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“Interesting!” John said. “I’ll have to tell Ann that, and see what she says. But …” He thought about it. “Then what do you call this? What do you call what you’re doing?”
Jürgen shrugged, grinned. “We don’t call it anything. It is just Mars.”
Perhaps that was being Swiss, John thought. He had been meeting them more and more in his travels, and they all seemed like that. Do things, and don’t worry too much about theory. Whatever seemed right.
Later still, after they had drunk another few bottles of wine, he asked them if they had ever heard of the Coyote. They laughed; one said, “He’s the one who came here before you, right?” They laughed again at his expression. “A story only,” one explained. “Like the canals, or Big Man. Or Sami Claus.”
Driving north the next day across Melas Chasma, John wished (as he had before) that everyone on the planet was Swiss, or at least like the Swiss. Or more like the Swiss in certain ways, anyway. Their love of country seemed to be expressed by making a certain kind of life: rational, just, prosperous, scientific. They would work for that life anywhere, because to them it was the life that mattered, not a flag or a creed or a set of words, nor even that small rocky patch of land they owned on Earth. The Swiss roadbuilding crew back there was Martian already, having brought the life and left the baggage behind.
He sighed, and ate lunch as his rover rolled past transponders north. It was not that simple, of course. The roadbuilding crew were traveling Swiss, gypsies of a sort, the kind of Swiss who spent most of their life out of Switzerland. There were a lot of those, but they were selected out by that choice, they were different. The Swiss who stayed at home were pretty intense about Swissness; still armed to the teeth, still willing to be the bagman for whoever brought them cash; still not a member of the UN. Although that fact, given the power UNOMA currently had over the local situation, made them even more interesting to John, as a model. That ability to be part of the world but to stand away from it at the same time; to use it, but hold it off; to be small but in control, to be armed to the teeth but never go to war; wasn’t that one way of defining what he wanted for Mars? It seemed to him there were some lessons there, for any hypothetical Martian state.
He spent a fair amount of his time alone thinking about that hypothetical state; it was a kind of obsession with him, and he found it very frustrating that he could not seem to come up with anything more than vague desires. And so now he thought hard about Switzerland and what it might tell him, he tried to be organized about it: “Pauline, please call up an encyclopedia article on the Swiss government.”
The rover passed transponder after transponder as he read the article that came up on the screen. He was disappointed to find that there was nothing obviously unique about the Swiss system of government. Executive authority was given to a council of seven, elected by the assembly. No charismatic president, which some part of Boone did not like very much. The assembly, aside from selecting the federal council, appeared to do little; it was caught between the power of the executive council and the power of the people, as exercised in direct initiatives and referenda, an idea they had gotten in the nineteenth century from California of all places. And then there was the federal system; the cantons in all their diversity were supposed to have a great deal of independence, which also weakened the assembly. But cantonal power had been eroding for generations, the federal government wresting away more and more. What did it add up to? “Pauline, please call up my constitution file.” He added a few notes to the file he had just recently begun: Federal council, direct initiatives, weak assembly, local independence, particularly in cultural matters. Something to think over, anyway. More data to add to the stew of his ideas. It helped somehow to write it down.
He drove on, remembering the roadbuilders’ calmness, their strange mixture of engineering and mysticism. The warmth of their welcome, which wasn’t something Boone took for granted; it didn’t always happen. In the Arab and Israeli settlements, for instance, he was received very stiffly, perhaps because he was seen as being anti-religion, perhaps because Frank had been spreading tales against him; he had been amazed to discover an Arabic caravan whose members believed he had forbidden the building of a mosque on Phobos; and they had only stared at him when he denied even hearing about such a plan. He was pretty sure that was Frank’s doing, word got back to him through Janet and others that Frank was prone to undercutting him in that way. So yes, there were definitely groups that greeted him coolly: the Arabs, the Israelis, the nuclear reactor teams, some of the transnational executives … groups with their own intense and parochial programs, people who objected to his larger perspective. Unfortunately there were a lot of them.
He came out of his reverie and looked around, and was surprised to discover that out in the middle of Melas it looked exactly as if he were out on the northern plains somewhere. The great canyon was two hundred kilometers wide at this point, and the curvature of the planet was so sharp that the north and south canyon walls, all three vertical kilometers of them, were completely under the horizons. Not until the following morning did the northern horizon double, and then separate out into the canyon floor and the great northern wall, which was cut in two by the gap of a short north-south canyon connecting Melas and Candor. It was only when he drove into that wide slot that he had the kind of view people thought of when they imagined being down in Marineris: truly giant walls flanked him on both sides, dark brown slabs riven by a fractal infinity of gullies and ridges. At the foot of the walls lay the huge spills of ancient rockfall, or the broken terracing of fossil beaches.
In this gap the Swiss road was a line of green transponders, snaking past mesas and arroyos, so that it looked as if Monument Valley had been relocated at the bottom of a canyon twice as deep and five times as wide as the Grand Canyon. The sight was too astonishing for John to be able to concentrate on anything else, and for the first time in his journey he drove all day with Pauline off.
North of the transverse gap, he drove into the huge sink of Candor Chasma, and now it was as if he were in a gigantic replica of the Painted Desert, with great deposition layers everywhere, bands of purple and yellow sediment, orange dunes, red erratics, pink sands, indigo gullies; truly a fantastic, extravagant landscape, disorienting to the eye because all the wild colors made it hard to figure out what was what, and how big it was, and how far away. Giant plateaus that seemed about to block his way would turn out to be curving strata on a distant cliff; small boulders next to the transponders would turn out to be enormous mesas half a day’s drive away. And in the sunset light all the colors blazed, the whole Martian spectrum revealed and blazing as if color was bursting out of the rock, everything from pale yellow to dark bruised purple. Candor Chasma! He was going to have to come back some time and explore it.
The day after that, he drove up the steady slope of the north Ophir road, which the Swiss crew had completed the previous year. Up and up and up; and then, without ever seeing a distinct rim he was out of the canyons, rolling past the domed holes of Ganges Catena, and then over the old familiar plain, following a wide road, over the tight horizon past Chernobyl and Underhill; then on for another day west to Echus Overlook, Sax’s new terraforming headquarters. His journey had taken a week, and crossed 2500 kilometers.
Sax Russell was back from Acheron, in his own place. He was a power now and no doubt about it, having been named by UNOMA a decade before as scientific head of the terraforming effort. And of course that decade of power had had its effect on him. He had solicited UN and transnational aid to build a whole town to serve as headquarters for the terraforming effort, and he had placed this town about five hundred kilometers due west of Underhill, on the edge of the cliff that formed the eastern wall of Echus Chasma. Echus was one of the narrowest and deepest canyons on the planet, and its eastern wall was even taller than south Melas; the section they had chosen to build the town into was a vertical basalt cliff four thousand meters high.
At the top of the cliff there was very little sign of the new town; the land behind the rim was almost unmarked, only a concrete pillbox here and there, and to the north the plume of a Rickover. But when John climbed out of his rover into one of the rim pillboxes, and got in one of the big elevators inside it, the extent of the town began to come clear; the elevators went down fifty floors. And when he descended fifty stories, he got out and found other elevators that would take him even lower, a whole series of them, descending right down to the floor of Echus Chasma. Say a story was ten meters; that meant there was room in the cliff for four hundred stories. Actually not that much of the room had been used yet, and most of the rooms built so far were clustered up in the highest twenty floors. Sax’s offices, for instance, were very near the top.
His meeting room was a big open chamber, with a continuous floor-to-ceiling window as its western wall. When John walked into the room looking for Sax, it was still mid-morning, and the window was almost clear; far, far below lay the chasm floor, still half in shadow, and there out in the sunlight stood the much lower western wall of Echus, and beyond that the great slope of the Tharsis bulge, rising higher and higher to the south. Out in the middle distance was the low bump of Tharsis Tholus, and to the left of it, just poking over the horizon, lay the purple cone of Ascraeus Mons, the northernmost of the great prince volcanoes.
But Sax was not in the meeting room, and he never looked out of this window as far as John could tell. He was next door in a lab, more lab rat than ever, hunch-shouldered and twitch-whiskered, gazing around at the floor, speaking in a voice that sounded like an AI. He led John through a whole sequence of labs, leaning forward to peer into screens or at inching graph paper, talking to John over a shoulder, in a state of distraction. The rooms they passed through were jammed with computers, printers, screens, books, rolls and stacks of paper, disks, GC-mass specs, incubators, fume hoods, long apparatus-filled lab tables, whole libraries; and placed on every precarious surface were potted plants, most of them unrecognizable bulges, armored succulents and the like, so that at a glance it looked like a virulent mold had sprung up and covered everything. “Your labs are getting kind of messy,” John said.
“The planet is the lab,” Sax replied.
John laughed, moved a bright yellow surarctic cactus from a countertop and sat down. It was said Sax never left these rooms anymore. “What are you simming today?”
“Atmospheres.”
Of course. It was a problem that gave Sax a serious case of the blinks. All the heat they were releasing or applying to the planet was thickening the atmosphere, but all their CO
-fixing strategies were thinning it; and as the chemical composition of the air slowly shifted to something less poisonous it became less greenhouse-gassed as well, so that things cooled back down and the process slowed. Negative feedback countering positive feedback, all over the place. Juggling all these factors into any meaningful extrapolative program was more than anyone had yet accomplished to Sax’s satisfaction, so he had resorted to his usual solution; he was trying to do it himself.
He paced the narrow aisles left between equipment, moving chairs out of his way. “There’s just too much carbon dioxide. In the old days the modelers swept that under the rug. I think I’m going to have to have robots feed the southern polar cap into Sabatier factories. What we can process won’t sublime, and we can release the oxygen and make bricks of the carbon, I guess. We’ll have more carbon blocks than we’ll know what to do with. Black pyramids to go along with the white.”
“Pretty.”
“Uhn.” The Crays and the two new Schillers hummed away behind him, providing his monotonal recitative with a ground bass. These computers spent all their time running through one set of conditions after another, Sax said; but the results, while never the same, were seldom encouraging. The air was going to be cold and poisonous for a good while yet.
Sax wandered down the hall, and John followed him into what looked like another lab, although there was a bed and a refrigerator in one corner. Violently disarranged bookscapes were overgrown with potted plants, bizarre Pleistocene growths that looked as deadly as the air outside. John sat in the lone empty chair. Sax stood and looked down at a seashell shrub as John described his meeting with Ann.
“Do you think she’s involved?” Sax said.
“I think she may know who is. She mentioned someone called the Coyote.”
“Ah yes.” Sax glanced briefly at John – at his feet, to be precise. “She’s siccing us onto a legendary character. He’s supposed to have been on the Ares with us, you know. Hidden by Hiroko.”
John was so surprised that Sax had heard of the Coyote that it took him a while to figure out what else was disturbing about what he had said. But then it came to him. One night Maya had told him that she had seen a face, the face of a stranger. The voyage out had been hard on Maya, and he had discounted the tale. But now …
Sax was wandering around turning on lights, peering at screens, muttering about security measures. He opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption of mold. John said, “You can see why most of the attacks have been on the moholes. They’re the easiest project to attack.”
Sax tilted his head to the side. “Are they?”
“Think about it. Your little windmills are everywhere, there’s nothing to be done about them.”
“People are disabling them. We’ve had reports.”
“What, a dozen? And how many are out there, a hundred thousand? They’re junk, Sax. Litter. Your worst idea.” And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some of them. All of that algae had died, apparently; but if it hadn’t, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost his job. It was yet another indication that Sax’s logical manner was a front.
Now his nose was wrinkled. “They add up to a terawatt a year.”
“And knocking a few apart won’t do anything to that. As for the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can’t be removed. The dawn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it’s not so easy to knock them out.”
“Someone did it to Pythagoras.”
“True, but we know who it was, and there’s a security team following her.”
“She may never lead them to anyone else. They may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard.”
“They could use what’s out there.” Sax shook his head. “The mirrors are vulnerable.”
“Okay. More than some projects, anyway.”
“Those mirrors are adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol,” Sax said. “And more all the time.” Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the Martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of energy to each day’s dawn and dusk. The whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax’s office, and he was proud of it.
“We’ll increase security for all the maintenance crews,” John said.
“So. Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes.”
“Yes. But that’s not all.”
Sax sniffed. “What do you mean?”
“Well, the problem is that it isn’t just the terraforming projects per se that are potential targets. I mean, the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they’re pumping out heat like the furnaces they are. If one of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout, more political even than physical.”
The vertical lines between Sax’s eyes reached up nearly to his hairline. John held out his palms. “Not my fault. That’s just the way it is.”
Sax said, “AI, take a note. Look into reactor security.”
“Note taken,” one of the Schillers said, sounding just like Sax.
“And that’s not the worst,” John said. Sax twitched, glared furiously at the floor. “The bioengineering labs.”
Sax’s mouth became a tight line.
“New organisms are being cooked up daily,” John went on, “and it might be possible to create something that would kill everything else on the planet.”
Sax blinked. “Let’s hope none of these people think like you.”
“I’m just trying to think like them.”
“AI, take a note. Biolab security.”
“Of course Vlad and Ursula and their group have stuck suicide genes into everything they’ve made,” John said. “But those are meant to stop oversuccess, or mutational accidents. If someone were to deliberately circumvent them, and concoct something that fed on oversuccess, we could be in trouble.”
“I see that.”
“So. The labs, the reactors, the moholes, the mirrors. It could be worse.”
Sax rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you think so. I’ll talk to Helmut about it. I’ll be seeing him soon anyway. It looks like they’re going to approve Phyllis’s elevator at the next UNOMA session. That will cut the costs of terraforming tremendously.”
“Eventually it will, but the initial investment must be huge.”
Sax shrugged. “Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go to work. It’s not as expensive as you might think.”
John rolled his eyes. “Sax, who’s paying for all this?”
Sax tilted his head, blinked. “The sun.”
John stood, suddenly hungry. “Then the sun calls the shots. Remember that.”
Mangalavid broadcast six hours of local amateur video every evening, a weird grab bag of stuff that John watched every chance he got. So after building a big green salad in the kitchen he went to the window room on the dorm floor, and watched while eating, glancing from time to time at the florid sunset over Ascraeus. The first ten minutes of that evening’s broadcast had been shot by a sanitary engineer working on a waste processing plant in Chasma Borealis; her voiceover was enthusiastic but boring: “What’s nice is we can pollute all we want with certain materials, oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, argon, steam, some biota – which gives us leeway we didn’t have back home, we just keep grinding what they give us till we can let it loose.” Back home, John said to himself, A newcomer. After her there was an attempt at a karate bout, both hilarious and beautiful at the same time; and then twenty minutes of some Russians staging Hamlet in pressure suits at the bottom of the Tyrrhena Patera mohole, a production that struck John as crazy until Hamlet caught sight of Claudius kneeling to pray, and the camera tilted up to show the mohole as cathedral walls, rising above Claudius to an infinitely distant shaft of sunlight, like the forgiveness he would never receive.
John shut off the TV and took the elevator down to the dorm. He got into bed and relaxed. Karate as ballet. The newcomers were all still engineers, construction workers, scientists of all kinds; but they didn’t seem as single-minded as the first hundred, and that was probably good. They still had a scientific mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility, practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and beliefs. Or so he hoped. He knew by now it was a bit naïve. You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps. Hiroko’s team disappearing … Out there in the wild rock somewhere, lucky bastards … He fell asleep.
He worked at Echus Overlook a few days more, then got a call from Helmut Bronski in Burroughs, who wanted to confer with him about the new arrivals from Earth. John decided to take the train to Burroughs and see Helmut in person.
The night before his departure, he went to see Sax in his labs; when he walked in Sax said in his monotone, “We’ve found an Amor asteroid that’s ninety percent ice, in an orbit that will bring it near Mars in three years. Just what I’ve been looking for, in fact.” His plan was to place a robot-controlled mass driver on an ice asteroid and push it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add massive quantities of water and separated hydrogen and oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed most. “It could raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty millibars.”
“You’re kidding!” The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars (Earth’s sea level averaged 1013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. “One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?”
“That’s what the simulations indicate. Of course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive as it sounds.”
“Still, that’s great, Sax. And it’ll be hard to sabotage.”
But Sax didn’t want to be reminded of that. He frowned slightly, and slipped away.
John laughed at his skittishness, and went to the door. Then he stopped to think, and looked up and down the hall. Empty. And no video monitors in Sax’s offices. He went back in, grinning at his own furtive tiptoes, and glanced around at the paper chaos on Sax’s desk. Where to start? Presumably his AI would be the repository of anything interesting, but probably it would only respond to Sax’s voice, and would surely keep a record of any other inquiries. Quietly he opened a desk drawer. Empty. All the drawers in the desk were empty; he almost laughed out loud, stifled it. There was a stack of correspondence on a lab bench; he picked through it. Mostly notes from the biologists at Acheron. At the bottom of the stack was a single sheet of unsigned mail, with no return address or origin code; Sax’s printer had spit it out without any identification that John could see. The message was brief:
“1). We use suicide genes to curb proliferation. 2). There are so many heat sources now on the surface that we don’t think anyone can tell our exhaust from the rest of it. 3). We simply agreed we wanted to get off and work on our own, without interference. I’m sure you understand now.”
After a minute of staring at this John whipped his head up and looked around. Still alone. He glanced at the note again, put it back where he had found it and walked quietly out of Sax’s offices, back to the guest quarters. “Sax,” he said admiringly, “you tricky congress of rats!”
The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of it, with two passenger cars up front, running over a superconducting magnetic piste so quickly and smoothly that it was hard to believe the view; after John’s endless plods cross-country in rovers, it was almost frightening. The only thing to do was flood the pleasure centers in the old brain with omegendorph and sit back and enjoy it, looking out at what appeared to be some kind of terrain-following supersonic flight.
The piste had been routed roughly parallel to the 10° N latitude; eventually the plan was to ring the planet, but so far only the hemisphere between Echus and Burroughs had been finished. Burroughs had become the biggest town in the far hemisphere. The original settlement had been built by an American-based consortium, using a French-led EC design and was located at the upper end of Isidis Planitia, which was in effect a huge trough where the northern plains made a deep indentation into the southern highlands. The sides and head of the trough counteracted the planet’s curvature in such a way that the landscape around the town had something like Terran horizons, and as the train flew down the great trough Boone could see across mesa-dotted dark plains to horizons some sixty kilometers away.
Burroughs’s buildings were almost all cliff-dwellings, cut into the sides of five low mesas that were grouped together on a rise in the bend of an ancient curving channel. Big sections of the mesas’ vertical sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on their sides and shoved into the hills. A startling sight, in fact, and far more impressive than Underhill, or even Echus Overlook, which had a great view but could not be seen. No, the glass-sided mesas of Burroughs, on their rise over a channel that seemed to be begging for water, with a view out to distant hills; these features combined to give the new town a quickly growing reputation as the most beautiful city on Mars.
Its western train station was inside one of the excavated mesas, a glass-walled room sixty meters high. John stepped out into this grand space and made his way through the crowds of people, head craned back like a hick in Manhattan. Train crews were dressed in blue jumpers, prospecting teams in walker green, UNOMA bureaucrats in suits, construction workers in work jumpers, colored like rainbows to suggest sportswear. UNOMA headquarters had been located in Burroughs three years before, and that had caused a real building boom; it was a close thing whether there were more UNOMA bureaucrats or construction workers in the station.
At the far end of the great room John found a subway entrance, and took a little subway car to the UNOMA headquarters. In the car he shook hands with a few people who recognized and approached him, feeling the old weirdness of the fishbowl return. He was back among strangers. In a city.
That night he had dinner with Helmut Bronski. They had met many times before, and John was impressed by the man, a German millionaire who had gotten into politics: tall, beefy, blond and red-faced, impeccably groomed, dressed in an expensive gray suit. He had been the EEC’s minister of finance when he took the UNOMA post. Now he told John the latest news, in a very urbane British English, eating roast beef and potatoes rapidly between bursts of sentences, holding his silverware in the workmanlike German fashion. “We are going to award a prospecting contract in Elysium to the transnational consortium Armscor. They will be shipping up their own equipment.”
“But Helmut,” John said, “won’t that violate the Mars treaty?”
Helmut made a wide gesture with the hand holding the fork: they were men of the world, his look said, they understood these kinds of things. “The treaty is superannuated, this is obvious to everyone dealing with the situation. But its scheduled revision is ten years away. In the meantime, we have to try to anticipate certain aspects of the revision. That’s why we give some concessions now. There is no rational reason to delay, and if we tried there would be trouble in the general assembly.”
“But the general assembly can’t be happy that you’ve given the first concession to an old South African weapons manufacturer!”
Helmut shrugged. “Armscor has very little relation to its origins. It is just a name. When South Africa became Azania, the company moved its home offices to Australia, and then to Singapore. And now of course it has become very much more than an aerospace firm. It is a true transnational, one of the new tigers, with banks of its own, and controlling interest in about fifty of the old Fortune 500.”
“Fifty of them?” John said.
“Yes. And Armscor is one of the smallest of the transnationals: that is why we picked it. But it still has a bigger economy than any but the largest twenty countries. As the old multinationals coalesce into transnational, you see, they really gather quite a bit of power, and they have influence in the general assembly. When we give one a concession, some twenty or thirty countries profit by it, and get their opening on Mars. And for the rest of the countries, that serves as a precedent. And so pressure on us is reduced.”
“Uh huh.” John thought it over. “Tell me, who negotiated this agreement?”
“Well, it was a number of us, you know.”
Helmut ate on, serenely ignoring John’s steady gaze.
John pursed his lips, looked away. He understood suddenly that he was talking with a man who, though a functionary, yet considered himself to be vastly more important on the planet than Boone. Genial, smooth-faced (and who cut his hair?), Bronski leaned back and ordered them after-dinner drinks. His assistant, their waitress for the evening, scurried off to oblige.
“I don’t believe I’ve been waited on before on Mars,” John observed.
Helmut met his gaze calmly, but his beefy color had heightened. John almost smiled. The UNOMA factor wanted to seem menacing, the representative of powers so sophisticated that John’s little weather station mentality couldn’t even comprehend them. But John had found in the past that a few minutes of his First Man On Mars routine was usually enough to crush that kind of attitude; and so he laughed, and drank, and told tales, and alluded to secrets only the first hundred were privy to, and made it clear to the assistant-waitress that he was the one in command at the table, and so on – behaving in general in an unconcerned, knowing, arrogant manner – and by the time they were finished with their sherbet and brandy Bronski was loud and blustery himself, clearly nervous and on the defensive.
Functionaries. John had to laugh.
But he was curious concerning the ultimate point of their conference, which still wasn’t clear to him. Perhaps Bronski had wanted to see in person how news of the new concession would affect one of the first hundred – perhaps to gauge the reaction of the rest? That would be silly, for to get a good gauge on the first hundred you would need to poll eighty of them at least; but that didn’t mean it wasn’t true. John was used to being taken for a representative of things, for a symbol. The figurehead again. It could definitely be a waste of time.
He wondered if he could salvage something of his own from the evening, and as they were walking back to his guest suite, he said, “Have you ever heard of the Coyote?”
“An animal?”
