"Red Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

Part Six Guns Under the Table

The day John Boone was assassinated we were up on east Elysium and it was morning and this meteor shower came raining down on us, there must have been thirty streaks or so and they were all black, I don’t know what those meteorites were made of but they burned black instead of white. Like smoke from crashing planes except straight and fast as lightning. It was so strange to see that we all were amazed and we hadn’t even yet heard the news, but when we did we figured back, and it happened at exactly the same time.

We were down in Hellas Lakefront and the sky went dark and a sudden wind whipped over the lake and blew every walktube in that town away, and then we heard.

We were in Senzeni Na where he worked a lot, and it was night and lightning started hammering us, giant bolts of lightning were shooting right down into the mohole, no one could believe it, and it was so loud you couldn’t hear. And there was a picture of him down in the worker’s quarters, up on the wall of one suite, and a lightning bolt hit the the concourse window and everyone was blinded for a second, and when our sight returned the frame of that picture was busted and the glass cracked and it was smoking. And then we heard the news.

We were in Carr and we couldn’t believe it. All the first hundred there were crying, he must have been the only one in that whole gang that everyone liked, if most of them were killed a good half of the rest would be cheering. Arkady was out of his mind, he cried for hours and it was so scary because it was so unlike him, Nadia kept trying to comfort him and she was saying It’s all right, it’s all right and Arkady kept saying It’s not all right, it’s not all right, and roaring and throwing things and then falling into Nadia’s arms again, even Nadia was freaked. And that was when he ran off to his room and came back with one of the ignition transmitter boxes, and when he explained what it was Nadia got really furious at all of us, she said Why would you ever do a thing like that? And Arkady was crying and yelling What do you mean why? Because of this, because of what just happened to John, they killed him, they killed him! Who knows which of us will be next! They’ll kill all of us if they can! And Nadia kept trying to give the transmitter back and he got soupset, he kept making her hold it saying Please Nadia please, just in case, just in case, please, until finally she had to keep it to get him to calm down. I never saw anything like it.

We were in Underhill and the power went off, and when it came back on every plant in the farm had frozen solid. The lights and heat came back on and the plants all began to wilt. We sat around all night telling stories about him. I remembered what it was like when he first touched down back in the twenties, a lot of us did. I was just a kid at the time but I remember everyone laughing at his first words, I thought it was funny myself but I remember being very surprised that all the adults were laughing too, everyone was so tickled, I think everyone fell in love with him at that moment, I mean how could you not like someone who was the first person on another planet walking out there and saying Well, here we are. It was impossible not to like him.

Oh I don’t know. I saw him punch a man once, it was on the Burroughs train and he was in our car obviously high, and there was this woman who had some kind of deformity, a big nose and no chin and when she went down to the toilets some guy said My Lord, that woman has really been beat hard with the ugly stick, and Boone bam! knocks him into the next seat and says, There is no such thing as an ugly woman.

That’s what he thought.

That is what he thought, why he slept with a different woman every night, and he didn’t care what they looked like. Or how old they were, he had to talk fast when they found him with that fifteen year-old. I don’t suppose Toitovna ever heard of that one or it would have been his balls, and hundreds of women would have gone wanting. He used to like to do it in two-person gliders with the woman on top of him while he piloted.

Oh man once I saw him pull a glider out of a downdraft that would have killed anyone else, it was a shear-off and it would have ripped the glider apart if he’d tried to resist it, but he just went with it and the plane dropped like a Rickover a thousand meters in a second, three or four times terminal velocity, and then when it was about to go smash he just tweaked it to the side and up and pancaked it in about twenty meters. Came out with his nose and ears bleeding. He was the best pilot on Mars, he could fly like an angel. Hell the whole first hundred would’ve been dead if he hadn’t hand flown them into their orbital insertion, that’s what I heard.

There were people who hated him. And with good reason too. He stopped the mosque on Phobos from being built. And he could be cruel, I’ve never met a man more arrogant.

We were on Olympus Mons and the whole sky went black.

Well, back before the beginning, Paul Bunyon came to Mars, and he brought his blue ox Babe with him. He walked around looking for lumber and his every footprint cracked the lava and left a rift canyon. He was so tall that he could reach into the asteroid belt while he walked around, and he chewed those rocks like Bing cherries and spit the pits out and boom there would be another crater.

And then he ran into Big Man. It was the first time Paul had ever seen anyone bigger than himself, and believe me Big Man was bigger-the usual two magnitudes, and that’s ain’t just twice as big let me tell you. But Paul Bunyon didn’t care. When Big Man said let’s see what you can do with that axe of yours Paul said sure, and with one stroke he hit the planet so hard that all the cracks of Noctis appeared at once. But then Big Man scratched the same spot with his toothpick, and the entire Marineris system yawned open. Let’s try bare fists, Paul said, and he landed a right cross on the southern hemisphere and there was Argyre. But Big Man tapped a spot nearby with his pinky and there was Hellas. Try spitting, Big Man suggested, and Paul spat and Nirgal Vallis ran as long as the Mississippi. But Big Man spat and all the big outflow channels ran at once. Try shitting! Big Man said, and Paul squatted and pushed out Ceraunius Tholus-but Big Man threw back his butt and there was the Elysium massif right next to it, steaming hot. Do your worst, Big Man suggested. Take a shot at me. And so Paul Bunyon picked him up by the toe and swung his whole bulk around and slammed him into the north pole so hard that that whole northern hemisphere is depressed to this day. But without even getting up Big Man grabbed Paul by the ankle, and caught up his blue ox Babe in that same fist, and swung them into the ground and slammed them right through the planet and almost out the other side. And that’s the Tharsis bulge-Paul Bunyon, almost sticking out-Ascraeus his nose, Pavonis his cock, and Arsia his big toes. And Babe is off to one side, pushing up Olympus Mons. The blow killed Babe and Paul Bunyon both, and after that Paul had to admit that he was beat.

But his own bacteria ate him, naturally, and they crawled all around down on the bedrock and under the megaregolith, down there going everywhere, sucking up the mantle heat, and eating the sulfides, and melting down the permafrost. And everywhere they went down there, every one of those little bacteria said I am Paul Bunyon.

It’s amatter of will, Frank Chalmers said to his face in the mirror. The phrase was the only residue of the dream he had been having when he awoke. He shaved with quick decisive strokes, feeling tense, crammed with energy ready to be unleashed, wanting to get to work. More residue: Whoever wants it the most wins!

He showered and dressed, padded down to the dining hall. It was just after dawn. Sunlight flooded Isidis with horizontal beams of redbronze light, and high in the eastern sky cirrus clouds looked like copper shavings.

Rashid Niazi, the Syrian representative to the conference, passed by and gave Chalmers a cool nod. Frank returned it and walked on. Because of Selim el-Hayil, the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood had gotten blamed for Boone’s assasination, and Chalmers had always been quick and public in defending them from all such accusations. Selim had been a lone assassin, he always asserted, a mad murder-suicide. This underlined the Ahads’ guilt while at the same time commanding their gratitude. Naturally Niazi, an Ahad leader, was a bit frustrated.

Maya came into the dining room and Frank greeted her cordially, automatically covering the discomfort he always felt in her presence.

“May I join you?” she said, watching him.

“Of course.”

Maya was perceptive, in her way; Frank concentrated on the moment. They chatted. The subject of the treaty began to come up, and so Frank said, “How I wish John were here now. We could use him.” And then: “I miss him.” This kind of thing would distract Maya instantly. She put her hand over his; Frank scarcely felt it. She was smiling, her arresting gaze full on him. Despite himself he had to look away.

The TV wall was showing the news package beamed up from Earth, and he tapped on the table console and turned up the sound. Earth was in bad shape. The video was of a massive protest march in Manhattan, the whole island packed with a crowd the protesters would call ten million and the police five hundred thousand. The helicopter images were quite arresting, but there were a lot of places these days that, although less visual, were much more dangerous. In the advanced nations people were marching because of draconian birth population reduction acts, laws that made the Chinese look like anarchists, and the young had erupted in fury and dismay, feeling their lives pulled out of their hands by a great crowd of ancient unnatural undead, by history itself come alive. That was bad, sure. But in the developing countries they were rioting over “inadequate access” to the treatments themselves, and that was far worse. Governments were falling; people were dying by the thousands. Really these images of Manhattan were probably meant to reassure; everything’s still orderly! they said. People conducting themselves in a civil manner, even if it be civil disobedience. But Mexico City and Sao Paulo and New Dehli and Manila were in flames.

Maya looked at the screen and read aloud one of the Manhattan banners: “‘Send the Old To Mars.’”

“That’s the essence of a bill someone’s introduced in Congress. Reach a hundred and you’re off, to retirement orbitals, the moon, or here.”

“Especially here.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“I supose that explains their stubborness about emigration quotas.”

Frank nodded. “We’ll never get those. They’re under too much pressure down there, and we’re seen as one of the few escape valves. Did you see that program aired on Euronews about all the open land on Mars?” Maya shook her head. “It was like a real estate ad. No. If the UN delegates gave us any say in emigration, they’d be crucified.”

“So what do we do?”

He shrugged. “Insist on the old treaty at every point. Act like every change is the end of the world.”

“So that’s why you were so crazy about the preface material.”

“Sure. That stuff may not be all that important, but we’re like the British at Waterloo. If we give at any point the whole line collapses.”

She laughed. She was pleased with him, she admired his strategy. And it was a good strategy, although it was not the one he was pursuing. For they were not like the British at Waterloo; they were if anything like the French, making a last-ditch assault which they had to win if they wanted to survive. And so he had been very busy giving in on many points in the treaty, hoping to thrust forward and hold on to what he really wanted in other areas. Which certainly included some remaining role for the American Martian Department, and its Secretary; after all, he needed a base from which to work.

So he shrugged, dismissing her pleasure. On the TV wall the crowds boiled up and down the great avenues. He clenched his teeth a few times. “We’d better get to it again.”

Upstairs the conferees were milling about in a sequence of long high rooms that were divided by tall partitions. Sunlight streamed into the big central room from the eastern meeting chambers, throwing a ruddy glare over the white pile carpet and the squarish teak chairs and the dark pink stone of the long table top. Knots of people were chatting casually against the walls. Maya went off to confer with Samantha and Spencer. The three of them were now the leaders of the MarsFirst coalition, and as such had been invited to the conference as non-voting representatives of the Martian population: the people’s party, the tribunes, and the only ones there actually elected to their positions, although they were there only at Helmut’s sufferance. Helmut had been as inclusive as anyone could ask; he had allowed Ann to attend as a non-voting member representing the Reds, even though they were part of the coalition; Sax was there observing for the terraforming team; and any number of mining and development executives were observing as well. There was a whole crowd of observers, in fact; but the voting members were the only ones to sit at the central table, where Helmut was now ringing a small bell. Fifty-three national representatives and eighteenUN officials took their seats; another hundred continued to wander in the eastern rooms, watching the discussion through the open portals or on small TVs. Outside the windows, Burroughs crawled with figures and vehicles, moving around in the clear-walled mesas, and the tents on and between the mesas, and in the network of connecting clear walktubes that lay on the ground or arched through the air, and in the huge valley tent with its wide streetgrass boulevards and its canals. A little metropolis.

Helmut called the session to order. In the eastern rooms people clustered around the TVs. Frank glanced through a portal into the east room nearest him; there would be rooms like that all over Mars and Earth, thousands of them, with millions of observers. Two worlds watching.

The day’s topic, as it had been for the past two weeks, was emigration quotas. China and India had a joint proposal to make; the head of the Indian office rose and read it in his musical Bombay English. Stripped of camoflage it came down to a proportional system, of course. Chalmers shook his head. India and China between them had forty percent of the world’s population, but they were only two votes of fifty-three at this conference, and their proposal would never pass. The Brit in the European delegation rose to point out this fact, not in so many words of course. Wrangling began. It would go on all morning. Mars was a real prize, and the rich and poor nations of Earth were struggling over it as they were over everything else. The rich had the money but the poor had the people, and the weapons were pretty evenly distributed, especially the new viral vectors that could kill everyone on a continent. Yes, the stakes were high, and the situation existed in the most fragile of balances, the poor surging up out of the south and pressing the northern barriers of law and money and pure military force. Gun barrels in their faces, in essence. But now there were so many faces; a human wave attack might explode at any instant, it seemed, just from the expansive pressure of sheer numbers-attackers shoved over the barricades by the press of babies in the rear, raging for their chance at immortality.

At the midmorning break, with nothing more accomplished, Frank rose from his seat. He had heard little of the wrangle, but he had been thinking, and his lectern’s sketchpad was marked up with a rough schematic. Money, people, land, guns. Old equations, old trade-offs. But it wasn’t originality he was after; it was something that would work.

Nothing would happen at the long table itself, that was certain. Someone had to cut the knot. He got up and wandered over to the Indian and Chinese delegation, a group of about ten conferring in a camera-free side room. After the usual exchange of pleasantries he invited the two leaders, Hanavada and Sung, to take a walk on the observation bridge. After a glance at each other, and quick conversations in Chinese and Hindu with their aides, they agreed.

So the three delegates walked out of the rooms and down the corridors to the bridge, a rigid walktube which began at the wall of their mesa and arched out over the valley and into the side of an even taller mesa to the south. The bridge’s height gave it an airy flying magnificence, and there were quite a few people walking its four kilometers, or just standing midway and taking in the view of Burroughs.

“Look,” Chalmers said to his two colleagues, “the expense of emigration is so great that you will never ease your population problems by moving them here. You know that. And you already have lots more reclaimable land in your own countries. So what you want from Mars isn’t land but resources, or money. Mars is leverage to get your share of resources back home. You’re lagging behind the North because of resources that were taken from you without payment during the colonial years, and you should have repayment for that now.”

“I am afraid that in a very real sense the colonial period never ended,” Hanavada said politely.

Chalmers nodded. “That’s what transnational capitalism means; we’re all colonies now. And there’s tremendous pressure on us here, to alter the treaty so that most of the profits from local mining become the property of the transnationals. The developed nations are feeling that very strongly.”

“This we know,” Hanavada said, nodding.

“Okay. And now you’ve made the pitch for proportional emigration, which is just as logical as alloting profits proportional to investment. But neither of these proposals is in your best interest. The emigration would be a drop in the bucket to you, but the money wouldn’t. Meanwhile the developed nations have a new population problem, so a chance at a larger share of emigration would be welcome. And they can spare the money, which would mostly go to transnationals anyway and become free-floating capital, outside any national control. So why shouldn’t the developed nations give you more of it? It wouldn’t really be coming out of their pocket anyway.”

Sung nodded quickly, looking solemn. Perhaps they had foreseen this response, and had made their proposal to stimulate it, and were waiting for him to play his part. But that just made it easier. “Do you think your governments will agree to such a trade?” Sung asked.

“Yes,” Chalmers said. “What is it but governments reassserting their power over the transnationals? Sharing the profits resembles in a way your old nationalization movements, only this time all countries would benefit. Internationalization, if you will.”

“It will cut down on investments by the corporations,” Hanavaba noted.

“Which will please the Reds,” Chalmers said. “Please most of the MarsFirst group, in fact.”

“And your government?” Hanavaba asked.

“I can guarantee it.” Actually the administration would be a problem. But Frank would deal with them when the time came, they were a bunch of Chamber of Commerce kids these days, arrogant but stupid. Tell them it was this or a third world Mars, a Chinese Mars, a Hindu Chinese Mars, with little brown people and cows unmolested in the walktubes. They would come around. In fact they would hide behind his knees yelling for protection, Grandpa Chalmers please save me from the yellow horde.

He watched the Indian and the Chinese look at each other, in a completely scrutable consultation. “Hell,” he said, “this is what you were hoping for, right?”

“Perhaps we should work on some figures,” Hanavaba said.

It took much of the next month to implement the compromise, as it entailed a whole set of corollary compromises to get the all voting delegations to accept it. Every nation’s delegate had to get a cut to show the folks back home. And there was Washington to be convinced as well; in the end Frank had to go over the heads of the kids right to the President, who was only a bit older than them, but could see a deal when it was poking him in the sternum. So Frank was busy, meetings nearly sixteen hours a day in his old pattern, as familiar as the sunrise. In the end, mollifying transnat lobbyists like Andy Jahns was the hardest part-essentially impossible, as the deal was being made at their expense and they knew it. They put all the pressure they could on the northern governments and on their flags of convenience, and that was considerable, as evidenced by the President’s scared irritability, and the defection of Singapore and Sofia from the deal. But Frank convinced the President, even across all that space, even across the deep psychological barrier of the time lag. And he used the same arguments with every other northern government. If you give in to the transnationals, he would say, then they’re the real government of the world. This is the chance to assert the interests of you and your population over those freefloating accumulations of capital which are very near to holding the ultimate power on earth! You need to get them on the leash somehow!

And it was the same at the UN, for every official there. “Who do you want to be the real world government? You or them?”

Still, it was a close thing. The pressures the transnats could bring to bear were awesome, it was impressive to watch. Subarashii and Armscor and Praxis were each bigger than all but the ten largest countries or commonwealths, and they really put out the funds. Money equals power; power makes the law; and law makes government. So that the national governments in trying to restrain the transnats were like the Lilliputians trying to tie down Gulliver. They needed a great network of tiny lines, staked into place along every millimeter of the circumference. And as the giant heaved to free itself and start trampling about, they had to rush from side to side, throw new lines over the monster, hammer new little pin stakes into place. Rush around making quarter-hour pin-stake appointments, for sixteen hours a day. Mad Dutch boy juggling.

Andy Jahns took him to dinner one night. He was angry with Chalmers, naturally, but tried to hide it, as the evening’s business consisted of the offer of a bribe thinly disguised, accompanied by threats thinly veiled. Business as usual, in other words. He offered Chalmers a position as head of a foundation which was being set up by the Earth-to-Mars transport consortium-the old aerospace industries, with their old Pentagon stash still sloshing around in their pockets. This new foundation would assist the consortium to make policy, and advise the UN on Mars-related matters. The position was to begin after his tenure as Secretary for Mars was over, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.

“It sounds marvelous,” Chalmers said. “I’m very interested indeed.” And over the course of the dinner he convinced Jahns he was sincere. Not only about taking the position in the foundation, but in working for the consortium immediately. This was work indeed, but he was good at it; he could see the suspicion slowly leak out of Jahns as the evening wore on. The weakness of businessmen: the belief that money was the point of the game. “I’ll do what I can,” Chalmers promised energetically, and outlined some strategies he would start to pursue at once. Talk to the Chinese about their need for land, get Congress back to the idea of a fair return on investments. Certainly. Make promises here and some of the pressure would subside; meanwhile the work could go on. There was no pleasure like double-crossing a crook.

So he went back to the conference table and carried on as before. The walk on the bridge, as it was now being called (others called it the Chalmers Shift), had broken the impasse. February 6th, 2057; Ls=144, m-16; a red-letter date in the history of diplomacy. Now it was a matter of giving everyone else a piece, and fixing the actual numbers. As this process ground along Chalmers talked with all the first hundred observers there, reassuring them and checking their opinions. Sax, it turned out, was upset with him, because he thought that if the transnats ceased investment his terraforming would have to slow considerably. He saw all the arriving business as heat. And yet Ann too was upset with him, because a new treaty based on the shift would allow both emigration and investment, and she and the Reds had been hoping for a treaty that would give Mars a kind of world park status. That kind of disconnection from reality made him crazy. “I’ve just saved you fifty million Chinese immigrants,” he yelled at her, “and you bitch at me because I haven’t managed to send everyone back home. You bitch because I didn’t work a miracle and turn this rock into a holy shrine, right next door to a world that’s beginning to look like Calcutta on a bad day. Ann, Ann, Ann. What would you have done? What would you have done except stalk around glaring at every single fucking thing people said, and convincing everyone that you’re from Mars? Jesus Christ. Go out and play with your rocks and leave the politics to people who can think.”

“Remember what thinking is, Frank,” she said. Somehow he had made her smile for a second there, in the middle of his tirade. But she laid the same old wild glare on him before she left.

But Maya, now; Maya was pleased with him. He could feel her gaze on him when he talked in the public meetings. Millions of people watching, and he felt only that gaze. It made him angry. She was full of admiration for the bridge walk, and he told her only what she would be pleased to hear about the backstage compromises he was making in order to get it accepted. She began joining him every evening during the cocktail hour, approaching him when the first press of critics and supplicants had ebbed, standing by his side through the second and third waves, watching and easing things along with her laugh, and extricating him from time to time with reminders that they had to go out and eat. Then they would go out onto restaurant terraces under the stars, and eat and then sip coffee, looking over the orange tiles and roof gardens under one of the big mesa-topping tents, feeling the evening breeze just as if they were out in the open. The MarsFirst crowd had committed themselves to his plan; so he had most of the locals, and he had the home office, and those were the two most important single parties in the whole process, he judged, aside from the transnational leadership, which he could do little about. So it was only a matter of time before he would work the deal. As he would tell her, sometimes, late in the evenings when he had fallen a bit under her spell. Been calmed by her. “Between us we’ll get it done,” he would say as he looked up at the vivid stars in the sky, unable to meet her penetrating gaze.

And one night she kept returning to his side during the cocktail gathering. With all the others they watched the terran news reports of the day’s progress, and saw again how oddly distorted and flattened they appeared, like tiny players in an incomprehensible soap opera. And then they left together, and ate, and then went walking down the wide grassy boulevards, eventually coming to his room in the lower town. And she accompanied him inside. Without explanation or comment, in Maya’s usual way. As if she always did this. It just happened, was happening. She was in his room, and then in his arms, hugging him. They lay on his bed and she kissed him. The shock of it was such that Frank felt completely removed from his body, his flesh was like rubber. This was beginning to worry him when the sheer animal presence of her broke through the shock, body spoke to body and he suddenly he could feel her again; sensation flooded back into him, and he responded to it with animal intensity. It had been a long time.

Afterward she walked around with a white sheet draped over her like a cape, getting a glass of water. “I like the way you work those people,” she said, her back to him. She drank from the glass, looked over her shoulder with her old affectionate grin, with that full and open gaze of hers, a gaze that seemed so insightful, like lazed light shining right through him, that suddenly he felt not only naked, but exposed. He pulled the remaining sheet up over his hip, then felt that he had given himself away. Surely she would see, see the way the air turned to cold water in his lungs, the way his stomach knotted, the way his feet froze. He blinked, returned her smile. He knew it was a wan and crooked smile; but feeling his face like a stiff mask over his real flesh, he took comfort. No one could accurately read emotions from facial expressions, that was all a lie, a bogus relationship as in palm reading or astrology. So he was safe.

But after that night she began spending a lot of time with him, both in public and private. She joined him at the receptions given every night by one or another of the national offices; she sat beside him at many of the group dinners; she sailed the hot sea of conversation with him afterward, as they watched the bad news from Terra, or sat in the close knot of the first hundred. And she went with him to his room at night, or even more disturbing, took him to hers.

And all without any sign of what she wanted from him. He could only conclude that she knew she did not have to speak of it. That just being with him was enough, that he would know what she wanted, and try his best to do it without her ever having to say a word. That she would get what she wanted. For of course it was impossible that she was doing it all without cause. That was the nature of power; when you had it no one was ever again simply a friend, simply a lover. Inevitably they all wanted things you could give them-if nothing else, the prestige of friendship with the powerful. That was prestige that Maya did not need, but she knew what she wanted. And wasn’t he doing it, after all? Infuriating a large part of his power base, to forge a treaty that would please no one but a handful of locals? Yes, she was getting what she wanted. And all without a word, or without a direct word. Nothing but praise and affection.

So that as he talked in the endless caucus conferences, carefully hammering out the wording of each clause of the new treaty, playing James Madison to this strange simulacrum of a constitutional convention, Spencer and Samantha and Maya would wander around helping him, and Maya would watch him with the most fractional smile, which revealed to him alone her approval, her pride in him. And then, energized by the day’s work, he would roam the evening reception, and she would laugh at him and stand at his side and chatter with all the rest, a kind of consort. Hell, a consort! And at night shower him with kisses, until it was impossible to imagine that she did not like him.

Which was intolerable. That it should be so easy to deceive even the people who knew you best… that she should be so stupid… it was shocking to realize these things more strongly than ever before. How hidden the true self is, he thought, under the phenomenological mask. In reality they were all actors all the time, playing their video parts, and there was no chance of contact with the true selves inside others, not anymore; over the long years their parts had hardened into shells and the selves inside had atrophied, or wandered off and gotten lost. And now they were all hollow.

Or perhaps it was just him. Because she seemed so real! Her laughter, her white hair, her passion, my God: her sweaty skin and the ribs underneath it, ribs that slid back and forth under his fingers like the slats of a fence, ribs that clamped down on the paroxysms of orgasm. A true self, didn’t it have to be so? Didn’t it? He could hardly believe otherwise. A true self.

But sadly deceived. One morning he awoke from a dream of John. It was from their time together on the space station, when they had been young. Except in the dream they had been old, and John had not died and yet he had; he spoke as a ghost, aware that he had died and that Frank had killed him, yet aware also of everything that had happened since, and free of all anger or blame. It was just something that had happened, like the time John had gotten the first landing assignment, or had taken Maya away on the Ares. A lot of things had happened between them one way and another, but they were still friends, still brothers. They could talk, they understood each other. Feeling the horror of that Frank had groaned through the dream, and tried to fold in on himself, and awakened. It was hot, his skin was sweaty. Maya was sitting up, her hair wild, her breasts swinging loosely between her arms. “What’s wrong!” she was saying. “What’s wrong!”

“Nothing!” he cried, and got up and padded to the bathroom. But she came after him, put her hands on him. “Frank, what was it?”

“Nothing,” he shouted, involuntarily jerking out of her grip. “Can’t you leave me alone!”

“Of course,” she said, hurt. A flush of anger: “Of course I can.” And she walked out of the bathroom.

“Of course you can!” he shouted after her, suddenly furious at her stupidity, to be so ignorant of him, so vulnerable to him, when it was all an act anyway. “Now that you’ve got what you want from me!”

“What does that mean?” she said, reappearing instantly in the bathroom doorway, a sheet around her.

“You know what I mean,” he said bitterly. “You’ve got what you wanted from the treaty, haven’t you. And you never would have, without me.”

She stood there, hands on her hips, watching him. The sheet was loose around her hips and she looked like the French figure of Liberty, very beautiful and very dangerous, her mouth a tight line. She shook her head in disgust and walked away. “You don’t have the faintest idea, do you,” she said.

He followed her. “What do you mean?”

She threw the sheet away and stepped violently into her underwear, yanked it up over her bottom. As she dressed she hurled short sentences at him. “You don’t know anything about what other people think. You don’t even know what you think. What do you want out of the treaty? You, Frank Chalmers? You don’t know. It’s only what I want, what Sax wants, what Helmut wants. What any of them want. You yourself have no opinion. Whatever is easiest to manage. Whatever leaves you in control at the end.

“And as for feelings!” She was dressed, standing at the door. She stopped to glare at him, a look like a lightning strike: he had been standing there too stunned to move and so now he stood there naked before her, exposed to the full blast of her scorn. “You don’t have any feelings, do you. I’ve tried, believe me, but you just-” She shuddered, apparenly unable to think of words vile enough to describe him. Hollow, he wanted to say. Empty. An act. And yet-

She walked out.

So when they signed the new treaty, Maya was not at his side; not even in Burroughs. Which a relief in many ways, really. And yet he could not help but feel empty, and cold in the chest; and certainly the others of the first hundred (at least) knew something had happened between them (again), which was infuriating, or so he told himself.

They signed the thing in the same conference room they had hammered it out in, with Helmut doing the honors with a big smile, and each delegate coming up in turn, in penguin suit or black evening gown, to say a few words for the cameras and then put their hand to “the document,” a gesture that only Frank seemed to see as bizarrely archaic, like scratching a petroglyph. Ridiculous. When it was his turn he went up and said something about striking a balance, which was exactly it; he had arranged the competing interests to strike together at angles that matched their momentum exactly, arranging a traffic accident so that all the vehicles would collide into a single solidified mass. The result was something not all that dissimilar to the previous version of the treaty, with both emigration and investment, the two main threats to the status quo (if there was such a thing on Mars), mostly blocked, and (this was the clever part) blocked by each other. It was a good piece of work, and he signed with a flourish, “for the United States of America,” he announced emphatically, glaring around the world intently. That would play well on vid.

So he strode through the subsequent parade with the cold satsifaction of work well done. The grass-floored tents and walktubes of the city were crowded with thousands of spectators, and the parade wound through them, wandering down the big canalside tent with diversions up into the mesas, coming back down and crossing every canal bridge to cheers, and proceeding up to Princess Park for a great street party. The weather people had set for cool and crisp, with brisk downslope winds. Kites dueled under the tent roofs like raptors, their colors bright against the dark pink afternoon sky.

Frank found the party in the park unsettling, there were too many people watching him, too many who wanted to approach him and talk. That was fame: you talked to groups. So he turned around and walked back up the canalside tent.

Two parallel rows of white pillars ran down the sides of the canal; each pillar was a Bareiss column, semicircular at top and bottom but with the hemispheres rotated 180 degrees to each other. This simple maneuver created pillars that looked completely different depending on where you were when you looked at them, and the two rows of these pillars had a strange tumble-down look, as if they were already ruins, although the smoothness and whiteness of their diamond-coated salt belied that; they stood off the grass as white as sugar cubes, and gleamed as if wet.

Frank walked between the rows, touching each pillar in turn. Above them on each side the valley slopes rose to the window-walled bluffs of mesas. Massed greenery shone behind these cliffs of untinted glass, so that it looked as if the city were rimmed by enormous terrariums. A really elegant ant farm. The part of the valley slope under tenting was dotted with trees and tile roofs, and cut by broad grassy boulevards. The uncovered part was still a red rocky plain. A great number of buildings were just being finished, or still under construction; there were cranes everywhere rearing up toward the tent roofs, a kind of odd colorful skeletal statuary. Also scores of scaffolded buildings, so that Helmut had said the tented hillsides reminded him of Switzerland, no suprise since most of the construction was being done by Swiss. “They scaffold a house to replace a window box.”

Sax Russell was standing at the foot of one of these scaffolded buildings, looking up at it critically. Frank turned and walked up a tube to him, said hello.

“There’s twice as much support as they need,” Sax said. “Maybe more.”

“The Swiss like that.”

Sax nodded. They stared at the building.

“Well?” Frank said. “What do you think?”

“The treaty? It will reduce support for terraforming,” Sax said. “People are more inclined to invest than to give.”

Frank scowled. “Not all investment is good for terraforming, Sax, you have to remember that. A lot of that money is spent on other things entirely.”

“But terraforming is a way to reduce overhead, you see. A certain percentage of the total investment will always be devoted to it. So I want the total as high as possible.”

“Real benefits can only be calculated using real costs,” Frank said. “All the real costs. Terran economics never bothered to do that, but you’re a scientist and you should. You have to judge the environmental damage from higher population and activity, as well as the benefits to terraforming that go along with it. Better to up the investment devoted to pure terraforming, rather than compromising and taking a percentage of a total that in some ways is working against you.”

Sax twitched. “It’s funny to hear you speak against compromise after the last four months, Frank. Anyway, I say it’s better to up both the total and the percentage. The environmental costs are negligible. Managed right they can mostly be turned to benefits. An economy can be measured in terawatts or kilocalories, like John used to say. And that’s energy. And we can use energy here in any form, even a lot of bodies. Bodies are just more work, very versatile, very energetic.”

“Real costs, Sax. All of of them. You’re still trying to play at economics, but it isn’t like physics, it’s like politics. Think what will happen when millions of displaced terran emigrants arrive here, with all their viruses, biological and psychic. Maybe they’ll all join Arkady or Ann, ever thought of that? Epidemics, running through the mob’s body and mind-they could crash your whole system! Look, hasn’t the Acheron group been trying to teach you biology? You should pay attention! This isn’t mechanics, Sax. It’s ecology. And it’s a fragile, managed ecology, so it has to be managed.”

“Maybe,” Sax said. It was one of John’s mannerisms, that phrase. Frank missed what Sax was saying for a minute, then his attention was captured again:

“… this treaty isn’t going to make all that much difference anyway. The transnationals that want to invest will find a way. They’ll make a new flag of convenience and it’ll look like a country staking its claim here, exactly according to the treaty’s quotas. But behind it will be transnational money. There’ll be all kinds of that stuff happening, Frank. You know how it is. Politics, right? Economics, right?”

“Maybe,” Frank said harshly, upset. He walked away.

Later he found himself in an upper valley district, still being built. The scaffolding was extreme, as Sax had said, especially for Martian gee. Some of it looked like it would be hard to bring down. He turned and looked out over the valley. The city was nicely placed, that was indisputable. The two sides of the valley meant there was going to be a lot visible from any point. Everywhere in town would have a view.

Suddenly his wristpad beeped, and he answered. It was Ann, staring up at him. “What do you want,” he snapped. “I suppose you think I sold you out too. Let in the hordes to overrun your playground.”

She grimaced. “No. You did the best that could be done, given the situation. That’s what I wanted to say.” She clicked off and his pad went blank.

“Great,” he said aloud. “I’ve got everyone on two worlds mad at me except Ann Clayborne.” He laughed bitterly, took off walking.

Back down to the canal and the rows of Bareiss columns. Lot’s wives. There were knots of celebrants scattered over the canalside sward, and in the late afternoon light their shadows were long. The sight took on a somehow ominous cast, and Frank turned, uncertain where to go. He didn’t like the aftermath of things. Everything seemed finished, done, revealed as pointless. It was always this way.

A group of Terrans were standing under one of the more magnificent new office blocks in the Niederdorf tent. There was Andy Jahns among them.

If Ann was pleased, Andy would be furious. Frank walked up to him, wanting to witness that.

Andy saw him, and his face went still for a moment. “Frank Chalmers,” he said. “What brings you down here?”

His tone was amiable, but his eyes were unamused, even cold. Yes, he was angry. Frank, feeling better every second, said “I’m just walking around, Andy, getting the blood flowing again. What about you?”

After the briefest of hesitations Jahns said, “We’re looking at office space.”

He watched as Frank digested the implications of the statement. His smile took on an edge, became a genuine smile. He went on: “These are friends of mine from Ethiopia, from Addis Ababa. We’re thinking of moving our home office there next year. And so” his smile broadened, no doubt in response to the look on Frank’s face, which Frank could feel hardening over the front of his skull, “we have a lot to discuss.”

Al-Qahira isthe name for Mars in Arabic, and Malaysian, and Indonesian. The latter two langauges got it from the former; look at a globe, then, and see how far the Arabs’ religion spread. The whole middle of the world, from West Africa to the West Pacific. And most of that in a single century. Yes, it was an empire in its time; and like all empires, after death it had a long half-life.

The Arabs who live out of Arabia are called Mahjaris, and the Arabs who came to Mars, the Qahiran Mahjaris. When they arrived on Mars a good number of them began to wander Vastitas Borealis (“The Northern Badia”) and the Great Escarpment. These wanderers were mostly Bedouin Arabs, and they traveled in caravans, in a deliberate recreation of a life that had disappeared on Earth. People who had lived in cities all their lives went to Mars and moved around in rovers and tents. The excuses for their ceaseless travel included the hunt for metals, areology, and trade; but it seemed clear that the important thing was the travel, the life itself.

Frank Chalmers joined old Zeyk Tuqan’s caravan a month after the treaty was signed, in the northern autumn of m-year 16 (July 2057). For a long time he wandered with this caravan over the broken slopes of the Great Escarpment. He worked on his Arabic, and helped with their mining, and took meteorological observations. The caravan was composed of actual Bedouins from Awlad ‘Ali, the western coast of Egypt. They had lived north of the area that the Egyptian government had named the New Valley Project, after a search for oil discovered a water aquifer holding an amount equal to a thousand years of the Nile’s flow. Even before the discovery of the gerontological treatment, the Egyptian population problem had been severe; with 96% of the country desert, and 99% of the population in the Nile Valley, it was inevitable that the hordes relocated in the New Valley Project would overwhelm the Bedouins and their entirely distinct culture. The Bedouins wouldn’t even call themselves Egyptians, and despised the Nile Egyptians as spineless and immoral; but that did not keep the Egyptians from crowding north from the New Valley Project into Awlad ‘Ali. Bedouins in the other Arab countries had taken the side of these overwhelmed outposts of their culture, and when the Arab commonwealth started a Mars program, and bought space on the continuous Earth-to-Mars shuttle fleet, they asked Egypt to give preference to their western Bedouins. The Egyptian government had been only too happy to oblige, and clear the region of its troublesome minority. So here they were, Bedouins on Mars, wandering the world-wrapping northern desert.

The weather observations piqued Frank’s interest in climatology like none of the scientists’ talk ever had. The weather on the Escarpment was often violent, with katabatic winds rushing downslope and colliding with the Syrtis trade winds to create tall fast red tornadoes, or onslaughts of gritty hail. Currently the atmosphere was at around 130 millibars in the summer, in a mix about 80% carbon dioxide and 10% oxygen, the remainder mostly argon. It wasn’t clear yet whether they were going to be able to overwhelm the CO2 with oxygen and the other gases, but Sax seemed satisfied with their progress so far. Certainly on a windy day on the escarpment it was clear that the air was thickening; it had some real heft to it, it threw heavy sand, and darkened the afternoons to the color of a scab. And in the hardest gales the gusts could knock you down quite easily. Frank timed one katabatic gust at six hundred kilometers an hour; luckily it was part of such a hard general blow that everyone was in the rovers when it happened.

The caravan was a mobile mining operation. Metals and ore-bearing minerals were being discovered in all kinds of locations and concentrations on Mars, but one thing the Arab prospectors were discovering was that a lot of sulfides were very lightly scattered on the great escarpment and the flats immediately below it. Most of these deposits were in concentrations and total quantities that would not justify the use of conventional mining methods, and so the Arabs were engaged in pioneering new extraction and processing procedures; they had built an array of mobile equipment, altering construction vehicles and exploration rovers to suit their purpose. The resulting machines were big, segmented, and distinctly insectile, looking like things out of a truck mechanic’s nightmare. These creatures wandered the Great Escarpment in loose caravans, seeking the diffuse surface areas of stratiform copper deposits, preferably those with high amounts of tetrahedrite or chalcocite in them, so that they could recover silver as a byproduct of the copper. When they located one of these, they would stop for what they called the harvesting.

While they did this, prospector rovers would range ahead along the Escarpment, on expeditions of a week or ten days, following the old flows and rifts. When Frank had arrived he had been welcomed by Zeyk, who told him to do whatever work he chose; so Frank commandeered one of the prospector rovers, and took it out on solo expeditions. He would spend a week out, puttering around on automatic search, reading the seismograph and the samplers and the weather instruments, doing an occasional boring, watching the skies.

All over both worlds, Bedouin settlements looked drab from the outside; when they abandoned tents, their neighborhoods took on a windowless thick-walled look, as if perpetually hunched over to protect themselves from the desert heat. Only when you got inside their homes did one see what was protected, the courtyards, the gardens, the fountains, the birds, the staircases, the mirrors, the arabesques.

The Great Escarpment was strange country, cut by north-south canyon systems, marred by old craters, overrun by lava flows, broken into hummocks and karsts and mesas and ridges; and all of them on a steep slope, so that on top of any rock or prominence one could see far down to the north. In his days of solitary travel, Frank let the prospector program make most of the decisions, and sat watching the land roll by: silent, stark, huge, torn like the dead past itself. Days would pass, and the shadows wheel. The winds swirled upslope in the mornings, and downslope in the late afternoons. Clouds stacked the sky, from low fog balls bouncing over the rocks to high cirrus shavings, with the occasional thunderhead spanning the whole distance, solid masses of cloud twenty thousand meters high.

Occasionally he would turn on the TV and watch the Arabic news channel. Sometimes in the silence of the mornings he would talk back to the TV. There was a part of him that was outraged at the stupidity of the media, and of the events they packaged. The stupidity of the human race, playing out its spectacle. Except that the vast bulk of humanity never appeared on video, never once in their lives, not even in the crowd scenes when a camera swept the mob. Back there the Terran past still lived on in enormous regions, where village life was plodding on as it always had. Maybe that was wisdom, held to by old wives and shamans. Maybe. But it was hard to believe, because look what happened when they gathered in cities. Idiots on video, history in the making. “One can say that the lengthening of human life must, by definition, be a great boon.” These things made him laugh. “Haven’t you ever heard of secondary effects, you asshole!”

One night he watched a report on the fertilization of the Antarctic Ocean with iron dust, which was to act as a dietary supplement to phytoplankton, a population that was shrinking at an alarming rate for no obvious reason. The iron dust was dumped out of planes, it looked like they were fighting some kind of submarine fire; the project would cost ten billion dollars a year, and would have to be continued in perpetuity, but it had been calculated that a century’s worth of fertilization would reduce the global concentration of carbon dioxide by fifteen percent plus or minus ten percent, and given the ongoing warming and subsequent threat to the coastal cities, not to mention the death of most of the world’s coral reefs, the project had been judged worth it. “Ann’s going to love this,” Frank muttered. “Now they’re terraforming Earth.”

Each vocal outburst he made untied a knot in his chest. He came to realize that no one was watching him, no one was listening. The tiny imaginary audience inside his head did not exist; no one watches our life movies. No friend or enemy would ever know what he did here, he could do whatever he liked and normalcy be damned. Apparently this was what he had been craving, what he had instinctively sought. He could go out and kick stones down the side of a karst for a whole afternoon; or cry; or write aphorisms in the sand; or scream abuse at the moons, careening across the southern sky. He could talk back to himself over meals, he could talk back to the TV, he could have conversations with his parents or his lost friends, with the President, or John, or Maya. He could dictate long rambling entries into his lectern: bits of a sociobiological history of the world, a journal, a philosopical treatise, a pornographic novel (he could masturbate), an analysis of the Arab culture and their history. He did all these things, and when he and his prospector rolled back to the caravans, he would feel better: emptier, calmer. More truly hollow. “Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”

But the Japanese were aliens. And living with the Arabs sharpened his sense of how alien they were too. Oh, they were part of twenty-first century humanity, no doubt about it; they were sophisticated scientists and technicians, cocooned like everyone else in a protective shell of technology at every moment of their lives, and busy making and watching their own life movies. And yet they prayed three to six times a day, bowing toward Earth when it was the morning or evening star. And the reason their techno-caravans gave them such great and obvious pleasure was because the caravans were an outward manifestation of this bending of the modern world to their ancient goals. “Man’s work is to actualize God’s will in history,” Zeyk would say. “We can change the world in ways that help to actualize the divine pattern. It’s always been our way: Islam says the desert does not remain desert, the mountain does not remain mountain. The world must be transformed into a semblance of the divine pattern, and that is what constitutes history in Islam. Al-Qahira gives us the same challenge as the old world, except in a purer form.”

He would say these things to Frank as they sat around in his rover, in its tiny courtyard. These family rovers were transformed into private preserves, spaces that Frank was seldom invited into, and then only by Zeyk. Each time he visited he was surprised anew: the rover was nondescript from the exterior, big, with darkened windows, one of several parked in a bunch with walktubes between them. But then one ducked through a doorway and inside, and stepped into space filled with sunlight pouring down through skylights, illuminating couches and elaborate rugs, tiled floors, green-leafed plants, bowls of fruit, a window with the martian view tinted and framed like a photo, low couches, silver coffee urns, computer consoles of inlaid teak and mahogany, running water in pools and fountains. A cool wet world, green and white, intimate and small. Looking around Frank had the powerful sensation that rooms like this had existed for centuries, that the chamber would be instantly recognized for what it was by people living in the Empty Quarter in the tenth century, or across Asia in the twelfth.

Often Zeyk’s invitations would come in the afternoon, when a group of men would convene in his rover for coffee and talk. Frank would sit in his spot near Zeyk, and sip his muddy coffee and listen to the Arabic with all the attention he could muster. It was a beautiful language, musical and intensely metaphoric, so that all their modern technical terminology resonated with desert imagery because of the root meanings of all the new words, which like most of their abstract terms had concrete physical origins. Arabic, like Greek, had been a scientific language early on, and this showed in many unexpected cognates with English, and in the organic and compact nature of the vocabulary.

The conversations ran all over, but they were guided by Zeyk and the other elders, who were deferred to by the younger men in a way Frank found incredible. Many times the conversation became an overt lesson for Frank on Bedouin ways, which allowed him to nod and ask questions, and occasionally to offer comments or criticism. “When you have a strong conservative streak in your society,” Zeyk would say, “which detaches itself from the progressive streak, that’s when you get the worst kinds of civil wars. As in the conflict in Columbia that they called La Violencia, for instance. A civil war that became a complete breakdown of the state, a chaos that no one could understand, much less control.”

“Or like Beirut,” said Frank innocently.

“No, no.” Zeyk smiled. “Beirut was much more complex than that. It was not only civil war, but also a number of exterior wars impinging on it. It was not a matter of social or religious conservatives detaching from the normal progress of culture, as in Columbia or the Spanish Civil War.”

“Spoken like a true progressive.”

“All Qahiran Mahjaris are progressive by definition, or we would not be here. But Islam has avoided civil war by remaining a whole; we have a coherent culture, so that the Arabs here are still devout. This is understood even by the most conservative elements back home. We will never have civil war, because we are united by our faith.”

Frank let his expression alone speak the fact of the Shiite heresy, among many other Islamic “civil wars.” Zeyk understood the expression, but ignored it and forged on: “We all move together through history, one loose caravan. You could say that we here on Al-Qahira are like one of our prospecting rovers. And you know what a pleasure it is to be in one of those.”

“So…” Frank thought hard about how to word his question; his inexperience with Arabic would only give him a certain amount of leeway before they got offended. “Is there really the idea of social progress in Islam?”

“Oh, certainly!” Several of them had replied in the affirmative, and were nodding still. Zeyk said, “Don’t you think so?”

“Well…” Frank let it pass. There still was not a single Arab democracy. It was a hierarchical culture with a premium put on honor and freedom; and for the many who were low down in the hierarchy, honor and freedom were only achievable by deference. Which reinforced the system and held it static. But what could he say?

“The destruction of Beirut was a disaster for progressive Arab culture,” another man said. “It was the city where intellectuals and artists and radicals went when they were attacked by their local governments. The national governments all hated the pan-Arab ideal, but the fact is we speak one language across these several countries, and language is a powerful unifier of culture. Along with Islam it makes us one, really, despite the political borders. Beirut was always the place to affirm that position, and when the Israelis destroyed it, that affirmation became more difficult. The destruction was calculated to splinter us, and it did. So here we begin the work again.”

And that was their social progress.

The stratiform copper deposit that they had been raking up ran dry, and it was time for another rahla, the movement of the hejra to the next site. They traveled two days, and arrived at another stratiform deposit that Frank had found. Frank went out again on another prospecting trip.

For days he sat in the driver’s seat, feet on the dash, watching the land roll by. They were in a region of thulleya or little ribs, parallel ridges running downslope. He never turned on the TV anymore; there was a lot to think about. “The Arabs don’t believe in original sin,” he wrote in his lectern. “They believe that man is innocent, and death natural. That we do not need a saviour. There is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it is lived. It is a humanist correction of Judaism and Christianity, in that sense. Although in another sense they have always refused to take responsibility for their destiny; it’s always Allah’s will. I don’t understand that contradiction. But now they are here. And the Mahjaris have always been an intimate part of Arab culture, often its leading edge; Arabic poetry was revived in the twentieth century by poets who actually lived in New York or Latin America. Perhaps it will be the same here. It is surprising to find how much their vision of history corresponds to what Boone believed; I don’t think either understood that at all. Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”

He came on a find of porphyry copper, unusually dense, and with high concentrations of silver in it as well. That would be welcome. Copper and silver were both only somewhat scarce metals on earth, but silver was used in massive quantities in a great number of industries, and they were running low on easy sources of it. And here was more of it, right on the surface, in good concentrations; not as much as in Silver Mountain on the Elysium massif, of course, but the Arabs would not care. Harvest it, and then they would get to move again.

He moved on himself. Days passed, the shadows wheeled. The wind went downslope, upslope, downslope, upslope. Clouds formed and storms broke, and sometimes the sky was spangled with icebows and sundogs and dust devils made of hail, sparkling like mica in the pink sunlight. Sometimes he would see one of the aerobraking continuous shuttles, like a blazing meteor running steadily across the sky. One clear morning he saw Elysium Montes, bulking over the horizon like a black Himalaya; the view was bending a thousand kilometers over the horizon, bent by an inversion layer in the atmosphere. He stopped turning on the lectern as he had the TV. Nothing but the world and him. Winds caught at the sand, and tossed clouds of it against the rover. Khala, the empty land.

But then dreams began to plague him, dreams that were memories, intense and full and accurate, as if he were reliving his past while he slept. One night he dreamed of the day he had found out for sure that he would lead the American half of the first Martian colony. He had driven from Washington out to the Shenandoah Valley, feeling very odd. He walked for a long time in the great Eastern hardwood forest. He came on the the limestone caves at Luray, now a tourist attraction, and on a whim he took the tour. Every stalagtite and stalagmite was lit by lurid colored lights. Some had had mallets attached to them, and an organist could play them like the plates of a glockenspiel; the well-tempered cavern! He had to walk out into the peripheral blackness and stuff his sleeve in his mouth so the other tourists wouldn’t hear him laugh.

Then he parked in a scenic overlook and walkd off into the forest, and sat down between the roots of a big tree. No one around, a warm fall night, the earth dark, and furry with trees. Cicadas cycling through their alien hum, crickets creaking their last mournful creaks, sensing the frost that would kill them. He felt so odd… could he really leave this world behind? Sitting there on the earth he had wished he could slide down a crack like a changeling and re-emerge something else, something better, something mighty, noble, long-lived-something like a tree. But nothing happened, of course; he lay on the ground, cut off from it already. A Martian already.

And he woke, and was disturbed all the rest of that day.

And then, even worse, he dreamed of John. He dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the other three. Frank left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot D.C. night, summer of 2020. It had been part of his plan for John to make the first landing, he had given it to him as one sacrafices a queen in chess, because that first crew would be fried by the voyage’s radiation, and according to the regs grounded for good on their return. And then the field would be cleared for the next trip out, for the colonists who would stay for good. That was the real game; and that was the one Frank planned to lead.

Still, on that historic night he found himself in a foul mood. He went back to his apartment near Dupont Circle and then went out and lost his FBI tag and slipped into a dark bar and sat there watching the TV over the bartenders’ heads, drinking bourbon like his father, with martian light pouring out of the TV and reddening the whole dark room. And as he got drunk and listened to John’s inane talk his mood got worse and worse. It was hard to focus on his plan. He drank hard. The bar was noisy, the crowd inattentive; not that the landing hadn’t been noticed, but here it was just another entertainment, on a par with the Bullets game that one bartender kept cutting to. Then blip, back to the scene on Chryse Planitia. The man next to him swore at the switch. “Basketball’s gonna be a hell of a game on Mars,” Frank said in the Florida accent he had long ago eradicated.

“Have to move the hoop up, or they be breaking their heads.”

“Sure, but think of the jumps. Twenty foot dunks, easy.”

“Yeah even you white boys’ll jump high there, or so you say. But you better leave the basket alone, or you got the same trouble you got here.”

Frank laughed. But outside it was hot, a muggy DC summer night, and he walked home in a plummeting foul mood, blacker and blacker with every step; and coming upon one of Dupont’s beggars, he pulled out a ten-dollar bill and threw it at the man, and as the bum reached for it Frank shoved him away shouting “Fuck you! Get a job!” But then people came up out of the Metro and he hurried off, shocked and furious. Beggars slumped in the doorways. There were people on Mars and there were beggars in the streets of the nation’s capital, and all the lawyers walked by them every day, their freedom-and-justice talk no more than a cover for their greed. “We’re gonna do it different on Mars,” Frank said viciously, and all of a sudden he wanted to be there immediately, no careful years of waiting, of campaigning, “Get a fucking job!” he shouted at another homeless man. Then on to his apartment building, with its bored security team behind the foyer desk, people wasting their whole lives sitting there doing nothing. Upstairs his hands shook so hard that he couldn’t at first get his door open; and once inside he stood frozen, horrified at the sight of all the bland executive’s furniture, all of it a theater set, built to impress infrequent visitors, really just NASA and the FBI. None of it his. Nothing his. Nothing but a plan.

And then he woke up, alone, in a rover on the Great Escarpment.

Eventually he returned from this horrid expedition of dreams. Back in the caravan he found it hard to talk. He was invited to Zeyk’s for coffee, and he swallowed a tablet of an opiate complex to relax himself in the company of men. In Zeyk’s rover he sat in his spot, and waited for Zeyk to pass around little cups of clove-dosed coffee. Unsi Al-Khal sat on his left, speaking at length about the Islam vision of history, and how it had begun in the Jahili or pre-Islam period. Al-Khal had never been friendly, and when Frank tried to pass him the cup that came his way in a standard gesture of politeness, Al-Khal curtly insisted that the honor was Frank’s, that Al-Khal would not be prevailed upon to usurp it. Typical insult by over-politeness, the hierarchy again: one could not do favors for one higher in the system, favors only went downward. Alpha males, pecking orders; really they might as well have been back on the savannah (or in Washington), it was nothing more than primate dominance tactics again.

Frank ground his teeth, and when Al-Khal began pontificating again he said, “What about your women?”

They were taken aback, and Al-Khal shrugged. “In Islam men and women have different roles. Just as in the West. It is biological in origin.”

Frank shook his head and felt the sensuous buzz of the tabs, the black weight of the past. The pressure on a permanent aquifer of disgust at the bottom of his thinking increased, and something gave, and suddenly he didn’t care about anything and was sick of pretending he did. Sick of all pretense everywhere, the glutinous oil that allowed society to run on in its gnashing horrible way.

“Yes,” he said, “but it’s slavery, isn’t it?”

The men around him stiffened, shocked by the word.

“Isn’t it?” he said, helplessly feeling the words bubble up out of his throat. “Your wives and daughters are powerless, and that is slavery. You may keep them well, and they may be slaves with peculiar and intimate powers over their masters, but the master-slave relationship twists everything to it. So that all these relations are twisted, pressured to the bursting point.”

Zeyk’s nose was wrinkled. “This is not the lived experience of it, I can assure you. You should listen to our poetry.”

“But would your women assure me?”

“Yes,” Zeyk said with perfect confidence.

“Maybe. But look, the most successful women among you are modest and deferent at all times, they are scrupulous in honoring the system. Those are the ones that aid their husbands and sons to rise in the system. So to succeed, they must work to enforce the same system that subjugates them. This is poisonous in its effects. And the cycle repeats itself, generation after generation. Supported by both masters and slaves.”

“The use of the word slaves,” Al-Khal said slowly, and paused. “Is offensive, because it presumes judgement. Judgement of a culture you do not really know.”

“True. I only tell you what it looks like from the outside. This can only be of interest to a progressive Moslem. Is this the divine pattern you are struggling to actualize in history? The laws are there to read, and to watch in action, and to me it looks like a form of slavery. And, you know, we fought wars to end slavery. And we excluded South Africa from the community of nations for arranging its laws so that the blacks could never live as well as the whites. But this you do this all the time. If any men in the world were treated like you treat your women, the UN would ostracize that nation. But because it is a matter of women, the men in power look away. They say it is a cultural matter, a religious matter, not to be interfered with. Or it is not called slavery because it is only an exaggeration of how women are treated elsewhere.”

“Or not even an exaggeration,” Zeyk suggested. “A variation.”

“No, it is an exagerration. Western women choose much of what they do, they have their lives to live. Not so among you. But no human submits to being property, they hate it, and subvert it, and have what revenge they can against it. That’s how humans are. And in this case it is your mother, your wife, your sisters, your daughters.”

Now the men were glaring at him, still more shocked than offended; but Frank stared at his coffee cup, and went on regardless. “You must free your women.”

“How do you suggest we do this?” Zeyk said, looking at him curiously.

“Change your laws! Educate them in the same schools you educate your sons. Make them the equal in rights to any Moslem of any kind anywhere. Remember, there is much in your laws that is not in the Koran, but was added in the time since Mohammed.”

“Added by holy men,” Al-Khal said angrily.

“Certainly. But we choose the ways we enforce our religious beliefs in the behavior of daily life. This is true of all cultures. And we can choose new ways. You must free your women.”

“I do not like to be given a sermon by anyone but a mullah,” Al-Khal said, mouth tight under his moustache. “Let those who are innocent of crime preach what is right.”

Zeyk smiled cheerily. “This is what Selim el-Hayil used to say,” he said.

And there was a deep, charged silence.

Frank blinked. Many of the men were smiling now, looking at Zeyk with appreciation. And it came to Frank in a flash that they all knew what had happened in Nicosia. Of course! Selim had died that night just hours after the assassination, poisoned by a strange combination of microbes; but they knew anyway.

And yet they had accepted him, taken him into their homes, into their private enclosures where they lived their private lives. They had tried to teach him what they believed.

“Perhaps we should make them as free as Russian women,” Zeyk said with a laugh, extricating Frank from the moment. “Crazed by overwork, don’t they say? Told they are equal, but actually not?”

Yussuf Hawi, a high-spirited young man, leered and cackled: “Bitches, I can tell you! But no more or less than any other woman! Isn’t it true that in the home the power always goes to the strong? In my rover I am the slave, I can tell you that. I kiss snake’s butt daily with my Aziza!”

The men roared with laughter at him. Zeyk took their cups, and poured another round of coffee. The men patched up the conversation as best they could; they covered for Frank’s gross assault, either because it was so far beyond the pale that it only indicated ignorance, or because they wanted to acknowledge and support Zeyk’s sponsorship of him. But only about half of them looked at Frank anymore.

He withdrew and listened again, profoundly angry at himself. It was a mistake to speak one’s mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did. Best to strip all statements of real content, this was a basic law of diplomacy. Out on the Escarpment he had forgotten that.

Disturbed, he went out in a prospector again. The dreams became less frequent. When he came back in, he did not take any drugs. He sat silently in the coffee circles, or spoke about minerals and groundwater, or the comfort of the newly-modified prospecting rovers. The men regarded him cautiously, and only included him in the conversation again because of Zeyk’s friendliness, which never flagged-except for that one moment, when he had most effectively reminded Frank of one of the basic facts of the situation.

One night Zeyk invited him over for a dinner with Zeyk and his wife Nazik only. Nazik wore a long white dress cut in the traditional Bedouin style, with a blue waist band and bare-headed, her thick black hair drawn back into a flat comb and then left to fall down her back. Frank had read enough to know that this was all wrong; among the Bedouin of the Awlad ‘Ali, women wore black dresses and red sashes, to indicate their impurity, sexuality, and moral inferiority; and they kept their heads covered, and used the veil in an elaborate hierarchical code of modesty. All in deference to male power; so that Nazik’s clothes would be deeply shocking to her mother and grandmothers, even if she was, as now, wearing them before an outsider who didn’t really matter. But if he knew enough to understand, then it was a sign.

And then at one point, when they were all laughing, Nazik rose at Zeyk’s request to get them dessert, and she said to Zeyk with a laugh, “Yes, master.”

Zeyk scowled and said “Go, slave,” and took a swipe at her, and she snapped her teeth at him. They laughed at Frank’s fierce blush, and saw that he understood: they were mocking him, and also breaking the Bedouin taboo against showing marital affection of any kind, to anyone. Nazik came over and put her fingertip on his shoulder, which shocked him further. “We are only joking with you, you know,” she said. “We women heard about your declaration to the men, and we love you for it. You could have as many wives among us as an Ottoman sultan. Because there is some truth to what you said, too much.” She nodded seriously, and pointed a finger at Zeyk, who wiped the grin from his face and nodded as well. Nazik went on: “But so much depends on the people within the laws, don’t you find? The men in this caravan are good men, smart men. And the women are even smarter, and we have taken over entirely.” Zeyk’s eyebrows shot up, and Nazik laughed. “No, really, we have only taken our share. Seriously.”

“But where are you, then?” Frank said. “I mean where are the caravan’s women, during the day? What do you do?”

“We work,” Nazik said simply. “Take a look, you’ll see us.”

“Doing all the kinds of work?”

“Oh yes. Perhaps not where you can see us much. There are still some-habits, customs. We are reclusive, separate, we have our own world-it is perhaps not good. We Bedu tend to group together, men and women. We have our traditions, you see, and they endure. But there is much that is changing here, changing fast. So that this is the next stage of the Islamic way. We are…” She searched for the word.

“Utopia,” Zeyk suggested. “The Moslem utopia.”

She waggled a hand doubtfully. “History,” she said. “The hadj to utopia.”

Zeyk laughed with pleasure. “But the hadj is the destination,” he said. “That is what the mullahs always teach us. So we are already there, no?” And he and his wife smiled at each other, a private communication with a high density of information exchange, a smile which they shared, for a moment, with Frank. And their talk veered elsewhere.

In practical terms Al-Qahira was the pan-Arab dream come alive, as all the Arab nations had contributed money and people to the Mahjaris. The mix of Arab nationalities on Mars was complete, but in the individual caravans it separated out a bit. Still, they mixed; and whether they came from the oil-rich nations or the oil-poor ones didn’t seem to matter. Here among the foreigners they were all cousins. Syrians and Iraqis, Egyptians and Saudis, Gulf Staters and Palestinians, Libyans and Bedouins. All cousins here.

Frank began to feel better. He slept deeply again, refreshed by the timeslip in every day, a little slack in the circadian rhythm, the body’s own time off. Indeed all life in the caravan had an altered duration, as if the moment itself had dilated; he felt there was time to spare, that there was never a reason to hurry.

And the seasons rolled by. The sun set in almost the same spot every night, shifting ever so slowly; they lived entirely by the martian calendar now, it was the only new year they noticed or celebrated: Ls=0, the start of northern spring, of the year 17. Season after season, each six months long, and each passing in the absence of the old sharp sense of mortality: it was like living in the eternal now, in an endless round of works and days, in the continuous cycle of prayer to the oh-so-distant Mecca, in the ceaseless wandering over the land. In the always-cold. One morning they woke to find it had snowed in the night, and the whole landscape was pure white. And mostly water ice. The whole caravan went crazy for the day, all of them men and women outside in walkers, giddy at the sight, kicking snow, making snowballs that did not cohere satisfactorily, trying to pile snowmen that likewise did not stick together. The snow was too cold.

Zeyk laughed hard at these efforts. “What an albedo,” he said. “It’s astonishing how much of what Sax does rebounds against him. Feedbacks naturally adjust toward homeostasis, don’t you think? I wonder if Sax shouldn’t have first made things so much colder that the whole atmosphere froze out onto the surface. How thick would it be, a centimeter? Then line up our harvesters pole to pole, and run them around the world like latitude lines, processing the carbon dioxide into good air and fertilizer. Ha, can’t you see it?”

Frank shook his head. “Sax probably considered it, and rejected it for some reason we don’t see.”

“No doubt.”

The snow sublimed away, the red land returned, they traveled on their way. Occasionally they passed nuclear reactors, standing like castles on the top of the Escarpment; not just Rickovers but giant Westinghouse breeders, with frost plumes like thunderheads. On Mangalavid they saw programs about a fusion prototype in Chasma Borealis.

Canyon after canyon. They knew the land in a way that even Ann didn’t; every part of Mars interested her equally, so she could not have this focused knowledge of a single region, this way they had of reading it like a story, following its leads through the red rock to a patch of blackish sulfides, or the delicate cinnabar of mercury deposits. They were not so much students of the land as lovers of it; they wanted something from it. Ann, on the other hand, asked for nothing but answers. There were so many different kinds of desire.

Days passed, and then more seasons. When they ran into other Arab caravans they celebrated long into the night, with music and dance, coffee and hookahs and talk, in meeting tents covering an octagon of parked rovers. Their music was never recorded, but played with great facility on flutes and electric guitars, and mostly sung, in quarter-tones and wails so strange to Frank’s ear that for a long time he couldn’t tell if the singers were accomplished or not. The meals lasted hours, and afterwards they talked till dawn, and made a point of going out to watch the furnace blast of sunrise.

When they met with other nationalities, however, they were naturally more reserved. Once they passed a new Amex mining station manned mostly by Americans, perched on one of the rare big veins of mafic rock rich in platinoids, in Tantalus Fossae near Alba Patera. The mine itself was down on the long flat floor of the narrow rift canyon, but it was mostly robotic, and the crew lived up in a plush tent, on the rim overlooking the rift. The Arabs circled next to this tent, made a brief guarded visit inside, and retreated into their insectile rovers for the night. It would have been impossible for the Americans to learn a thing about them.

But that evening Frank went back over into the Amex tent by himself. The folks inside were from Florida, and their voices brought up memories in him like nets filled with coelacanths; Frank ignored all the little mental explosions, and asked question after question, concentrating on the black and Latino and redneck faces that answered him. He saw that this group was imitating an earlier form of community just like the Arabs did; this was a wildcat oil field crew, enduring harsh conditions and long hours for big paychecks, all saved for the return to civilization. It was worth it even if Mars sucked, which it did. “I mean even on the Ice you can go outside, but here, fuck.”

They didn’t care who Frank was, and as he sat among them listening they told stories to each other that astonished him even though they were somehow deeply familiar. “There was twenty-two of us prospecting with this little mobile habitat with no rooms to it, and one night we got to partying and took all our clothes off, and all the women got in a circle on the floor with their heads in the middle, and the guys went in a circle around the outside, and there were twelve guys and ten gals so the two guys out kept the rotation going pretty fast, and we actually got all the way around the circle in the timeslip. We tried to all come at once at the end of the timeslip and it worked pretty good, once a few couples got going it was like a whirlpool and it sucked everyone down into it. Felt so good.”

And then, after the laughter and the shouts of disbelief: “We was killing and freezing these hogs in Acidalia, and those humane killers are like shooting a giant arrow into their heads so we figured why not kill and freeze them both at once and see what happens. So we got them all handicapped, and bet on which ones would get the furthest, and we open the outer lock door and those pigs all dash out outside and wham, they all keeled over inside of fifty yards of the door, except for one little gal that got almost two hundred yards, and froze standing upright. I win a thousand dollar on that hog.”

Frank grinned at their howls. He was back in America. He asked them what else they had done on Mars. Some had been building nuclear reactors up on top of Pavonis Mons, where the space elevator would touch down. Others had worked on the water pipe running up eastern Tharsis bulge from Noctis to Pavonis. The parent transnational for the elevator, Praxis, had a lot of interests at the bottom end, as they called it. “I worked on a Westinghouse on top of the Compton aquifer under Noctis, which is supposed to have as much water in it as the Mediterranean, and this reactor’s entire job was going to be to power a bunch of humidifiers. Fucking two hundred megawatts of humidifier, they’re the same as the humidifier I had in my bedroom when I was a kid, except they take fifty kilowatts apiece! Gigantic Rockwell monsters with single molecule vaporizers and jet turbine engines that shoot the mist out of thousand meter stacks. Fucking unbelievable. A million liters a day of H and O added to the air.”

Another of them had been building a new tent city in the Echus channel, below Overlook: “They’ve tapped an aquifer there and there’s fountains all over town, statues in the fountains, waterfalls, canals, ponds, swimming pools, you name it, it’s a little Venice up there. Great thermal retention too.”

The conversation removed itself to the gym, which was well-stocked with machines designed to enable their users to stay Earth-ready. “He’s buffed, look at that, must be short time.” Almost everyone kept to a rigorous workout schedule, three hours a day minimum. “If you give up you’re stuck here, right? And then what good is that savings account?”

“Eventually it’ll be legal tender,” another one of them said. “Where people go, the American dollar is sure to follow.”

“You got it backwards, assbite.”

“As we are the proof of.”

Frank said, “I thought the treaty blocked the use of Terran money here?”

“The treaty’s a fucking joke,” said one doing lat pulls.

“Dead as Bessy the Long Distance Hog.”

They stared at Frank, all of them in their twenties and thirties, a generation he had never talked to much; he didn’t know how they had grown up, what had shaped them, what they might believe. The oh-so-familiar accents and faces might be deceptive, in fact probably were. “You think so?” he asked.

Some of them seemed more aware than the rest that he might be connected to the treaty, along with all his other historical associations. But the man doing lat pulls was oblivious: “We’re here on a deal that the treaty says is illegal, man. And it’s happening all over. Brazil, Georgia, the Gulf States, all the countries that voted against the treaty are letting the transnats in. It’s a contest among the flags of convenience as to how convenient they can be! And UNOMA is flat on its back with its legs spread, saying More, more. Folks are landing by the thousands and most are employed by transnats, they’ve got their government visas and five year contracts, including rehab time to get you Earth buffed, things like that.”

“By the thousands?” Frank said.

“Oh yeah! By the tens of thousands!”

He hadn’t looked at TV, he realized, for… For a long time.

A man doing military presses spoke between lifts of the whole stack of black weights. “It’s gonna blow pretty soon-A lot of people don’t like it-Not just oldtimers like you-A whole bunch of newtimers too-They’re disappearing in droves-Whole operations-whole towns sometimes-Came on a mine in Syrtis-completely empty-Everything useful gone-Completely stripped-Even stuff like inner lock doors-Oxygen tanks-Toilets-Stuff that’d take hours-to pull loose.”

“Why did they do that?”

“Going native!” a bench presser exclaimed. “Won over by your comrade Arkady Bogdanov!”

From flat on his back this man met Frank’s gaze; a tall, broad-shouldered black man with an aquiline nose. He said, “They get up here and the company tries to look good, gyms and good food and rec time and all, but what it comes down to is them telling you everything you can do and can’t do, it’s all scheduled, when you wake up, when you eat, when you shit, it’s like the Navy has taken over Club Med, you know? And then here comes your bro Arkady, saying to us, You’re Amurricans, boys, you got to be free, this Mars is the new frontier, and you should know some of us are treating it that way, we ain’t no robot software, we’re free men, making our own rules on our own world! And that’s it, man!” The room crackled with laughter, everyone had stopped to listen: “That does the trick! Folks get up here and they see they’re schedule software, they see they can’t keep Earth-buffed without they spend their whole time in here sucking the air hose, and even then I spect it’s impossible, they lied to us I’ll bet. So the pay means nothing, really, we’re all software and maybe stuck here for good. Slaves, man! Fucking slaves! And believe you me, that’s pissing a lot of folk off. They’re ready to strike back, I mean to tell you. And that’s the folks who are disappearing. Gonna be a whole lot of them before it’s all over.”

Frank stared down at the man. “Why haven’t you disappeared?”

The man laughed shortly and began pumping weights again.

“Security,” someone else called from the Nautilus machine.

Military Press disagreed. “Security’s lame-But you got to have-Somewhere to go. Soon as Arkady shows-Gone!”

“One time,” Bench Press said, “I saw a vid of him where he talked about how folk of color are better suited for Mars than white folk, how we do better with the UV.”

“Yeah! Yeah!” They were all laughing at that, both skeptical and amused at once.

“It’s bullshit, but what the hell,” Bench Press said. “Why not? Why not? Call it our world. Call it Nova Africa. Say no boss is gonna take it away from us this time.” He was laughing again, as if everything he had said was no more than a funny idea. Or else a hilarious truth, a truth so delicious that just saying it made you laugh out loud.

And so very late that night Frank went back to the Arab rovers, and he continued on with them, but it wasn’t the same. He had been yanked back into time, and now the long days in the prospector only made him itch. He watched TV; he made some calls. He had never resigned as Secretary; the office had been run in his absence by Assistant Secretary Slusinski, and he had done just enough by phone for them to cover for him, telling Washington that he was working, then that he was doing deep research, then that he was taking a working vacation, and that as one of the first hundred he needed to be out there wandering around. It wouldn’t have lasted much longer, but when Frank called Washington directly the President was pleased, and in Burroughs the exhausted-looking Slusinski looked happy indeed. In fact the whole Burroughs office sounded pleased that he planned to come back, which surprised Frank quite a bit. When he had left Burroughs, disgusted at the treaty and depressed about Maya, he had been, he thought, a bastard of a boss. But here they had covered for him for almost two years, and seemed happy to hear he was coming back. People were strange. The aura of the first hundred, no doubt. As if that mattered.

So Frank returned from his final prospecting trip and sat that evening in Zeyk’s rover, sipping his coffee, watching them talk, Zeyk and Al-Khan and Yussuf and the rest, and, wandering in and out of the room, Nazik and Aziza. People who had accepted him; people who in some sense understood him. By their code he had done the necessary things. He relaxed in the flow of Arabic, still and always awash with ambiguity: lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine, words that might refer to a waldo hand, a pipe, a kind of talus, robot parts; or perhaps just to lily, river, forest, lark, jasmine. A beautiful, beautiful language. The speech of the people who had taken him in, and let him rest. But he would have to leave.

They hadarranged things so that if you spent half the year in Underhill you were assigned a permanent room of your own. Towns all over the planet were adopting similar systems, because people were moving around so much that no one felt at home anywhere, and this arrangement seemed to mitigate that. Certainly the first hundred, who were among the most mobile Martians of all, had started spending more time in Underhill than they had in the years before, and this was mostly a pleasure, to most of them. At any given time twenty or thirty would be around, and others came in and stayed for a while between jobs, and in the constant come and go they had a chance to carry on a more-or-less continuous conference on the state of things, with newcomers reporting what they had seen firsthand, and the rest arguing about what it meant.

Frank, however, did not spent the required thirteen months a year in Underhill, and so he did not have a room there. He had moved the department’s head offices to Burroughs back in 2050, and before joining the Arabs in ‘57 the only room he had kept was there in the offices.

Now it was ‘59 and he was back, in a room one floor down from his old one. Dropping his bag on the floor and looking around at the room, he cursed aloud. To have to be in Burroughs in person-as if one’s physical presence made any difference these days! It was an absurd anachronism, but that’s the way people were. Another vestige of the savannah. They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.

Slusinski came in. Though his accent was pure New York, Frank had always called him Jeeves, because he looked like the actor in the BBC series. “We’re like dwarves in a waldo,” Frank said to him angrily. “One of those really big waldo excavators. We’re inside it and supposed to be moving a mountain, and instead of using the waldo capabilities we’re leaning out of a window and digging with teaspoons. And complimenting each other on the way we’re taking advantage of the height.”

“I see,” Jeeves said carefully.

But there was nothing to be done about it. He was back in Burroughs, hurrying around, four meetings an hour, conferences that told him what he already knew, which was that UNOMA was now using the treaty for toilet paper. They were approving accounting systems which guaranteed that mining would never show any profits to distribute to the general assembly members, even after the elevator was working. They were handing out “necessary personnel” status to thousands of emigrants. They were ignoring the various local groups, ignoring MarsFirst. Most of this was done in the name of the elevator itself, which provided an endless string of excuses, thirty-five thousand kilometers of excuses, a hundred and twenty billion dollars of excuses. Which was not all that expensive, actually, compared to the military budgets of the past century-less than a year of the global military budget of those days, in fact, and most of the elevator funds had been needed in the first years of finding the asteroid and getting it into proper orbit, and setting up the cable factory. After that the factory ate the asteroid and spit out the cable, and that was that; they only had to wait for it to grow long enough, and nudge it down into position. A bargain, a real bargain!

And also a great excuse for breaking the treaty whenever it seemed expedient. “God damn it,” Frank shouted at the end of a long day in the first week back. “Why has UNOMA caved like this?”

Jeeves and the rest of his staff took this as a rhetorical question and offered no theories. He had definitely been away too long; they were afraid of him now. He had to answer the question himself: “It’s greed I guess, they’re all getting paid off in one cosmeticized way or another.”

At dinner that night, in a little cafe, he ran into Janet Blyleven and Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev. As they ate they watched the news from Earth on a bar TV. Really it had gotten to be almost too much to watch. Canada and Norway were joining the plan to enforce population growth slowdown. No one would say population control, of course, it was a forbidden phrase in politics, but that’s what it was in fact, and it was turning into the tragedy of the commons all over again: if one country ignored the UN resolutions, then nearby countries were howling for fear of being overwhelmed-another monkey fear, but there it was. Meanwhile Australia, New Zealand, Scandanavia, Azania, the United States, Canada, and Switzerland had all proclaimed immigration illegal. While India was growing by eight percent a year. Famine would solve that, as it would in a lot of countries. The Four Horsemen were good at population control. Until then… the TV cut to an ad for a popular diet fat, which was indigestible and went right through the gut unchanged. “Eat all you want!”

Janet clicked off the TV. “Let’s change the subject.”

They sat around their table and stared at their plates. It turned out Vlad and Ursula had come from Acheron because there was an outbreak of resistant tuberculosis in Elysium. “The cordon sanitaire has fallen apart,” Ursula said. “Some of the emigrant viruses will surely mutate, or combine with one of our tailored systems.”

Earth again. It was impossible to avoid it. “Things are falling apart down there!” Janet said.

“It’s been coming for years,” Frank said harshly, his tongue loosened by the faces of his old friends. “Even before the treatment life expectancy in the rich countries was nearly double that in the poor. Think about that! But in the old days the poor were so poor they hardly knew what life expectancy was, the day itself was their whole concern. Now every corner shop has a TV and and they can see what’s happening-that they’ve got AIDS while the rich have the treatment. It’s gone way beyond a difference in degree, I mean they die young and the rich live forever! So why should they hold back? They’ve got nothing to lose.”

“And everything to gain,” Vlad said. “They could live like us.”

They huddled over cups of coffee. The room was dim. The pine furniture had a dark patina; stains, nicks, fines rubbed in by hand… It could have been one of those nights in that distant time when they were the only ones in the world, a few of them up later than the rest, talking. Except Frank blinked and looked around, and saw in his friends’ faces the weariness, the white hair, the turtle faces of the old. Time had passed, they were scattered over the planet, running like he was, or hidden like Hiroko, or dead like John. John’s absence suddenly seemed huge and gaping, a crater on whose rim they huddled glumly, trying to warm their hands. Frank shuddered.

Later Vlad and Ursula went to bed. Frank looked at Janet, feeling immobilized as he sometimes did at the end of a long day, incapable of ever moving again. “Where’s Maya these days?” he asked, to keep Janet from retiring too. She and Maya had been good friends in the Hellas years.

“Oh, she’s here in Burroughs,” Janet said. “Didn’t you know?”

“No.”

“She’s got Samantha’s old rooms. She may be avoiding you.”

“What?”

“She’s pretty mad at you.”

“Mad at me?”

“Sure.” She regarded him across the dim, faintly humming room. “You must have known that.”

While he was still considering how open to be with her, he said “No! Why should she be?”

“Oh Frank,” she said. She leaned forward in her chair. “Quit acting like you’ve got a stick up your ass! We know you, we were there, we saw it all happen!” And as he was recoiling she leaned back, and said calmly, “You must know that Maya loves you. She always has.”

“Me?” he said weakly. “It’s John she loved.”

“Yeah, sure. But John was easy. He loved her back, and it was glamorous. It was too easy for Maya. She likes things hard. And that’s you.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

Janet laughed at him. “I know I’m right, she’s told me as much! Ever since the treaty conference she’s been angry at you, and she always talks when she’s mad.”

“But why is she angry?”

“Because you rejected her! Rejected her, after pursuing her for years and years, and she got used to that, she loved it. It was romantic, the way you persisted. She took it for granted, sure, but she loved you for it. And she liked how powerful you were. And now John is dead, and she could finally say yes to you, and you sent her packing. She was furious! And she stays mad a long time.”

“This…” Frank struggled to collect himself. “It just doesn’t match with my understanding of what’s happened.”

Janet stood up to go, and as she walked by him she patted him on the head. “Maybe you ought to talk to Maya about it then.” She left.

For a long time he sat there, feeling stunned, examing the shiny grain of his chair arm. It was hard to think. Eventually he stopped trying and went to bed.

He slept poorly, and at the end of a long night he had another dream about John. They were in the long drafty upcurved chambers of the space station, spinning at martian gravity, in their long stay of 2010, six weeks together up there, young and strong, John saying I feel like Superman, this gravity’s great, I feel like Superman! Running laps around the big ring of the station hallway. Everything’s going to change on Mars, Frank. Everything!

No. Each step was like the last jump of a triple jump. Boing, boing, boing, boing.

Yes! The whole question will be learning to run fast enough.

A perfect interference pattern of cloud-dots lay pasted over the western coast of Madagascar. The sun bronzing the ocean below.

Everything looks so fine from up here.

Get any closer and you begin to see too much, Frank murmured.

Or not enough.

It was cold, they argued over the temperature, John was from Minnesota and had slept as a boy with his window open. So Frank shivered, a down coverlet draped over his shoulders, his feet blocks of ice. They played chess and Frank won. John laughed. How stupid, he said.

What do you mean?

Games don’t mean anything.

Are you sure? Sometimes life seems like a kind of game to me.

John shook his head. In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy’s king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop’s ear, and suddenly it’s playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you’re fucked.

Frank nodded. He had taught these things to John.

A confusion of meals, chess, talk, the view of the rolling Earth. It felt like the only life they had ever lived. The voices from Houston were like AIs, their concerns absurd. The planet itself was so beautiful, so intricately patterned by its land and its clouds.

I never want to go down. I mean this is almost better than Mars’ll be, don’t you think?

No.

Huddled, shivering, listening to John talk of boyhood. Girls, sports, dreams of space. Frank responded with tales of Washington, lessons from Machiavelli, until it occurred to him that John was formidable enough as it was. Friendship was just diplomacy by other means, after all. But later, after a vague blur… talking, halting, shivering, talking about his father, coming home drunk from the Jacksonville bars, Priscilla and her white blond hair, her fashion magazine face. How it meant nothing to him anymore, a marriage for the resume, for looking normal to the shrinks without holding him down. And not his fault. Abandoned, after all. Betrayed.

That sounds bad. No wonder you think people are so fucked.

Frank waved at their big blue lamp. But they are. Waving by coincidence at the Horn of Africa. Think about what’s happened down there.

That’s history, Frank. We can do better than that.

Can we? Can we?

You just wait and see.

He woke up, his stomach knotted, his skin sweaty. He got up and took a shower; already he could remember no more than a single fragment of the dream: John, saying “Wait and see.” But his stomach was like wood.

After breakfast he clicked his fork on the table, thinking. All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit, bizarre, symbolic of something else?

That evening he went looking for Maya, feeling helpless, in the grip of a compulsion. The decision had been made the night before, when Janet said “she loves you, you know.” And he turned a corner to the dining commons and there she was, her head thrown back in the middle of her pealing laugh, vividly Maya, her hair as white as it had once been black, her eyes fixed on her companion; a man, dark-haired, handsome, perhaps in his fifties, smiling at her. Maya put a hand to his upper arm, a characteristic gesture, one of her usual intimacies, it meant nothing and in fact indicated that he was not her lover but rather someone she was in the process of enchanting; they could have met just minutes before, although the look on his face indicated he knew her better than that.

She turned and saw Frank, blinked with surprise. She looked back at the man and continued to speak, in Russian, her hand still on his arm.

Frank hesitated and almost turned and left. Silently he cursed himself; was he no more than a schoolboy, then? He walked by them and said hello, did not hear if they replied. All through the dinner she stayed glued to the man’s side, not looking his way, not coming over. The man, pleasant-enough looking, was surprised at her attention, surprised but pleased. Clearly they would leave together, clearly they would spend the night together. That foreknowledge always made people pleasant. She would use people like that without a qualm, the bitch. Love… The more he thought about it the angrier he got. She had never loved anyone but herself. And yet… that look on her face when she first saw him; for a split second hadn’t she been pleased, and then wanted him angry at her? And wasn’t that a sign of hurt feelings, of a desire to hurt back, meaning a certain (incredibly childish) desire for him?

Well, the hell with her. He went back to his room and packed his bag, and took the subway to the train station, and got on a night train west, up Tharsis to Pavonis Mons.

In a few months’ time, when the elevator was maneuvered into its remarkable orbit, Pavonis Mons was going to become the hub of Mars, superceding Burroughs as Burroughs had once superceded Underhill. And as the elevator’s touchdown was not far off, signs of the area’s coming predominance were already everywhere. Paralleling the train piste as it ascended the steep eastern slope of the volcano were two new roads and four thick pipelines, as well as an array of cables, a line of microwave towers, and a continuous litter of stations, loading tracks, warehouses, and dumps. And then, on the last and steepest upcurve of the volcano’s cone, there was a vast congregation of tents and industrial buildings, thicker and thicker until up on the broad rim they were everywhere, and between them immense fields of insolation capture sheets, and receivers for the energy microwaved down from the orbiting solar panels. Each tent along the way was a little town, stuffed with little apartment blocks; and each apartment block was stuffed with people, their laundry hanging from every window. The tents nearest the piste had very few trees in them, and looked like commercial districts; Frank caught quick glimpses of food stands, video rentals, open-front gyms, clothing stores, laundromats. Litter piled in the streets.

Then he was into the train station on the rim, and out of the train and into the spacious tent of the station. The south rim had a tremendous view over the great caldera, an immense, nearly circular hole, flawless except for a single giant scoop bursting out of the rim to the northeast. This scoop formed a great gap across the caldera from the station, the mark of a truly huge sideways explosion. But that was the only flaw in the design; otherwise the cliff was regular, and the floor of the caldera was almost perfectly round, almost perfectly flat. And sixty kilometers across, and a full five thousand meters deep. Like the start of the mohole to end all moholes. The few signs of human presence on the caldera floor were on an ant’s scale, almost invisible from the rim.

The equator ran right across the southern rim, and that was where they were going to secure the lower end of the elevator. The attachment point was obvious; it was a massive tan and white concrete blockhouse, located a few kilometers west of the big tent town around the train station. Running west along the rim beyond the blockhouse was a line of factories and earthmovers and cones of feedstock materials, all gleaming with photographic clarity in the clear dustless thin high air, under a sky that was a kind of plum black. There were a number of stars near the zenith that were visible by day.

The day after his arrival, the staff of the local department office took him out to the elevator base; apparently technicians were going to capture the leader line from the cable that afternoon. This turned out to be unspectacular, but it was a peculiar sight nevertheless. The end of the leader line was marked by a small guidance rocket, and this rocket’s eastern-facing jets flared continuously, while the north and south jets added occasional spurts. The rocket thus descended slowly into the grasp of a gantry, looking like any other landing vehicle, except that there was a silver line extending up from it, a straight fine line that was only visible for a couple thousand meters above the rocket. Looking at it Frank felt as if he were standing on a sea floor and observing a fishing line, dropped down among them from the plum sea surface-a fishing line tied to a bright colorful lure, in the process of snagging on a bottom wreck. His blood burned in his throat, and he had to look down and breathe deep. Very peculiar.

They toured the base complex. The gantry that had captured the leader line was located inside a big hole in the concrete block, a concrete crater with a thick ring of a rim. The walls of this concrete crater were studded by curved silver columns, which held magnetic coils that would fix the cable butt in a shock-cushioning collar. The cable would float well off the concrete floor of the chamber, suspended there by the pull of the outer half of the cable; an exquisitely balanced orbit, an object extending from a moonlet down into this room, thirty-seven thousand kilometers in all. And only ten meters across.

With the leader line secured, the cable itself could be guided down fairly easily; but not rapidly, as it had to drift down into its final orbit very gently indeed, in an asymptotic approach. “It’s going to be like Zeno’s paradox,” Slusinski said.

So it was many days after that visit when the butt of the cable finally appeared in the sky, and hung there. Over the next few weeks it descended ever more slowly, always there in their sky. A very odd sight indeed; it gave Frank a touch of vertigo, and every time he saw it the image of standing on an ocean floor returned to him. They were looking up at a fishing line, a black thread hanging down from the plum sea surface.

Frank spent this time setting up the head Department of Mars offices in the town, which one day was christened Sheffield. The Burroughs staff protested the move, but he ignored them. He spent his time meeting with American executives and project managers, all at work on various aspects of the elevator or Sheffield, or the outlying Pavonis towns. Americans represented only a fraction of the workforce on hand, but Chalmers was kept busy nevertheless, because the overall project was so huge. And Americans appeared to be dominating the superconducting, and the software involved with the actual elevator cars, a coup that was worth billions and which many people gave Frank credit for, though it was in fact his AI and Slusinski who were responsible, along with Phyllis.

Many of the Americans lived out in a tent town east of Sheffield called Texas, sharing the space with internationals who liked the idea of Texas, or had just ended up there randomly. Frank met with as many of them as he could, so that by the time the cable touched down they would be organized and working with a coherent policy-or under his thumb, as some of them put it. But happy to be there, as long as it gave them any clout. They knew they were less powerful than the East Asian commonwealth, which was building the elevator car shells, and less powerful than the EEC, which had constructed the cable itself. And less power ful than Praxis, and Amex, and Armscor, and Subarashii.

Eventually the day came when the cable was going to touch down. A giant crowd gathered in Sheffield to see it; the train station concourse was jammed to well over capacity, as it had a good view along the rim to the base complex, popularly referred to as the Socket.

As the hours passed, the end of the black column drifted downward, moving more and more slowly as it approached its target. There it hung, not that much bigger than the leader line guiding it down; smaller in fact than the business end of an Energia rocket. It stood up into the sky perfectly vertically, but it was so thin and the foreshortening was so severe that it looked not much longer than a tall skyscraper. A very skinny tall skyscraper, walking on air. A black tree trunk, taller than the sky. “We ought to be right under it, down on the floor of the socket,” one of his staff said. “There’d be headroom when it stops, right?”

“Magnetic field might scramble you a bit,” Slusinski replied, never taking his gaze from the sky.

As it got closer they saw that the cable was knobbed with various protrusions, and filigreed with silver lines. The gap under it got smaller. Then the end of it disappeared into the base complex, and the seashell roar of the crowd in the concourse grew louder. People watched the TVs closely; cameras inside the socket showed the cable come to a slow halt, still ten meters above the concrete floor. After that came the tweezerlike movement of gantries, and the clamping of a physical collar around the cable, a few meters up from its end. Everything happened in dreamlike slow motion, and when it was done it looked like the round socket room had suddenly gained an ill-fitting black roof.

Over the loudspeaker system a woman’s voice said, “The elevator is secured.” There was a brief cheer. People moved away from the TVs and looked out the tent walls again. Now the object looked much less strange than it had when hanging out of the sky; now it was nothing more than the reductio ad absurdum of Martian architecture, a very slender, very tall black spire. A beanstalk. Peculiar, but not so unsettling. The crowd burst into a thousand conversations, and scattered.

And not long after that, the elevators were working. During the years when the cable was extruding from Clarke, robots had been spidering along it, constructing the power lines, safety cables, generators, superconducting pistes, maintenance stations, defense stations, position adjustment rockets, fuel tanks, and emergency shelters that marked the cable every few kilometers. This work had proceeded at the same pace as the cable construction itself, so that soon after touchdown the cars were running up and down, up and down, four hundred of them going in each direction, like parasites on a strand of hair. And a few months after that, you could take an elevator into orbit. And you could take another elevator down out of orbit, to the surface.

And down they came, transported from Earth by the fleet of continuous shuttles, those big spaceships that boomed around the Earth-Venus-Mars system, using the three planets and Luna as gravity handles, fielding madly accelerating ferry packets from Earth and Mars. Each of the thirteen operating ships held a thousand people, and they were full every trip out. So there was a continuous stream of people docking on Clarke, descending in elevator cars, and debarking in the socket. And then pouring into Sheffield’s concourses, wild and unsteady and bug-eyed with gawking, as they were herded with some difficulty to the train station, and onto trains outbound. Most of these trains then emptied their loads into the Pavonis tent towns; robot crews were building the tents just fast enough to house the influx, and the completion of two new pipelines had secured the water supply on Pavonis, which was being pumped up from the Compton Aquifer beneath Noctis Labyrinthus. So the emigrants settled in.

And back in the socket, on the other side of the cable, upbound elevator cars were being loaded with refined metals, platinum, gold, uranium, silver; and then the cars swung in and locked onto the piste, and up they rose again, accelerating slowly to their full speed of three hundred kilometers an hour. Five days later they arrived at the top of the cable, and decelerated into locks inside the ballast asteroid Clarke, now a much-tunneled chunk of carbonaceous chondrite, so filigreed with exterior buildings and interior chambers that it seemed more a spaceship or a city than Mars’s third moon. It was a busy place; there was a continuous procession of incoming and outgoing ships, and crews perpetually in transit, as well as a large force of local traffic controllers, using some of the most powerful AIs in existence. Though most of the operations involving the cable were computer controlled and robotically accomplished, entire human professions were springing up to direct and oversee all these efforts.

And of course media coverage of all the new imagery was immediate and intense; and all in all, despite the decade of waiting, it seemed that on touchdown the elevator had sprung into being like Athena.

But there was trouble. Frank found that his staff was spending more and more time dealing with men and women from the tents, who had come in to Sheffield and right into their offices, new arrivals who were sometimes nervous, sometimes loud and angry, rattling on about crowded living conditions or insufficient police or bad food. One bulky red-faced man wearing a baseball cap shook a finger at them and said, “Private security companies come in from tents higher up and offer protection, but they’re just gangs, it’s just extortion! I can’t even give you my name or our security might found out I came here! I mean I believe in the black economy as much as the next guy, but this is crazy! This isn’t what we came here for.”

Frank paced his office, seething. These kinds of allegations were clearly true, but difficult to verify without a security team of one’s own, a big police force in fact. When the man left, he grilled his staff, but they could tell him nothing new, which made him even angrier. “You’re paid to find these things out for me, that’s your jobs! What are you doing sitting around in here all day watching Terran news!”

He cancelled a day’s appointments, thirty-seven meetings in all. “Lazy incompetent bastards,” he said loudly as he stalked out the door. He went to the train station and caught a local downslope to have a look for himself.

The local train now stopped every kilometer of the descent, in small stainless steel locks that served as stations for the tent towns. He got out in one; signs in the lock identified it as El Paso. He walked through the open doors of the passage lock.

At least these tents had a view, there was no denying that. Down the great eastern slope of the volcano ran the train piste and the pipelines, and on either side of them tent after tent, like blisters. The clear fabric of the older ones upslope was already turning a bit purple. Ventilators hummed loudly from the physical plant next to the station, and from somewhere a hydrazine generator was adding its high hum. People were conversing in Spanish and English. Frank called his office and got them to ring the apartment of a man from El Paso who had dropped in to complain; the man answered, and Frank arranged to meet him at a cafe next to the station, then walked over and sat at an outer table. Men and women sat around tables eating and talking like anywhere else. Little electric cars hummed up and down the narrow streets, most piled high with boxes. The buildings near the station were three stories tall and appeared prefab, steel-reinforced concrete painted bright blue and white. There was a line of young trees in tubs running away from the station down the main thoroughfare. Small groups sat on the astroturf, or walked aimlessly from shop to shop, or hurried with shoulderbags and daypacks toward the station. All of them looked a bit disoriented or uncertain, as if they had no habits, or had not yet learned to walk properly.

The man showed up with a whole crowd of his neighbors, all in their twenties, too young to be on Mars or so it used to be said; perhaps the treatment could fix damage from radiation, allow them to reproduce accurately, who could say for sure till they tried? Laboratory animals, that’s what they were. What they had always been.

It was strange to stand among them like some ancient patriarch, treated with a mixture of awe and condescension, like a grandpa. Irritably he told them to take him on a walk and show him around. They guided him down narrow streets away from the station and the taller buildings, between long rows of what turned out to be Agee huts, which had been designed for temporary shelter in the outlands: research outposts, or water stations, or refugee huts. Now lined up by the score. The slope of the volcano had been hastily graded, and a lot of the huts were on a two or three degree slope, so that they had to be careful in the kitchens, they said, and make sure to align their beds properly.

Frank asked them what they did. Stevedores in Sheffield, most replied; offloading the elevator cars and getting the stuff on trains. Robots were supposed to do it, but it was surprising how much labor remained in the process for human muscle. Heavy equipment operations, robot programmers, machine repairmen, waldo dwarves, construction workers. Most of them had rarely gotten out onto the surface; some of them never had. They had done similar kinds of work back home, or had been unemployed. This was their chance. Most wanted to return to Earth someday, but the gyms were crowded and expensive and time-consuming, and they were all losing their tone. They had southern accents that Frank hadn’t heard since childhood; it was like hearing voices from a previous century, like listening to Elizabethans. Did people still talk that way? TV never revealed it. “Y’all been here so long you don’t mind being indoors, but I can’t stand it.” Ah caint stayun det.

Frank glared into a kitchen. “What do you eat?” he demanded.

Fish, vegatables, rice, tofu. It all came in bulk packages. They had no complaints; they thought it was good. Americans, the most degraded palates in history. Somebody gimme a cheeseburger! No, what they minded was the confinement, the lack of privacy, the teleoperation, the crowding together. And the resulting problems: “All my stuff got stole the day after I got here.” “Me too.” “Me too.” Theft, assault, extortion. The criminals all came from other tent towns, they said. Russians, they said. White folks with strange talk. Some black folks too, but not so many here as at home. A woman had been raped the previous week. “You’re kidding!” Frank said.

“What do you mean you’re kidding,” one woman said, disgusted at him.

Eventually they led him back to the station. Pausing in the door, Frank didn’t know what to say to them. Quite a crowd had gathered, people had recognized him or been called or drawn to the group. “I’ll see what I can do,” he muttered, and ducked through the passage lock.

Thoughtlessly he stared into tents as he rode a train back up. There was one fitted with coffin hotels, Tokyo style. That would be much more crowded than El Paso, but did its occupants care about that? Some people were used to being treated like ball bearings. A lot of people, in fact. But on Mars it was supposed to be different!

Back in Sheffield he stalked the rim concourse, staring out at the thin vertical line of the elevator, ignoring other people and forcing some of them to jump out of his way as he paced. Once he stopped and looked around at the crowd; there were perhaps five hundred people in view at that moment, living their lives. When had it gotten like this? They had been a scientific outpost, a handful of researchers, scattered over a world with as much land surface as the Earth: a whole Eurasia, Africa, America, Australia, and Antarctica, all for them. All that land was still out there, but what percentage of it was under tents and habitable? Much less than one percent. And yet what was UNOMA saying? A million people here already, with more on the way. And so police, and crime-or rather, crime without police. A million people and no law, no law but corporate law. The bottom line. Minimize expenses, maximize profits. Run smoothly on ball bearings.

The next week a set of tents on the south slope went on strike. Chalmers heard about it on his way to the office, Slusinski actually breaking in on his walk with a call. The striking tents were mostly American, and his staff was in a panic. “They’ve closed the stations and aren’t allowing anyone off the trains, so they can’t be controlled unless their emergency locks are stormed-”

“Shut up.”

Frank went down the south piste to the striking tents, ignoring Slusinski’s objections. In fact he ordered several of the staff down to join him.

A team from Sheffield security was standing in the station, but he ordered them to get on the train and leave, and after a consulation with the Sheffield administrators, they did. At the passage lock he identified himself, and asked to come in alone. They let him through.

He emerged in the main square of another tent, surrounded by a sea of angry faces. “Kill the TVs,” he suggested. “Let’s talk in private.”

They killed the TVs. It was the same as in El Paso, different accents but the same complaints. His earlier visit gave him the ability to anticipate what they were going to say, to say it before they did. He watched grimly as their faces revealed how impressed they were by this ability. They were young.

“Look, it’s a bad situation,” he said after they had talked for an hour. “But if you strike for long, you’ll only make it worse. They’ll send in security and it won’t be like living with gangs and police among you, it’ll be like livng in prison. You’ve made your point already, and now you’ve got to know when to let off and negotiate. Form a committee to represent you, and make a list of complaints and demands. Document all the incidents of crime, just write them down and get the victims to sign the statements. I’ll make good use of them. It’s going to take work at UNOMA and back home, because they’re breaking the treaty.”

He paused to get control of himself, relax his jaw. “Meanwhile, get back to work! It’ll pass the time better than sitting around cooped up in here, and it’ll make you points for the negotiation. And if you don’t, they’ll maybe just cut off your food and make you. Better to do it of your own free will, and look like rational negotiators.”

So the strike ended. They even gave him a ragged round of applause when he went back out into the station.

He got on the train in a blinding fury, refusing to acknowledge any of his staff’s questions or their mute looks of idiot inquiry, and savaging the head of the security team, who was an arrogant fool: “If you corrupt bastards had any integrity this wouldn’t have happened! You’re nothing but a protection racket! Why are people getting assaulted in the tents? Why are they paying protection, where are you when all this is happening!”

“It’s not our jurisdiction,” the man said, white-lipped.

“Oh come on, what is your jurisdiction? Your pocket is your only jurisidiction.” He went on until they got up and left the car, as angry at him as he was at them, but too disciplined or scared to talk back.

In the Sheffield offices he strode from room to room, shouting at the staff and making calls. Sax, Vlad, Janet. He told them what was happening, and they all eventually offered the same suggestion, which he had to admit was a good one. He would have to go up the elevator, and talk to Phyllis. “See if you can manage the reservations,” he said to his staff.

The elevatorcar was like an old Amsterdam house, narrow and tall, with a light-filled room at the top, in this case a clear-walled and domed chamber that reminded Frank of the bubble dome of the Ares. On the second day of the trip he joined the car’s other passengers (only twenty on this one, there weren’t too many people going this way) and they took the car’s own little interior elevator up the thirty stories to this clear penthouse, to see Phobos pass. The outer perimeter of the room was set out over the elevator proper, so there was a view down as well; Frank stared down at the curved line of the planet’s horizon, much whiter and thicker than the last time he had seen it. Atmosphere at one hundred fifty millibars now, really quite impressive, even if it was composed of poison gas.

While they were waiting for the little moon’s appearance Frank stared at the planet below. The gossamer arrow of the cable pointed straight down at it; it looked like they were rising on a tall slender rocket, a strange attentuated rocket which stretched some kilometers above and below them. That was all they would ever see of the cable. And below them the round orange floor of Mars looked just as blank as it had on their first approach so long ago, unchanged despite all their meddling. One only had to get far enough away.

Then one of the elevator pilots pointed out Phobos, a dim white object to the west. In ten minutes it was upon them, flashing past with astonishing speed, a large gray potato hurtling faster than the head could turn. Zip! Gone. The observers in the penthouse hooted, exclaimed, chattered. Frank had caught only the merest glimpse of the dome on Stickney, winking like a gem in the rock. And there had been a piste banding the middle like a wedding ring, and some bright silver lumps; that was all he could recall of the blurred image. Fifty kilometers away when it passed, the pilot said. At seven thousand kilometers an hour. Not all that fast, actually; there were meteors that hit the planet at fifty thousand kilometers an hour. But fast enough.

Frank went back down to the dining floor, trying to fix the hurtling image in his mind. Phobos: people at the dining table next to him talked of shoving it up into a braided orbit with Deimos. It was out of the loop now, a new Azores, nothing but an inconvenience to the cable. And Phyllis had argued all along that Mars itself would have suffered the same fate in the solar system at large, unless the elevator were built to climb its gravity well; they would have been bypassed by miners going to the metal-rich asteroids, which had no gravity wells to contend with. And then there were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets…

But there was no danger of that now.

On the fifth day they approached Clarke, and slowed down. It had been an asteroid about two kilometers across, a carbonaceous hunk now shaped to a cube, with every centimeter of its Mars-facing surface graded and covered with concrete, steel, or glass. The cable plunged right into the center of this assemblage; there were holes on both sides of the joint where cable met moon, just big enough to allow passage to the elevator cars.

They slid up into one of these holes, and came to a smooth stop. The interior space they slid into was like a vertical subway station. The passengers got out and went their ways into the tunnels of Clarke. One of Phyllis’s assistants met him and drove him in a little car through a warren of rock-walled tunnels. They came to Phyllis’s offices, which were rooms on the planet side of the moon, walled with mirrors and green bamboo. Though they were in microgravity and pulling themselves around, they stood on a consensus floor as established by the furniture, rip-ripping around in velcro shoes. A rather conservative practice, but to be expected in such an Earth-regarding place. Frank exchanged his shoes for some velcro slippers by the door and followed suit.

Phyllis was just finished talking with a couple of men: “Not only a cheap and clean lift out of the gravity well, but a propulsion system for slinging loads all over the solar system! It’s an extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering, don’t you think?”

“Yes!” the men replied replied.

She looked about fifty years old. After fulsome introductions-the men were from Amex-the others left. When Phyllis and Frank were the only ones left in the room, Frank said to her, “You’d better stop using this extraorinarily elegant piece of engineering to flood Mars with emigrants, or it’ll blow up in your face and you’ll lose your anchoring point.”

“Oh Frank.” She laughed. She really had aged well: hair silver, face handsomely lined and taut, figure trim. Neat as a pin in a rust jumpsuit and lots of gold jewelry, which together with her silver hair gave her an overall metallic sheen. She even looked at Frank through gold wire-rimmed glasses, an affectation that distanced her from the room, as if she were focusing on flat video images on the insides of her spectacles.

“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they’re like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”

She stared at a spot about three feet in front of him. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listeners. “This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It’s here for us and we’re going to use it. Earth is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropping. Science and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they always have. These first pioneers may suffer some hardships, but those won’t last long. We lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived.”

Startled at this lie, Frank glared at her. But she did not back down. Scornfully he said, “You’re not paying attention!” But the thought frightened him, and he paused.

He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear floor at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked down on Tharsis, of course, and from this high it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemisphere: the great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemished. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked her.

“L sixty. I go down regularly.” She smiled.

“Where do you stay when you descend?”

“In UNOMA dorms.” Where she worked busily to break the UN treaty.

But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned her to do. Elevator manager, and also the primary liason with the mining concerns. When she quit the UN, she could take all the jobs she could handle from them. Queen of the elevator. Which was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She’d have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.

And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarks. Well, she always had been a little stupid. Frank gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.

“Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States,” he said. “If the American government decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some.”

“You could never do that,” Phyllis said. “It would bankrupt the government.”

“That’s like threatening a dead man with hanging. A couple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymore. The only ones who even think they can are exactly your transnational executives. They hold the debt, but no one else cares about their money. I could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in you face. Whichever way it does, it wrecks your game.” He waved a hand angrily. “At which point someone else will occupy these rooms, and-” a sudden intuition-”you’ll be back in Underhill.”

That got her attention, no doubt about it. Her easy contempt took on a sudden edge. “No single person can convince Washington of anything. It’s quicksand down there. You’ll have your say and I’ll have mine, and we’ll see who has more influence.” And she rip-ripped across the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of UN officials.

So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough; he would prove her wrong.

On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new president would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.

Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd; it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one gee. An image came to him: running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One gee. Funny how the body remembered it.

Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Praxis; and so he was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.

He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but also they would have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.

Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a cafe over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.

Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in; and the Russians next door did the same.

A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the roadbuilding subdivision of Praxis, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil; they had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through in their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.

Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth); and once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.

The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.

“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. Then: “Who speaks for you?”

They had no spokesman. He swore viciously. “What kind of fools are you? You’d better learn to operate the system, or you’ll be in bags like this one forever. Bags like this or else bodybags.”

Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he would say. And still no sign of a spokeman, so Chalmers shouted, “All right, I’ll talk to all of you! Sit down so I can see who’s speaking!”

They would not sit; but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent’s main square. Chalmers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tents below. He asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.

“You were provoked,” he said when they were done. “They wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. They’ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you’re the murderers the police have caught! You were stupid!”

The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken aback. “Those so-called police were in on it too!” one of them said loudly.

“Maybe so,” Chalmers said, “But it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese on a rampage. You should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out! As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy to go along, they’re on the other side right now, at least some of them. But the national armies are shifting over to your side! So you’ve got to learn to co-operate with them, you’ve got to figure out who your allies are, and act accordingly! I don’t know why there are so few people on this planet capable of doing that. It’s like the passage from Earth scrambles the brain or something.”

Some laughed a startled laugh. Frank asked them about conditions in the tents. They had the same complaints as the others had, and again he could anticipate, and say it for them. Then he described the result of his trip to Clarke. “I got a moratorium on emigration, and that means more than just time to build more towns. It means the start of a new phase between the US and the UN. They finally figured it out in Washington that the UN is working for the transnationals, and so they need to enforce the treaty themselves. It’s in Washington’s best interest, and they’re the only ones that’ll do it. The treaty is part of the battle now, the battle between people and the transnationals. You’re in that battle and you’ve been attacked, and you have to figure out who to attack back, and how to connect up with your allies!”

They were looking grim at this, which showed sense, and Frank said, “Eventually we’re going to win, you know. There’s more of us than them.”

So much for the carrot, such as it was. As for the stick, that was always easy with people as powerless as these. “Look, if the national governments can’t calm things down quick, if there’s more unrest here and things start coming apart, they’ll say the hell with it-let the transnats solve their labor problems themselves, they’ll be more efficient at it. And you know what that means for you.”

“We’re sick of this!” one man shouted.

“Of course you are,” he said. He pointed a finger. “So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?”

It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, co-operate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.

He left to cheers.

Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head; the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.

She asked him to accompany her, and he was too exhausted to run a cost/benefit analysis of the act. With a twist of the mouth he agreed. It was easier just to tag along.

They took the train down to the next station, made their way through the police and inside. The Russian tent was packed like a circuit board. “You’re going to have a harder job of it than I did,” Frank said as he looked around.

“Russians are used to it,” she said. “These tents aren’t that different from Moscow apartments.”

“Yes, yes.” Russia had become a kind of immense Korea, sporting the same brutal streamlined capitalism, perfectly Taylorized and with a veneer of democracy and consumer goods covering the junta. “It’s amazing how little you need to keep starving people strung along.”

“Frank, please.”

“Just remember that and it will go okay.”

“Are you going to help or not?” she demanded.

“Yes, yes.”

The central square smelt of bean curd and borscht and electrical fires, and the crowd was much more unruly and loud than in the American tent, everyone there a defiant leader, ready to unleash a declamation. A lot more of them were women than in the American tent. They had unpisted a train and this had galvanized them, they were anxious for more action. Maya had to use a hand megaphone, and all the time that she stood on a chair and talked, the crowd swirled around them and participants in several loud arguments ignored her, as if she were a cocktail lounge pianist.

Frank’s Russian was rusty, and he couldn’t understand most of what the crowd shouted at Maya, but he followed her replies pretty well. She was explaining the emigration moratorium, the bottleneck in town robot production and in water supplies, the necessity for discipline, the promise of a better life to come if all was enacted in an orderly fashion. He supposed it was a classic babushka harangue, and it had the effect of pacifying them somewhat, as there was a strong reactionary streak in many Russians now; they remembered what social unrest really meant, and were justifiably afraid of it. And there was a lot to promise, it all seemed plausible: big world, few people, lots of material resources, some good robot designs, computer programs, gene templates…

In one really loud moment of the discussion he said to her in English, “Remember the stick.”

“What?” she snapped.

“The stick. Threaten them. Carrot and stick.”

She nodded. Into the megaphone again: the never-to-be-taken-for-granted fact of the poisonous air, the deadly cold. They were alive only because of the tents, and the input of electricity and water. Vulnerable in ways they hadn’t fully thought out, in ways that didn’t exist back home.

She was quick, she always had been. Back to promises. Back and forth, stick and carrot, a jerk on the leash, some niblets. Eventually the Russians too were pacified.

Afterward on the train up to Sheffield Maya gabbled with nervous relief, face flushed, eyes brilliant, hand clutching his arm as she threw her head back abruptly and laughed. That nervous intelligence, that arresting physical presence… he must have been exhausted himself, or more shaken than he had realized by the the time in the tents, or maybe it was the encounter with Phyllis; because he felt himself warming to her, it was like stepping into a sauna after a freezing day outside, with that same sense of relief from vigilance, of penetrating ease. “I don’t know what I would have done without you,” she was saying rapidly, “really you are so good in those situations, so clear and firm and sharp. They believe you because you don’t try to flatter them or soften the truth.”

“That’s what works best,” he said, looking out the window at the tents running by. “Especially when you’re flattering them and lying to them.”

“Oh Frank.”

“It’s true. You’re good at it yourself.”

This was an example of the trope under discussion, but Maya didn’t see it. There was a name for that in rhetoric, but he couldn’t recall it. Metonymy? Synechdoche? But she only laughed and squeezed his shoulder, leaning against him. As if the fight in Burroughs had never happened, not to mention everything before that. And in Sheffield she ignored her stop, and got off the train with him at his stop, walking at his shoulder through the spaciousness of the rim station, and then to his rooms, where she stripped and showered and put on one of his jumpers, chattering all the while about the day and the situation at large, as if they did this all the time: went out to dinner, soup, trout, salad, a bottle of wine, every night sure! Leaning back in their chairs, drinking coffee and brandy. Politicians after a day of politics. The leaders.

She had finally wound down, and was poured into her chair, content just to watch him. And for a wonder it didn’t make him nervous, it was as if some force field protected him from all that. Perhaps the look in her eye. Sometimes it seemed you really could tell if someone liked you.

She spent the night. And after that she divided her time between her quarters at the MarsFirst office and his rooms, without ever discussing what she was doing, or what it meant. And when it was time for bed, she would take off her clothes and roll in next to him, and then onto him, warm and calm. The touch of a whole body, all at once… And if he ever started things, she was so quick to respond; he only had to touch her arm. Like stepping into a sauna. She was so easy these days, so calm. Like a different person, it was amazing. Not Maya at all; but there she was, whispering Frank, Frank.

But they never talked about any of that. It was always the situation, the day’s news; and in truth that gave them a lot to talk about. The unrest on Pavonis had gone into abeyance temporarily, but the troubles were planetwide, and getting worse: sabotages, strikes, riots, fights, skirmishes, murder. And the news from Earth had plummeted through even the blackest of gallows humor, into just plain awfulness; Mars was the picture of order in comparison, a litle local eddy spun away from the vortex of a giant maelstrom, which looked to Frank like a death spiral for everything that fell into it. Little wars like matchheads were flaring everywhere. India and Pakistan had used nuclear weapons in Kashmir. Africa was dying, and the north bickered over who should help first.

One day they got word that the mohole town Hephaestus, west of Elysium, manned by Americans and Russians, had been entirely deserted. Radio contact had stopped, and when people went down from Elysium to look, they had found the town empty. All Elysium was in an uproar, and Frank and Maya decided to see if they could do something in person. They took the train down Tharsis together, back down into the thickening air and across the rocky plains now piebald with snowdrifts that never melted, with snow that was a dirty granular pink, conforming tightly to the north slope of every dune and rock, like colored shadows. And then onto the glistening crazed black plains of Isidis, where the permafrost melted on the warmest summer days, and then refroze in a bright black cracklelure. A tundra in the making, maybe even a marsh. Flying by the train windows were tufts of black grass, perhaps even arctic flowers. Or maybe it was just litter.

Burroughs was quiet and uneasy, the broad grassy boulevards empty, their green as shocking as a hallucination or an afterimage of looking into the sun. While waiting for the train to Elysium, Frank went to the station’s storage room and reclaimed the contents of his Burroughs room, which he had left behind. The attendant returned with a single large box, containing a bachelor’s kitchen equipment, a lamp, some jumpers, a lectern. He didn’t remember any of it. He put the lectern in his pocket and tossed the rest of it in a trash dumper. Wasted years; he couldn’t remember a day of them. The treaty negotiation, now revealed as pure theater, as if someone had kicked a backstage strut and brought down the whole backdrop, revealing real history on the back steps, two men exchanging a handshake and a nod.

The Russian office in Burroughs wanted Maya to stay and deal with some business there, and so Frank took a train on to Elysium by himself, and then joined a rover caravan out to Hephaestus. The people in his car were subdued by his presence, and irritably he ignored them and glanced through his old lectern. A standard selection for the most part, a great book series only slightly augmented by some political philosophy packages. A hundred thousand volumes; lecterns today beat that a hundredfold, although it was a pointless improvement, as there was no longer time to read even a single book. He had been fond of Nietschze in those days, apparently. About half the marked passages were from him, and glancing through them Frank couldn’t see why, it was all windy drivel. And then he read one that made him shudder: “The individual is, in his future and his past, a piece of fate, one law more, one necessity more for everything that is and everything that will be. To say to him ‘change yourself’ means to demand that everything should change, even in the past…”

In Hephaestus a new mohole crew was settling in, old timers for the most part, tech and engineering types, but much more sophisticated than the newcomers on Pavonis. Frank talked with quite a few of them, asking about those who had disappeared, and one morning at breakfast, next to a window that looked out on the mohole’s solid white termal plume, an American woman who reminded him of Ursula said, “These people have seen the videos all their life, they’re students of Mars, they believe in it like a grail, and organize their lives around getting here. They work for years, and save, and then sell everything they have to get passage, because they have an idea of what it will be like. And then they get here and they’re incarcerated, or at best back in the old rut, in indoor jobs so it’s all just like it’s still on TV. And so they disappear. Because they’re looking for more the kind of thing they came here for.”

“But they don’t know how the disappeared live!” Chalmers objected. “Or even if they survive at all!”

The woman shook her head. “Word gets around. People come back. There are one-play videos that show up occasionally.” The people around her nodded. “And we can see what’s coming up from Earth after us. Best to get into the country while the chance is still there.”

Frank shook his head, amazed. It was the same thing the benchpresser in the mining camp had been saying, but coming from this calm middle-aged woman it was somehow more disturbing.

That night, unable to sleep, he put out a call for Arkady, and got him half an hour later. Arkady was on Olympus Mons of all places, up at the observatory. “What do you want?” Frank said. “What do you imagine will happen if everyone here slips away into the highlands?”

Arkady grinned. “Why then we will make a human life, Frank. We will work to support our needs, and do science, and perhaps terraform a bit more. We will sing and dance and walk around in the sun, and work like maniacs for food and curiosity.”

“It’s impossible,” Frank exclaimed. “We’re part of the world, we can’t escape it.”

“Can’t we? It’s only the blue evening star, the world you speak of. This red world is the only real one for us, now.”

Frank gave up, exasperated. He had never been able to talk to Arkady, never. With John it had been different; but then he and John had been friends.

He trained back to Elysium. The Elysium Massif rose over the horizon like an enormous saddle dropped on the desert; the steep slopes of the two volcanoes were pinkish white now, deep in snows that had packed down to firn, and would become glaciers before too long. He had always thought of the Elysium cities as a counterweight to Tharsis; older, smaller, more manageable and sane. But now people there were disappearing by the hundreds; it was a jump-off point into the unknown nation, hidden out there in the cratered wilderness.

In Elysium they asked him to give a speech to a group of American newcomers, on the first evening of their orientation. A formal speech, but there was an informal gathering before, and Frank wandered around asking questions as usual. “Of course we’ll get out if we can,” one man said to him boldly.

Others chipped in immediately. “They told us not to come here if we wanted to get outdoors much. It’s not like that on Mars, they said.”

“Who do they think they’re fooling?”

“We can see the video you sent back as well as they can.”

“Hell, every other article you read is about the Mars underground, and how they’re communists or nudists or Rosicrucians-”

“Utopias or caravans or cave-dwelling primitives-”

“Amazons or lamas or cowboys-”

“What it is, is everyone’s projecting their fantasies out here because it’s so bad back there, do you understand?”

“Maybe there’s a single co-ordinated counterworld-”

“That’s another big fantasy, the totalizing fantasy-”

“The true masters of the planet, why not? Hidden away, maybe led by your friend Hiroko, maybe in contact with your friend Arkady, maybe not. Who knows? No one knows for sure, not on Earth they don’t.”

“It’s all stories. It’s the best story going right now, and millions of people on Earth are into it, they’re addicted to it. A lot of them want to come, but only a few of us get to. And a good percentage of those of us who got chosen went through the whole selection process lying through our teeth to get here.”

“Yes, yes,” Frank interjected gloomily. “We all did that.” It reminded him of Michel’s old joke; since they were all going to go crazy anyway…

“Well there you are! What did you expect?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head unhappily. “But it’s all fantasy, do you understand? The need to stay hidden would hamper any community in a crippling way. It’s all stories, when you get right down to it.”

“Then where are all the disappeared going?”

Frank shrugged uneasily, and they grinned.

An hour later he was still thinking about it. Everyone had moved out into an open-air ampitheater, built from fixed salt blocks in classical Greek style. The semi-circle of rising white benches was filled with bodies topped by attentive faces, waiting for his speech, curious to see what one of the first hundred would say to them; he was a relic of the past, a character out of history, he had been on Mars ten years before some of the people in the audience were born, and his memories of Earth were of their grandparents’ time, on the other side of a vast and shadowy chasm of years.

The classical Greeks had certainly gotten the size and proportions right for a single orator; he hardly had to raise his voice, and they all heard him. He told them some of the usual things, his standard address, all chopped and censored, as it was sadly tattered by current events. It didn’t sound very coherent, even to him. “Look,” he said, desperately revising as he spoke, ad libbing, searching through the faces in the crowd, “when we came up here we came to a different place, to a new world, and that necessarily makes us different beings than we were before. None of the old directives from Earth matter. Inevitably we will make a new Martian society, just in the nature of things. It comes out of the decisions we make together, by our collective action. And they are decisions that we’re making in our time, in these years, right now at this very instant. But if you dodge off into the outback and join one of the hidden colonies, you isolate yourself! You remain whatever you were when you came, never metamorphosing into a Martian human. And you also deprive the rest of us of your expertise and your input. I know this personally, believe me.” Pain lanced through him, he was astonished to feel it: “As you know, some of the first hundred were the first to disappear, presumably under the leadership of Hiroko Ai. I still don’t understand why they did it, I really don’t. But how we have missed her genius for systems design in the years since, I can hardly tell you! Why, I think you can accurately say that part of our problems now result from her absence these many years.” He shook his head, tried to gather his thoughts. “The first time I saw this canyon we’re in, I was with her. It was one of the first explorations to this area, and I had Hiroko Ai at my side, and we looked down into this canyon, its floor bare and flat, and she said to me, It’s like the floor of a room.” He stared at the audience, trying to remember Hiroko’s face. Yes… no. Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you. “I’ve missed her. I come here, and it’s impossible to believe it’s the same place, and so… it’s hard to believe I ever really knew her.” He paused, tried to focus on their faces. “Do you understand?”

“No!” someone bellowed.

A flicker of his old anger boiled through his confusion. “I’m saying we have to make a new Mars here! I’m saying we’re completely new beings, God dammit, that nothing is the same here! Nothing is the same!”

He had to give up, go sit down. Other speakers took over, and their droning voices floated over him as he sat, stunned, looking out the open end of the ampitheater into a park of wide-set sycamore trees. Slender white buildings beyond, trees growing on their roofs and balconies. A green and white vision.

He couldn’t tell them. No one could tell them. Only time, and Mars itself. And in the meantime they would act in obvious contradiction to their own best interests. It happened all the time, but how could it, how? Why were people so stupid?

He left the ampitheater, stalked through the park and the town. “How can people act against their own obvious material interests?” he demanded of Slusinski over his wristpad. “It’s crazy! Marxists were materialists, how did they explain it?”

“Ideology, sir.”

“But if the material world and our method of manipulating it determine everything else, how can ideology happen? Where did they say it comes from?”

“Some of them defined ideology as an imaginary relationship to a real situation. They acknowledged that imagination was a powerful force in human life.”

“But then they weren’t materialists at all!” He swore with disgust. “No wonder Marxism is dead.”

“Well, sir, actually a lot of people on Mars call themselves Marxists.”

“Shit! They might as well call themselves Zoroastrians, or Jansenists, or Hegelians.”

“Marxists are Hegelian, sir.”

“Shut up,” Frank snarled, and broke the connection.

Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mouth. Even now, when it was just what they needed.

Maya met him at the Burroughs station, gave him a hug. He endured it stiffly, his bags hanging from his hand. Outside the tent low chocolate thunderheads billowed in a mauve sky. He couldn’t meet her eye. “You were wonderful,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it.”

“For an hour.” After which the emigrants would disappear as before. It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.

He hurried off to the mesa offices. Maya came along and chattered at him as he checked into one of the yellow-walled rooms on the fourth floor. Bamboo furniture, flowery sheets and couch cushions. Maya was full of plans, cheery, pleased with him. She was pleased with him! He crushed his teeth together until they hurt. Bruxism was giving him headaches and all kinds of facial pain, wearing through his crowns and the cartilage in his jaw joints.

Finally he stood and walked to the door. “I have to go for a walk,” he said. As he left he saw her face in his peripheral vision: hurt surprise. As usual.

He walked quickly down to the sward, and paced off the long row of Bareiss columns, their disarray like bowling pins caught flying. On the other side of the canal he sat at a round white table at the edge of a sidewalk cafe, and nursed a Greek coffee for an hour.

Suddenly Maya was standing before him.

“What do you mean by this?” she said. She gestured at the table, at his own annoyed scowl. “What is wrong now?”

He stared at his coffee cup, looked up at her; back down at the cup. It was impossible. A sentence was pronouncing itself in his mind, each word equally weighted: I killed John.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “What do you mean.”

The corners of her mouth tightened, making her glare look contemptuous, and her face old. Nearly eighty now. They were too old for this. After a long silence she sat down across from him.

“Look,” she said slowly. “I don’t care what happened in the past.” She stopped speaking, and he risked a glance at her; she was staring down, looking inward. “What happened in the Ares, I mean, or in Underhill. Or any of it.”

His heart beat inside him like a child trying to escape. His lungs were cold. She was still talking, but he hadn’t caught it. Did she know? Did she know what he had done in Nicosia? It was impossible, or she would not have been here (would she?); but she ought to have known.

“Do you understand?” she asked.

He hadn’t heard what she was referring to. He continued to stare at his coffee cup, and suddenly she slapped it away with the back of her hand, it clattered under a nearby table and broke. The white ceramic semi-circle of the handle spun on the ground.

“I said do you understand? ”

Paralyzed, he continued to stare at the empty table top. Overlapping rings of brown coffee stains. Maya leaned forward and put her face in her hands. She was hunched tight over her stomach, not breathing.

Finally she breathed, pulled her head up. “No,” she said, so quietly that at first he assumed she was addressing herself. “Don’t speak of it. You think I care, and so you do all this. As if I would care more about then than now.” She looked up at him and caught his gaze. “It was thirty years ago,” she said. “Thirty-five since we met, and thirty since all that happened. I am not that Maya Katarina Toitovna. I don’t know her, I don’t know what she thought or felt, or why. That was a different world, another life. It doesn’t matter to me now. I have no feeling for it. Now I am here, and this is me.” She poked herself between the breasts with a thumb. “And look; I love you.”

She let the silence stretch, her last words drifting out like ripples on a pond. He couldn’t stop looking at her; then he pulled his gaze away, he glared up at the faint twilight stars overhead, let their position seep into his memory. When she said I love you, Orion stood tall in the southern sky. The metal chair under you was hard. Your feet were cold.

“I don’t want to think about anything but that,” she said.

She didn’t know; and he did. But everyone has to assume their past somehow. They were eighty-odd years old, and healthy. There were people who were now a hundred and ten years old, healthy, vigorous, strong. Who knew how long it would last? They were going to have a lot of past to assume. And as it went on, and those years of their youth receded into the distant past, all those searing passions that had cut so deep… could they really be only scars? Weren’t they crippling wounds, a thousand amputations?

But it wasn’t a physical thing. Amputations, castrations, hollowing out; they were all in the imagination. An imaginary relationship to a real situation…

“The brain is a funny animal,” he muttered.

She cocked her head, looked curiously at him. Suddenly he was afraid; they were their pasts, they had to be or they were nothing at all, and whatever they felt or thought or said in the present was nothing more than an echo of the past; and so when they said what they said, how could they know what their deeper minds were really feeling, thinking, saying? They didn’t know, not really. Relationships were for that reason utterly mysterious; they took place between two subconscious minds, and whatever the surface trickle thought was going on could not be trusted to be right. Did that Maya down at the deepest level know or not know, remember or forget, swear vengeance or forgive? There was no way of telling, he could never be sure. It was impossible.

And yet there she was, sitting there miserably, looking as if he could shatter her like a coffee cup, shatter her with a single flick of his finger. If he didn’t at least pretend to believe her, what then? What then? How could he shatter her like that? She would hate him for it-for forcing her to remember the past, to care about it. And so… one had to go on, to act.

He lifted his hand, so frightened that the movement felt like teleoperation. He was a dwarf in a waldo, a waldo that was stiff, touchy, unfamiliar: lift, quick modulate! To the left, hold; return, hold; steady. Down gently. Gently gently onto the back of her hand. Clasp, very gently. Her hand was really very cold; and so was his.

She looked wanly at him.

“Let’s-” He had to clear his throat. “Let’s go back to our rooms.”

For weeks after that he remained physically clumsy, as if he had withdrawn into some other space, and had to operate his body from a distance. Teleoperation. It made him aware of how many muscles he had. Sometimes he knew them so well he could snake through the air; but most of the time he jerked across the landscape like Frankenstein’s monster.

Burroughs was flooded with bad news; life in the city seemed fairly normal, but the video screens piped in scenes of a world Frank could scarcely believe. Riots in Hellas; the domed crater New Houston declaring itself an independent republic; and that same week, Slusinski sent tape of an American orientation in which all five dorms had voted to leave for Hellas without the proper travel permits. Chalmers contacted the new UNOMA factor, and got a detachment of UN security police to go there; and ten men arrested five hundred, by the simple expedient of overriding the tent’s physical plant computer and ordering the helpless occupants to board a series of train cars, before the tent’s air was released. They had then been trained off to Korolyov, which was now in effect a prison city. Its transformation into a prison had become general knowledge sometime recently; it was hard to recall exactly when, as it had an air of already-always about it, perhaps because the parts of a prison system had already existed for several years, scattered planetwide.

Chalmers interviewed some the prisoners over their room videos, two or three at a time. “You see how easy it was to detain you,” he told them. “That’s the way it will be all over. The life support systems are so fragile that they’re impossible to defend. Even on Earth advanced military technology makes a police state much more possible to implement than ever before, but here it’s absurdly easy.”

“Well, you got us when it was easiest,” replied a man in his sixties. “Which was smart. Once we get free I’d like to see you catch us. At that point your life support system is as vulnerable to us as ours is to you, and yours is more visible.”

“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!”

“I’m sure there was many a good Tory neighbor arguing the same case in the colonies,” the man said with a grin. “Actually the analogy is in many ways a good one. We’re not just cogs in the machine here, we’re individual people, most of us ordinary, but there’s some real characters too, we’re going to see our Washingtons and Jeffersons and Paines, I guarantee you. Also the Andrew Jacksons and Forrest Mosebys, the brutal men who are good at getting what they want.”

“This is ridiculous!” Frank cried. “It’s a false analogy!”

“Well, it’s more metaphor than analogy anyway. There are differences, but we intend to respond to those creatively. We won’t be hefting muskets over rock walls to take potshots at you.”

“Hefting mining lasers over craters walls? You think that’s different?”

The man flicked at him, as if the camera in his room were a mosquito. “I suppose the real question is, will we have a Lincoln?”

“Lincoln is dead,” Frank snapped. “And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.” He cut the connection.

Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”

Useless. He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.

Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He’d be better off talking to Arkady, it said. But Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer taking calls. “It’s like playing fucking hide and seek,” Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya one day. “Did you have that game in Russia? I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I’d never find any of them.”

“Forget the disappeared,” she advised. “Concentrate on who you can see. The disappeared will be monitoring you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them or if they don’t reply.”

He shook his head.

Then there was a new wave of emigration. He shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.

“Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say.”

“Damn them!” Frank said. “They don’t know what they’re doing with this!”

He walked in a circle, grinding his teeth. The words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their own making; “You see but you don’t understand. It’s like John used to say, there’s parts of Martian reality that don’t make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall. And so you’re getting it all wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches… “

He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to Pavonis Mons. All during the trip he sat by the window and watched the red landscape rise and fall, contract in to the flatland five kilometers and then, as they rose, extend out to forty kilometers, or a hundred. Such a big bulge in the planet, Tharsis. Something inside, breaking out. As in the current situation. Yes, they were stuck on the side of the Tharsis bulge of Martian history, with the big volcanoes about to pop.

And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to talk. He avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car; news flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people’s faces. It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron, and cylindrical bushes of needles; but the needles were all yellow and drooping. He had heard about this, there was some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they weren’t sure. Helmeted figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick needles. “That’s me,” Frank said to Maya under his breath, as she was asleep. “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.”

In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with Washington. It turned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarishii in the hostile takeover.

Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New Houston. Nicosia had become a big jump-off point for the disappeared; you could slip into Nicosia and never be heard of again, it had happened hundreds of times, so many that it was clear there was some system there, of contact and transmission, an underground railroad kind of thing that no undercover agent had yet been able to penetrate, or at least to return from. “Let’s go down there and talk to him,” Frank said to Maya when he heard. “I really want to confront him in person.”

“It won’t do any good,” Maya said darkly. But Nadia was supposed to be there as well, as so she came along.

All down the slope of Tharsis they rode in silence, watching the frosted rock fly by. At Nicosia the station opened for their train as if there was not even a question of refusing them. But Arkady and Nadia were not in the small crowd that greeted them; instead it was Alexander Zhalin, and Raul. Back at the city manager’s offices, they called up Arkady on a vidlink; judging by the sunlight behind him, he was already many kilometers to the east. And Nadia, they said, had never been in Nicosia at all.

Arkady looked the same as ever, expansive and relaxed. “This is madness,” Frank said to him, furious that he had not gotten him in person. “You can’t hope to succeed.”

“But we can,” Arkady said. “We do.” His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter Havana. “Of course it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!”

Then before Frank could say more, someone offscreen got Arkady’s attention. A muttered conversation in Russian, and then Arkady faced him again. “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “I must attend to something. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

“Don’t you go!” Frank shouted, but the connection was gone. “God damn it!”

Nadia came on the line. She was in Burroughs, but had been linked into the exchange, such as it was. In contrast to Arkady she was taut, brusque, unhappy. “You can’t support what he’s doing!” Frank cried.

“No,” Nadia said grimly. “We aren’t talking. We still have this phone contact, which is how I knew where you were, but we don’t use it direct anymore. No point.”

“You can’t influence him?” Maya said.

“No.”

Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence a man, not manipulate him? What was Nadia’s problem?

That night they stayed at a dorm near the station. After supper Maya went back to the city manager’s office, to talk to Alexander and Dmitri and Elena and Raul; Frank wasn’t interested, it was a waste of time. Restlessly he walked the circumference of the old town, through alleys running against the tent wall, remembering that night so long ago. Only nine years, in fact, though it felt like a hundred. Nicosia looked little these days. The park at the western apex still had a good view of the whole, but a blackness filled things so that he could scarcely see.

In the sycamore grove, now mature, he passed a short man hurrying the other way. The man stopped and stared at Frank, who was under a streetlamp. “Chalmers!” the man exclaimed.

Frank turned. The man had a thin face, long tangled dreadlocks, dark skin. No one he knew. But seeing him, he felt a chill. “Yes?” he snapped.

The man regarded him. He said, “You don’t know me, do you.”

“No I don’t. Who are you?”

The man’s grin was assymetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point of the jaw. Underneath the streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.

“Who are you?” Frank said again.

The man raised a finger. “The last time we met, you were bringing down the town. Tonight it’s my turn. Ha!” He strode off laughing, each sharp “ha!” higher than the last.

Back at the city manager’s, Maya clutched his arm. “I was worried, you shouldn’t be walking around alone in this town!”

“Shut up.” He went to a phone and called the physical plant. Everything was normal. He called the UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the train station. He was still repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to new factor for final confirmation, when the screen went blank. There was a tremor underfoot, and every alarm bell in town went off at once. A concerted, adrenal brinnnnng!

Then there was a sharp jolt. The doors all hissed shut; the building was sealing, meaning pressures outside had made a rapid drop. He and Maya ran to the window and looked out. The tent over Nicosia was down, in some places stretched over the tallest rooftops like saran wrap, in others blowing away on the wind. People down on the street were pounding on doors, running, collapsing, huddled in on themselves like the bodies in Pompeii. Frank wheeled away, his teeth bursting with hot pain.

Apparently the building had sealed successfully. Below all the noise Frank could hear or feel the hum of a generator. The video screens were blank, which had the effect of making it hard to believe the view out the window. Maya’s face was pink, but her manner calm. “The tent is down!”

“I know.”

“But what happened?”

He didn’t reply.

She was working away at the video screens. “Have you tried the radio yet?”

“No.”

“Well?” she cried, exasperated by his silence. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Revolution,” he said.