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Hiroko stopped chanting, brought her hand to her mouth, began to eat the dirt in her palm. All the others did the same. Michel lifted his hand to his face: a lot of dirt to eat, but he stuck his tongue out and licked up half of it and felt a brief electric shiver as he rubbed it against the roof of his mouth, sliding the gritty stuff back and forth until it was mud. It tasted salty and rusty, with an unpleasant whiff of rotten eggs and chemicals. He choked it down, gagging slightly. He swallowed the other mouthful in his hand. There was an irregular hum coming from the circle of celebrants as they ate, vowel sounds shifting from one to the next, aaaay, ooooo, ahhhh, iiiiiii, eeee, uuuuuu, lingering over each vowel for a minute it seemed, the sound spreading into two and sometimes three parts, with head tones creating odd harmonies. Hiroko began to chant over this song. Everyone stood and Michel scrambled up with them. They all moved into the center of the circle together, Evgenia and Ellen taking Michel by the arms and pulling him along. Then they were all pressed together around Hiroko, in a mass of close-packed bodies, surrounding Michel so that warm skin squashed up against every side of him. This is our body. A lot of them were kissing, their eyes closed. Slowly they moved, twisting to keep maximum contact as they shifted to new kinetic configurations. Wiry pubic hair tickled his bottom, and he felt what had to have been an erect penis against his hip. The dirt was heavy in his stomach, and he felt light-headed; his blood was fire, his skin felt like a taut balloon, containing a blaze. The stars were packed overhead in astonishing numbers, and each one had its own color, green or red or blue or yellow; they looked like sparks.
He was a phoenix. Hiroko herself pressed against him, and he rose in the center of the fire, ready for rebirth. She held his new body in a full embrace, squeezed him; she was tall, and seemed all muscle. She looked him eye-to-eye. He felt her breasts against his ribs, her pubic bone hard on his thigh. She kissed him, her tongue touching his teeth; he tasted the dirt, then suddenly felt all of her at once; all the rest of his life the involuntary memory of that feeling would be enough to start the pulse of an erection, but at that moment he was too overwhelmed, completely aflame.
Hiroko pulled her head back and looked at him again. His breath was whooshing in his lungs, in and out. In English, in a voice formal but kind, she said, “This is your initiation into the areophany, the celebration of the body of Mars. Welcome to it. We worship this world. We intend to make a place for ourselves here, a place that is beautiful in a new Martian way, a way never seen on Earth. We have built a hidden refuge in the south, and now we are leaving for it.
“We know you, we love you. We know we can use your help. We know you can use our help. We want to build just what you are yearning for, just what you have been missing here. But all in new forms. For we can never go back. We must go forward. We must find our own way. We start tonight. We want you to come with us.”
And Michel said, “I’ll come.”
PART FIVE Falling Into History (#ulink_912ecfcd-3160-5cc0-9c46-7d9280668d3a)
The lab hummed quietly. Desks and tables and benches were cluttered with things, the white walls crowded with graphs and posters and cut-out cartoons, all vibrating slightly under bright artificial light. Like any lab anywhere: somewhat clean, somewhat disorderly. The one window in the corner was black and reflected the interior; it was night outside. The whole building was nearly empty.
But two men in lab coats stood at one of the benches, leaning forward to look at a computer screen. The shorter of the two tapped at the keyboard below the screen with a forefinger, and the image on the screen changed. Green corkscrews on a black field, squiggling so that they looked sharply three dimensional, as if the screen were a box. An image from an electron microscope; the field was only a few microns across.
“You see it’s a kind of plasmid repair of the gene sequence,” the short scientist said. “Breaks in the original strands are identified. Replacement sequences are synthesized, and when these replacement sequences are introduced into the cell, the breaks are seen as attachment sites, and the replacements bind to the originals.”
“Do you introduce them by transformation? Electroporation?”
“Transformation. Treated cells are injected along with a competent, and the repair strands make a conjugal transfer.”
“In vivo?”
“In vivo.”
A low whistle. “So you can repair any little thing? Cell division error?”
“That’s right.”
The two men stared at the corkscrews on the screen, waving about like the new tips of grapevines in a breeze.
“You’ve got proof?”
“Did Vlad show you those mice in the next room?”
“Yeah.”
“Those mice are fifteen years old.”
Another whistle.
They went next door into the mice room, muttering to each other under the hum of machinery. The tall one stared curiously into a cage, where patches of fur breathed under wood chips. When they left again they turned out the lights in both rooms. The flicker of the electron microscope screen illuminated the first lab, giving it a green cast. The scientists went to the window, talking in low voices. They looked out. The sky was purple with the coming day; stars were popping out of existence. Out on the horizon stood a black massive bulk, the flat-topped mound of an immense volcano. Olympus Mons, the largest mountain in the solar system.
The tall scientist shook his head. “This changes everything, you know.”
“I know.”
From the bottom of the shaft, the sky looked like a bright pink coin. The shaft was round, a kilometer in diameter, seven kilometers deep. But from the bottom it seemed much thinner and deeper than that. Perspective plays a lot of tricks on the human eye.
Such as that bird, flying down the round pink dot of the sky, looking so big. Except it wasn’t a bird. “Hey,” John said. The shaft director, a round-faced Japanese named Etsu Okakura, looked at him, and through their two faceplates John could see the man’s nervous grin. One of his teeth was discolored.
Okakura looked up. “Something falling!” he said quickly, and then: “Run!”
They turned and ran over the shaft floor. Quickly John found that although most of the loose rock had been swept off the starred black basalt, no effort had been made to make the shaft bottom perfectly level. Miniature craters and scarps became increasingly difficult as he gained speed; in this moment of primate flight the instincts formed in childhood reasserted themselves, and he kept pushing off too hard with each step, coming down on uninspected terrain with a jolt and then pushing off wildly again, a crazy run until finally he caught his toe and lost control and fell crashing across the ragged stone, arms flung out to save his faceplate. It was small comfort to see that Okakura had fallen as well. Fortunately the same gravity that had caused their tumbles was giving them more time to escape: the falling object had not yet landed. They got up and ran again, and once again Okakura fell. John glanced back and saw a bright metallic blur hit the rock, and then the sound of the impact was a solid whump, like a blow. Silver bits splashed away, some in their direction: he stopped running, scanned the air for incoming ejecta. No sound at all.
A big hydraulic cylinder flew out of the air and banged end over end to their left, and they both jumped. He hadn’t seen it coming.
After that, stillness. They stood nearly a minute, and then Boone stirred. He was sweating; they were in pressurized suits, but at 49°C the shaft bottom was the hottest place on Mars, and the suit’s insulation was built for cold. He made a move to help Okakura to his feet, but stopped himself; presumably the man would rather get up himself than owe giri to Boone for the help. If Boone understood the concept properly. “Let’s have a look,” he said instead.
Okakura got up, and they walked back over the dense black basalt. The shaft had long ago been bored into solid bedrock, in fact it was now about twenty percent of the way through the lithosphere. It was stifling at the bottom, as if the suits were entirely uninsulated. Boone’s air supply was a welcome coolness in the face and lungs. Framed by the dark shaft walls, the pink sky above was very bright. Sunlight illuminated a short conic section of the shaft wall. In midsummer the sun might shine all the way – no, they were south of the Tropic of Capricorn. In shadow forever, down here.
They approached the wreck. It had been a robot dump truck, hauling rock up the road that cut a spiral into the shaft wall. Pieces of the truck were mixed with big rough boulders, some scattered as much as a hundred meters from the point of impact. Beyond a hundred meters debris was rare; the cylinder that had flown by them must have been fired out under pressure of some kind.
A pile of magnesium, aluminum and steel, all twisted horribly. The magnesium and aluminum had partially melted. “Do you think it fell all the way from the top?” Boone asked.
Okakura didn’t respond. Boone glanced at him; the man was studiously avoiding his gaze. Perhaps he was frightened. Boone said, “There must have been a good thirty seconds between the time I caught sight of it and when it hit.”
At roughly three meters per second squared, that had been more than enough time for it to reach terminal velocity. So it had hit at about two hundred kilometers per hour. Not so bad, really. On Earth it would have come down in less than half the time, and might have caught them. Hell, if he hadn’t have looked up when he had, this one might have caught them. He made a quick calculation. It had probably been about halfway up the shaft when he saw it. But at that point it could have been falling for quite some time.
Boone slowly walked around into the gap between the shaft wall and the pile of scrap. The truck had landed on its right side, and the left side was deformed but recognizable. Okakura climbed several steps up the wreckage, then pointed at a black area behind the left front tire. John followed him up, scraped at the metal with the claw on his right glove’s forefinger. The black came away like soot. Ammonium nitrate explosion. The body of the truck was bent in there as if hammered. “A good-sized charge,” John observed.
“Yes,” Okakura said, and cleared his throat. He was frightened, that was sure. Well, the first man on Mars had almost been killed while in his care; and himself too, of course, but who knew which would scare him more? “Enough to push truck off road.”
“Well, like I said, there’s been some sabotage reported.”
Okakura was frowning through his faceplate. “But who? And why?”
“I don’t know. Anyone in your team seem to be having any psychological difficulties?”
“No.” Okakura’s face was carefully blank. Every group larger than five had someone experiencing difficulties, and Okakura’s little industrial town had a population of five hundred.
“This the sixth case I’ve seen,” John said. “Although none so close up.” He laughed. The image of the birdlike dot in the pink sky came back to him. “It would have been easy for someone to attach a bomb to a truck before it came down. Detonate it with a clock or an altimeter.”
“Reds, you mean.” Okakura was looking relieved. “We have heard of them. But it is …” He shrugged. “Crazy.”
“Yes.” John climbed gingerly off the wreck. They walked back across the floor of the shaft to the car they had come down in. Okakura was on another band, talking to people up top.
John stopped by the central pit to have a final look around. The sheer size of the shaft was hard to grasp: the muted light and vertical lines reminded him of a cathedral, but all the cathedrals ever built would have sat like dollhouses at the bottom of this great hole. The surreal scale made him blink, and he decided he had tilted his head back too long.
They drove up the road inscribed in the side wall to the first elevator, left the car and got in the cage. Up they went. Seven times they had to get out and walk across the wall road to the bottom of the next elevator. The ambient light grew to something more like ordinary daylight. Across the shaft he could see where the wall was scored by the double spiral of the two roads: thread-marks in an enormous screw hole. The shaft’s bottom had disappeared into the murk, he couldn’t even make out the truck.
In the last two elevators they ascended through regolith; first the megaregolith, which looked like cracked bedrock, and then the regolith proper, its rock and gravel and ice all hidden behind a concrete retainer, a smooth curved wall that looked like a dam, and was angled so far back that the final elevator was actually a cog rail train. They cranked up the side of this enormous funnel – Big Man’s bathtub drain, Okakura had said on the way down – and came finally to the surface, out into the sun.
Boone got out of the cog train and looked back down. The regolith retainer looked like the inner wall of a very smooth crater, with a two-laned road spiraling down it; but the crater had no floor. A mohole. He could see down the shaft a little way, but the wall was in shadow, and only the road spiraling down picked up any light, so that it appeared to be something like a freestanding staircase, descending through empty space to the planet’s core.
Three of the giant dump trucks ground slowly up the last stretch of the road, full of black boulders. These days it took them five hours to make the trip from the bottom of the shaft, Okakura said. Very little supervision, like most of the project, in both manufacture and operation. The inhabitants of the town only had to see to programming, deployment, maintenance, and troubleshooting. And, now, security.
The town, called Senzeni Na, was scattered over the floor of Thaumasia Fossae’s deepest canyon. Nearest to the hole was the industrial park; here most of the excavation equipment was manufactured, and the rock from the hole processed for its trace amounts of valuable metals. Boone and Okakura stepped into the rim station, changed out of their pressure suits into coppery jumpers, and entered one of the clear walktubes that connected all the buildings in the town. It was cold and sunny in the tubes, and everyone in them wore clothing with an outer layer of copper-colored foil, the latest in Japanese radproofing. Copper creatures, moving in clear tubes; it looked to Boone like a giant ant farm. Overhead the thermal cloud frosted into existence and shot up like steam from a valve, until it was caught by high winds and blown out in a long flattened contrail.
The town’s actual living quarters were built into the southeast wall of the canyon. A big rectangular section of the cliff had been replaced by glass; behind it was a tall open concourse, backed by five stories of terraced apartments.
They walked through the concourse and Okakura led him up to the town offices, on the fifth floor. A small crowd of concerned-looking people gathered in their wake, chattering to Okakura and among themselves. They all went through the office and out onto its balcony. John watched closely as Okakura described in Japanese what had happened. A number of his audience looked nervous, and most would not meet John’s eye. Had the near accident itself been enough to incur giri? It was important to make sure they didn’t feel publicly shown up, or anything like it. Shame was strong stuff for the Japanese, and Okakura was beginning to look desperately unhappy, as if he were deciding it had been his fault.
“Look, it could just as easily have been outsiders as someone from here,” John said boldly. He made some suggestions for future security. “The rim is a perfect barrier. Set up an alarm system, and a few people at the rim station could keep an eye on both the system and the elevators. A waste of time, but I guess we have to do it.”
Diffidently Okakura asked him if he knew anything about who might be responsible for the sabotage. He shrugged. “No idea, sorry. People opposed to the moholes, I guess.”
“But the moholes are dug,” one of them said.
“I know. I guess it’s symbolic.” He grinned. “But if a truck falls on someone, it would be a bad symbol.”
They nodded seriously. He wished he had Frank’s facility for languages, it would help to be able to communicate better with these people. They were hard to read; inscrutable and all that.
They wondered if he wanted to lie down.
“I’m okay,” he said. “It missed us. We’ll have to look into it, but today let’s just continue according to the schedule we had.”
So Okakura and several men and women led him on a tour of the town, and cheerfully he visited labs and meeting rooms, lounges and dining halls. He nodded and shook hands and said hi until he was sure he had met over fifty percent of Senzeni Na’s inhabitants. Most had not yet heard of the incident in the hole, and all were pleased to meet him; happy to shake his hand, to speak with him, to show him something, to look at him. It happened everywhere he went, reminding him unpleasantly of the fishbowl years between his first trip and his second.
But he did his job. An hour’s work, then four hours of being The First Man On Mars: the usual ratio. And as afternoon darkened to evening, and the whole town gathered for a banquet in honor of his visit, he settled back and patiently played his part. That meant shifting into a good mood, no easy task that night. In fact he took a break, went back to the bathroom in his room and swallowed a capsule manufactured by Vlad’s medical group in Acheron. It was a drug they had named omegendorph, a synthetic mix of all the endorphins and opiates they had found in the brain’s natural chemistry and a better feel-good drug than Boone would have imagined possible.
He returned to the banquet much more relaxed. In fact filled with a little glow. He had escaped death, after all, and by running like a wild man! Some more endorphins were not inappropriate. He moved easily from table to table, asking questions as he went. This was what pleased people, what gave them the festival feeling that a meeting with John Boone should bring. John liked being able to do that, it was the part of his job that made celebrity tolerable; because when he asked questions, people leaped to answer like salmon in the stream. It was peculiar, really, as if people were seeking to right the imbalance they felt in the situation, in which they knew so much about him while he knew so little about them. So that with the right encouragement, often a single carefully-judged prompt, they would erupt with the most astonishing spills of personal information: witnessing, testifying, confessing.
So he spent the evening learning about life at Senzeni Na (“Means, what have we done?” Quick grin.) And afterwards he was led to his big guest suite, the rooms thick with live bamboo, the bed seemingly hacked out of a stand of it. When he was alone he connected his code box to the phone, and called Sax Russell.
Russell was at Vlad’s new headquarters, a research complex built into a dramatic fin ridge in the Acheron Fossae north of Olympus Mons. Sax spent all his time there now, studying genetic engineering like an undergrad; he had become convinced that biotechnology was the key to terraforming, and he was determined to educate himself to the point where he could contribute actively to that part of the campaign, despite the fact that all his training was in physics. Modern biology was notoriously gooey, and a lot of physicists hated it; but the people at Acheron said Sax was a quick learner, and John believed it. Sax himself made little snicking noises at his own progress, but it was clear he was deep in. He talked about it all the time, “It’s the crux,” he would say. “We need the water out of the ground and the carbon dioxide out of the air, and it’s going to take biomass to do both.” And so he slaved at the screens and in the labs.
He listened to Boone’s report with his usual impassivity. Such a parody of the scientist, John thought. He even wore a lab coat. Seeing his characteristic blink made John think of a story he had heard one of Sax’s assistants tell, to a laughing audience at a party: in a secret experiment gone awry, a hundred lab rats that had been injected with an intelligence booster became geniuses. They revolted, escaped from their cages, captured their principal investigator, and strapped him down and retro-injected all their minds into his body, using a method they invented on the spot – and that scientist was Saxifrage Russell, white-coated, blinking, twitching, inquisitive, lab-bound. His brain the sum of a hundred hyperintelligent rats, “and named for a flower like lab rats are, it’s their little joke, see?”
It explained a lot. John smiled as he finished his report, and Sax cocked his head at him curiously. “Do you think this truck was meant to kill you?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do the people there seem?”
“Scared.”
“Think they’re in on it?”
John shrugged. “I doubt it. They’re probably just worried about what happens next.”
Sax flicked a hand out. “Sabotage like that won’t make the slightest dent in the project,” he said mildly.
“I know.”
“Who’s doing this, John?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could it be Ann, do you think? Has she become another prophet, like Hiroko or Arkady, with followers and a program and the like?”
“You have followers and a program too,” John reminded him.
“But I’m not telling my followers to wreck things and try to kill people.”
“Some people think you’re trying to wreck Mars. And people will certainly die as a result of terraforming, in accidents.”
“What are you saying?”
“Just reminding you. Trying to get you to see why someone might do this.”
“So you do think it’s Ann.”
“Or Arkady, or Hiroko, or someone we’ve never heard of in one of the new colonies. There are a lot of people here now. A lot of factions.”
“I know.” Sax walked over to a countertop, drained his battered old coffee mug. Finally he said, “I’d like you to try to find out who it is. Go where you need to go. Go talk to Ann. Reason with her.” There was a plaintive note in his voice: “I can’t even talk to her anymore.”
John stared at him, surprised at the display of emotion. Sax took this silence for reluctance, and went on: “I know it isn’t exactly your thing, but everyone will talk to you. You’re practically the only one left we can say that about. I know you’re doing the mohole work, but you can get your team to do your part of that, and keep visiting the moholes as part of this inquiry. There really isn’t anyone else who can do it. There’s no real police to turn to. Although if things keep happening, UNOMA will provide some.”
“Or the transnational.” Boone considered it. The sight of that truck, falling out of the sky … “All right. I’ll go talk to Ann, anyway. After that we should get together and talk about security for all the terraforming projects. If we can stop anything more from happening, that will keep UNOMA out.”
“Thanks, John.”
Boone wandered out onto his suite’s balcony. The concourse was filled with Hokkaido pines, the chilled air stiff with resin. Copper figures walked below, among the tree trunks. Boone considered the new situation. For ten years now he had worked for Russell on terraforming, managing the moholes and doing PR and the like, and he enjoyed the work; but he wasn’t on the cutting edge of any of the sciences involved, and so he was out of the decision-making loop. He knew that many people thought of him as a figurehead only, a celebrity for consumption back on Earth; a dumb space jock who had gotten lucky once, and was living off that for good. That didn’t bother John; there were always knee-high people hacking away, trying to get everyone down to their size. That was okay, especially since in his case they were wrong. His power was considerable, although perhaps only he could see the full extent of it, as it consisted of an endless succession of face-to-face meetings, of the influence he had over what people chose to do. Power wasn’t a matter of job titles, after all. Power was a matter of vision, persuasiveness, freedom of movement, fame, influence. The figurehead stands at the front, after all, pointing the way.
Still, despite all that, there was something to be said for this new task. He could feel that already. It would be problematic, difficult, perhaps risky … above all, challenging. A new challenge: he liked that. Going back into his suite, getting into bed (John Boone Slept Here!) it occurred to him that now he was going to be not only the first man on Mars, but the first detective. He grinned at the thought, and the last action of the omegendorph set his nerves aglow.
Ann Clayborne was doing a survey in the mountains surrounding the Argyre Basin, which meant he could check out a glider and fly from Senzeni Na to her. So early the next morning he took the elevator balloon up the mooring mast to the stationary dirigible floating over the town, exulting as he rose in the ever-expanding view of the big Thaumasia canyons. From the dirigible he lowered himself into the cockpit of one of the gliders hooked to its underside. After securing himself he unhooked, and the glider dropped like a stone until he ran it into the mohole thermal, which tossed it violently upward. He fought for control and banked the big gossamer craft into a steep rising gyre, whooping as he battled the intense buffeting; it was like riding a soap bubble over a bonfire!
At five thousand meters the plume cloud flattened and spread out to the east. John swooped out of his spiral and headed southeast, playing with the glider as he went to get a feel for it. He would have to ride the winds carefully to make it to Argyre.
He aimed into the sun’s smeary yellow blaze. Wind keened over the wings. The land below him was a dark rough orange, shading to a very light orange at the horizon. The southern highlands were wildly pocked in every direction, with the raw, primordial, lunar look that saturation cratering always had. John loved flying over it, and he piloted unconsciously, concentrating on the land below. It was precious to sit back and fly, feeling the wind as if under his elbows, watching the land and not thinking a thing. He was sixty-four years old in this year 2047 (or “m-year 10” as he usually thought of it), and he had been the most famous man alive for almost thirty of those years; and nowadays he was happiest when he was alone, and flying.
After an hour had passed, he started thinking about his new task. It was important not to get caught up in fantasies of magnifying glasses and cigar ash, or gumshoe with handgun; there was work he could do even as he flew. He called up Sax, and asked if he could connect his AI into the UNOMA emigration and planetary travel records, without alerting UNOMA to the connection. After some investigation Sax got back to him and said that he could manage that, and so John sent a sequence of questions through, and then continued to fly. An hour and many craters later, Pauline’s redlight blinked rapidly, indicating a downloading of raw data. John asked the AI to run the data through various analyses, and when she was done he studied the results on the screen. Patterns of movement; they were confusing, but he hoped that when matched with the sabotage incidents, something might turn up. Of course there were people moving around off the record, the hidden colony among them; and who knew what Hiroko and the others thought of the terraforming projects? Still, it was worth a look.
The Nereidium Montes popped over the horizon ahead. Mars had never had much tectonic movement, and so mountain ranges were rare; those that existed tended to be crater rims writ large, rings of ejecta thrown out by impacts so great that the debris fell in two or three concentric ranges, each many kilometers wide, and extremely rugged. Hellas and Argyre, being the biggest basins, therefore had the biggest ranges; and the only other major mountain range, the Phlegra Montes on the slope of Elysium, was probably the fragmentary remains of a basin impact later inundated by the Elysium volcanoes, or by an ancient Oceanus Borealis. Debate raged over that question, and Ann, John’s final authority in such matters, had never expressed an opinion on it.
The Nereidium Montes made up the northern rim around Argyre, but currently Ann and her team were investigating the southern rim, the Charitum Montes. Boone adjusted his course southward, and in the early afternoon he soared low over the broad flat plain of the Argyre Basin. After the wild cratering of the highlands, the basin floor seemed smooth indeed, a flat yellowish plain bounded by the big curve of rim ridges. From his vantage he could see about ninety degrees of the arc of the rim, enough to give him a sense of the size of the impact that had formed Argyre; it was an amazing sight. Flying over thousands of Martian craters had given Boone a sense of the sizes they came in, and Argyre was simply off the scale; a quite big crater named Galle was no more than a pockmark in Argyre’s rim! A whole world must have crashed in here! Or, at the very least, a damn big asteroid.
Inside the southeast curve of the rim, on the basin floor against the foothills of the Charitum, he spotted the thin white line of a landing strip. Easy to spot human constructs in such desolation, their regularity stood out like a beacon. Thermals were rising hard off the sunwarmed hills, and he turned down into one, dropping with a vibratory humm, the craft’s wings bouncing visibly as it stopped. Dropping like a rock, like that asteroid, John thought with a grin, and he pulled up for the landing with a dramatic last flourish, putting down with as much precision as he could muster, aware of his reputation as a hot flyer, which of course had to be reinforced at every opportunity. Part of the job …
But it turned out there were only two people in the trailers by the strip, and neither of them had watched him land. They were inside watching TV news from Earth; they looked up when he came in the inner lock door, and jumped to their feet to greet him. Ann was up one of the mountain canyons with a team, they told him, probably no more than two hours’ drive away. John ate lunch with them, two Brit women with North accents, very tough and charming; then he took a rover and followed the tracks up a cleft into the Charitum. An hour’s twisting climb up a flat-bottomed arroyo brought him to a mobile trailer, with three rovers parked outside it. Together they gave it the look of a desiccated cafe in the Mojave.
The trailer was unoccupied. Footprints led away from the camp in many directions. After thinking it over Boone climbed a knoll west of camp, and sat down on its peak. He lay on the rock and slept until the cold penetrated his walker. Then he sat up and tongued a capsule of omegendorph, and watched the black shadows of the hills creep east. He thought about what had happened at Senzeni Na, running through his memories of the hours before and after the accident, the looks on people’s faces, what they had said. The image of the falling truck gave his pulse a little surge.
Copper figures appeared in a cleft between hills to the west. He stood and descended the knoll, and met them down at the trailer.
“What are you doing here?” Ann said over the first hundred’s band.
