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“Sorry,” John said. “I don’t answer questions from people who break into my rooms.”
“You have to,” Chang said. “It’s the law.”
“What law? What are you going to do to me?” He turned toward the open door of the room and Chang moved to block him; he lost his temper again and jerked toward Chang, who flinched but remained in the doorway, immovable. John turned and walked away, back down to the commons.
He left Senzeni Na that afternoon in a rover, and took the transponder road north along the eastern flank of Tharsis. It was a good road and three days later he was 1300 kilometers to the north, just northwest of Noctis Labyrinthus, and when he came to a big transponder intersection, with a new fuel station, he hung a right and took the road east to Underhill. Each day as the rover rolled along blindly through the dust, he worked with Pauline. “Pauline, would you please look up all planetary records for theft of dental equipment?” She was as slow as a human in processing an incongruous request, but eventually the data were there. Then he had her go over the movement records of every suspect he could think of. When he was sure where everyone had been, he gave Helmut Bronski a call to protest the actions of Houston and Chang. “They say they’re working with your authorization, Helmut, so I thought you should know what they’re doing.”
“They are trying their best,” Helmut said. “I wish you would stop harassing them and co-operate, John. It could be helpful. I know you have nothing to hide, so why not be more helpful?”
“Come on, Helmut, they don’t ask for help. It’s rank intimidation. Tell them to stop it.”
“They are only trying to do their job,” Helmut said blandly. “I have not heard of anything illegitimate.”
John broke the connection. Later on he called Frank, who was in Burroughs. “What’s with Helmut? Why is he turning the planet over to these policemen?”
“You idiot,” Frank said. He was typing madly at a computer screen as he talked, so that he seemed to be only barely conscious of what he was saying. “Aren’t you paying any attention at all to what’s going on here?”
“I thought I was,” John said.
“We’re knee-deep in gasoline! And these goddamned ageing treatments are the match. But you never understood why we were sent here in the first place, so why should you understand anything now?” He typed on, staring hard into his screen.
John studied the little image of Frank on his wrist. Finally he said, “Why were we sent here in the first place, Frank?”
“Because Russia and our United States of America were desperate, that’s why. Decrepit outmoded industrial dinosaurs, that’s what we were, about to get eaten up by Japan and Europe and all the little tigers popping up in Asia. And we had all this space experience going to waste, and a couple of huge and unnecessary aerospace industries, and so we pooled them and came here on the chance that we’d find something worthwhile, and it paid off! We struck gold, so to speak. Which is only more gasoline poured onto things, because gold rushes show who’s powerful and who’s not. And now even though we got a head start up here, there are a lot of new tigers down there who are better at things than we are, and they all want a piece of the action. There’s a lot of countries down there with no room and no resources, ten billion people standing in their own shit.”
“I thought you told me Earth would always be falling apart.”
“This isn’t falling apart. Think about it – if this damned treatment only goes to the rich, then the poor will revolt and it’ll all explode – but if the treatment goes to everyone, then populations will soar and it’ll all explode. Either way it’s gone! It’s going now! And naturally the transnats don’t like that, it’s horrible for business when the world blows up. So they’re scared, and they’re deciding to try to hold things together by main force. Helmut and those policemen are only the smallest tip of the iceberg – a lot of policymakers think a world police state for a few decades or so is our only chance of getting to some kind of population stabilization without a catastrophe. Control from above, the stupid bastards.”
Frank shook his head disgustedly, then leaned toward his screen and became absorbed in its contents.
John said, “Did you get the treatment, Frank?”
“Of course I did. Leave me alone, John, I’ve got work to do.”
The southern summer was warmer than the previous one that had been shrouded in the Great Storm, but still colder than any recorded. The storm was now almost two M-years long, over three Terran years, but Sax was philosophical about it. John called him at Echus Overlook, and when John mentioned the cold nights he was experiencing Sax only said, “We’ll very likely have low temperatures for the greater part of the terraforming period. But warmer per se isn’t what we’re trying for. Venus is warm. What we want is survivable. If we can breathe the air, I don’t care if it’s cold.”
Meanwhile it was cold, cold everywhere, the nights down to a hundred below every night, even on the equator. When John reached Underhill, a week after leaving Senzeni Na, he found there was a kind of pink ice covering the sidewalks; it was nearly invisible in the storm’s dim light, and walking around was a treacherous business. The people at Underhill spent most of their time indoors. John occupied a few weeks by helping the local bioengineering team field test a new fast snow algae. Underhill was crowded with strangers. Most of them were young Japanese or Europeans, who fortunately still used English to communicate with each other. John roomed in one of the old barrel vaults, near the northeast corner of the quadrant. The old quadrant was less popular than Nadia’s concourse, smaller and dimmer, and many of its vaults were now used for storage. It was strange to walk the square of hallways, remembering the pool, Maya’s room, the dining hall – now all dark, and stacked with boxes. Those years when the first hundred had been the only hundred. It was getting hard to remember what that had been like.
He kept track through Pauline of the movements of quite a few people, the UNOMA investigating force among them. It was a not-very-rigorous surveillance, as it was not always easy to track the investigators, especially Houston and Chang and their crew, whom he suspected were going off-net deliberately. Meanwhile the spaceports’ arrival records gave more evidence every month that Frank had been right about them being only the tip of the iceberg; a lot of people coming down at Burroughs in particular were working for UNOMA without job specifications, and then spreading out to the mines and moholes and other settlements, and going to work for the local security heads. And their Terran employment records were very interesting indeed.
Often at the end of a session with Pauline John would leave the quadrant, and go for a walk outside, feeling disturbed and thinking hard. There was a lot more visibility than there had been: things were clearing up a bit out on the surface, though the pink ice still made walking tricky. It seemed the Great Storm was lessening. Wind speeds on the surface were only two or three times the pre-storm average of thirty kilometers per hour, and the dust in the air was sometimes little more than a kind of thick haze, turning the sunsets into blazing pastel swirls of pink, yellow, orange, red and purple, with random streaks of green or turquoise appearing and disappearing, along with icebows and sundogs, and occasional brilliant shafts of pure yellow light: nature at her most tasteless, transient and spectacular. And watching all that hazy color and movement John would be distracted from his thoughts and climb the great white pyramid to have a look around, and then go back inside ready to start the fight again.
One evening after one of these sunset extravaganzas he climbed down the peak of the great pyramid, and walked slowly back toward Underhill – and then he spotted two figures climb out one of the garage side doors, and down a clear crawltube into a rover. There was something quick and furtive in their motion, and he stopped to look closer: they did not have their helmets on, and he recognized Houston and Chang by the backs of their heads and the size of their bodies. They moved with scurrying Terran inefficiency into the rover, and drove toward him. John polarized his faceplate and started walking again, head down, trying to look like someone coming in from work, veering to the side a bit to increase the distance between him and them. The rover dove into a thick dust cloud and disappeared abruptly.
By the time he got to the lock doors he was deep in thought, and almost frightened. He stood motionlessly at the door, thinking it over, and when he moved it was not to the door, but to the intercom console in the wall next to the door. There were several different kinds of jacks under the speakers, and carefully he unplugged the stopper in one and cleared away the fines crusting the edge – these jacks were never used anymore – and plugged in his wristpad. He tapped in the code for Pauline, and waited for encryption and decryption to work through. “Yes, John?” said Pauline’s voice from his helmet intercom speaker.
“Turn on your camera please, Pauline, and pan my room.”
Pauline was sitting on the side table by his bed, plugged into the wall. Her camera was a little fiber thing, rarely used, and the image on his wristpad was small. The room was dim with only a nightlight on; and his faceplate’s curve was yet another barrier, so that even with the wristpad right against it, he couldn’t quite make out the images; gray shapes, shifting. There was the bed, there was something on it, then the wall. “Back ten degrees,” John said, and squinted trying to comprehend the two centimeter square image. His bed. There was a man lying on his bed. Wasn’t that what it was? The bottom of a shoe, torso, hair. It was hard to tell. It didn’t move. “Pauline, do you hear anything in the room?”
“The vents, the electricity.”
“Transmit to me what you’re picking up on your mike, at full volume.” He leaned his head to the left against his helmet, cramming his ear against the helmet speaker. A hiss, a whoosh, static. There was too much transmission error in a process like this, especially using these corroded old jacks. But certainly he heard no breathing. “Pauline, can you enter the Underhill monitoring system, and locate our vault’s door camera, and transmit its image to my wrist, please?”
He had directed the installation of Underhill’s security system, just a few years before; Pauline still had all the plans and codes, and it didn’t take long for her to replace the image on his wrist with that of the suite outside his room, seen from above. The suite’s lights were on, and in the camera’s sweeps he could see that his door was shut; that was all.
He let his wrist fall to his side and thought it over. Five minutes passed before he raised it again and began giving instructions through Pauline to the Underhill security system. Possession of the codes allowed him to instruct the entire camera system to erase its surveillance tapes, and then to run them in an hour loop rather than the usual eight-hour one. Then he instructed two of the cleaning robots to come to his room, and open its door. While they did that he stood shivering, waiting for them to make their slow roll through the vaults. When they opened his door, he saw them through Pauline’s little eye; light poured into the room and momentarily blazed, then adjusted, and he had a much clearer view. Yes, it was a man on his bed. John’s breath went shallow. He teleoperated the robots, using the minute button toggles on his wristpad. It was a jerky procedure, but if lifting the man woke him up, so much the better.
It didn’t. The man lolled down on both sides of the robot’s cradling arms, which lifted him with their algorithmic delicacy. A body hanging down. The man was dead.
John deliberately took a deep breath, then held it and continued the teleoperation, directing the first robot to deposit the body in the second robot’s big trash hopper. Sending the robots back down the hall to their storage vault was easy. Several people walked by them as they rolled along, but there was nothing he could do about that. The body was not visible except from above, and hopefully no one was paying enough attention to remember the robots later.
When he got them in their storage room, he hesitated. Should he take the body to the incinerators in the Alchemists’ Quarter? But no – now that it was out of his room, he didn’t need to get rid of the body. In fact he would need it later. For the first time he wondered who it was. He directed the first robot to put its extensor eye against the body’s right wrist, and read with its magnetic imager. It took a long time for the eye to hit the right spot on the wrist. Then it held fast. The minute tag that everyone had implanted on a wristbone held information in the standard dot language, and it only took a minute for Pauline to get an ID. Yashika Mui, UNOMA auditor, based at Underhill, arrived 2050. An actual person. A man who might have lived a thousand years.
John began to shiver. He leaned against the glazed blue brick wall of Underhill. It would be an hour before he could go inside, or a little less. Impatiently he pushed off and walked around the quadrant. It took about fifteen minutes to walk around it usually, but now he found he was doing it in ten. After the second turn he walked over to the trailer park.
Only two of the old trailers were still there, and they were apparently abandoned or used only for storage. Figures loomed out of the night dust between them, and for a second he was afraid, but they passed on by. He returned to the quadrant and circled it again, then walked out the path to the Alchemists’ Quarter. He stood looking at the antiquated complex of tubes and piping and squat white buildings, all covered with their black calligraphic equations. He thought of their first years. And now it had come to this, in what seemed the blink of an eye. In the gloom of the Great Storm. Civilization, corruption, crisis. Murder on Mars. He gritted his teeth.
An hour had passed, it was nine p.m. He went back to the lock and went inside, took off his helmet and walker and boots in the changing room and stripped, went into the showers and showered, dried off and put on a jumper, combed his hair. He took a deep breath and walked around the south side of the quadrant and up through the vaults to the one with his room. As he was opening his door he was not surprised to see four of the UNOMA investigators appear, but he tried to act surprised when they ordered him to stop: “What’s this?” he said.
It wasn’t Houston or Chang, but rather three men, with one of the women from that first group at Low Point. The men clustered at his sides without really responding to him, and pulled his door completely open and two of them went inside; John controlled the urge to punch them, or shout at them, or laugh at the expressions that came over their faces when they saw that his room was empty; he merely stared curiously at them, and tried to limit himself to the irritation he would have shown had he been ignorant of what was going on. This irritation would have been considerable of course, and once he opened that door inside himself it was hard indeed to keep all his fury from banging through, hard to keep it to an innocent’s level; they had to be snapped at as if they were overzealous policemen, rather than assaulted as murderous functionaries; and that was extremely hard to hold to.
In their confusion at the unexpected situation he managed to drive them off with a few biting sentences, and when he had closed the door on them he stood in the middle of his room. “Pauline, transmit what’s happening on the security system to yourself, please, and record. Show me whatever cameras have them.”
So Pauline tracked them. It only took a couple of minutes for them to go to the security control room, where they were joined by Chang and others. They went after the camera packs. John sat at Pauline’s screen and watched right along with them as they ran the loops back and found that they were only an hour long, and that the events of the afternoon had been erased. That would give them something to think about. He smiled grimly and told Pauline to get off the system.
A wave of exhaustion swept through him. It was only eleven, but all adrenalin and the morning’s dose of omegendorph had drained out of him, and he was tired. He sat on his bed, but then remembered what had last been there, and got up. In the end he slept on the floor.
He was awakened in the timeslip by Spencer Jackson, with news of a body discovered in a robot hopper. He went and stood wearily beside Spencer in the clinic, staring at the body of Yashika Mui while several of the investigators eyed him warily. The diagnostic machinery was as good at autopsy as anything else, maybe better; tests of minute samples were indicating a blood coagulant. Somberly John ordered a full criminal autopsy; Mui’s body and clothes had to be scanned, and all microscopic particles read against his genome, and all foreign particles read against the list of people who were currently in Underhill. John stared at the UNOMA investigators as he gave this instruction, but they didn’t blink. Probably they had been wearing gloves and walkers, or teleoperated the whole thing as he had. He had to turn away to hide his disgust; he couldn’t let on that he knew!
But then of course they knew that they had put the body there; and so they must suspect that he was the one who had removed it, and erased the camera tapes. So they already knew that he knew, or suspected he did. But they couldn’t be sure; and there was no reason to give anything away.
An hour later he went back to his room, and lay on the floor again. Although he was still exhausted, he could no longer sleep. He stared at the ceiling, thinking it over. Thinking over everything that he had learned.
Near dawn he felt he had things sorted out. He gave up on sleep, and got up to go out for another walk; he needed to be outside, away from the human world and all its sickening corruption, out into the great rush of the wind, made so dramatically visible by the storm’s flying dust.
But when he got out of the lock door, there were stars overhead. The complete net of them – all the thousands burning as of old, without the slightest twinkle or flicker, the faint ones so dense that the black sky itself appeared slightly whitish, as if the whole sky were the Milky Way.
When he had recovered from his astonishment, and the almost-forgotten wonder of the stars, he got on his intercom and called in the news.
It caused pandemonium; people heard and woke their friends, and rushed down to the changing rooms to grab a walker before the supply was exhausted. And the lock doors started opening and spewing out crowds.
The sky to the east turned a blackish red, and then lightened quickly. The whole sky shifted to a dark rose shade, and then began to glow. The stars disappeared by the hundreds, until only Venus and the Earth hung in the east, over a growing intensity of light. The sky in the east grew brighter, and brighter again, until it seemed brighter than day could ever get; even behind faceplates their eyes watered, and some cried out over the common band at the sight. There were figures scampering around, the intercom babbling, the sky growing impossibly brighter, and brighter, and brighter yet, until it seemed it would burst: it pulsated with glowing pink light, the dots that were Venus and Earth overwhelmed by it. And then the sun cracked the horizon and fountained across the plain like a thermonuclear bomb, and the people roared and jumped up and down and ran among the long black shadows of the rocks and the buildings. All east-facing walls were great blocks of Fauvist color, their glaze mosaics stunning, hard to look at directly. The air was clear as glass and indeed seemed a solid substance, imbuing the things stuck in it with razor-edged clarity.
John walked out away from the crowds, east toward Chernobyl. He turned his intercom off. The sky was a darker pink than he remembered, with a touch of purple at the zenith. Everyone in Underhill was going crazy; many of the people there had never seen the sun shine on Mars, and no doubt it felt like they had lived their whole lives in the Great Storm. And now it was over, and they were wandering out in the sunshine drunk with it, slipping on pink ice left and right, getting in yellow snowball fights, climbing the frosted pyramids. When John saw that he turned, and went up the steps of the last pyramid himself, to have a look at the tors and hollows around Underhill. They were somewhat frosted and silted over, but otherwise just the same. He turned on the common band, but turned it back off; people, still inside were howling for walkers, and no one outside was paying any attention to them. It had been an hour since sunrise, one cried, though John found that hard to believe. He shook his head; the raucous voices, and the memory of the body on his bed, made it hard to feel much joy in the end of the storm.
Eventually he went back inside, and gave his walker over to a pair of women his size who were squabbling over who got to use it next, went down to the comm center and called Sax in Echus Overlook. When he got him he congratulated him on the end of the storm.
Sax waved this away brusquely, as if it had happened years before. “They’ve boarded Amor 2051B,” he said. This was the ice asteroid they had found for insertion into Martian orbit. They were in the process of installing rockets on it, which would knock it onto a course that would bring it in on a trajectory similar to the Ares’; without a heat shield the aerobraking would burn it up. All looked well for a MOI ETA about six months away. That was the big news, Sax implied in his blinking, calm way. The Great Storm was history.
John had to laugh. But then he thought of Yashika Mui, and he told Sax about it because he wanted someone else’s celebration to be ruined as well. Sax only blinked. “They’re getting serious,” he finally said. Disgusted, John said goodbye and got off.
He wandered back out through the vaults, disturbed by a fiercely clashing mix of good and bad emotions. He returned to his room and took an omegendorph and one of the new pandorphs Spencer had given him, and then he went out into the quadrant’s central atrium, and wandered among the plants, all skinny storm spawn, troping toward the light bulbs running overhead. The sky was still a clear dark pink, still very bright. A lot of the people who had gone out first were now back and in the atrium between the rows of crops, partying. He ran into a few friends, some acquaintances, mostly strangers. He went back into the vaults, through rooms full of strangers who sometimes cheered when he walked in. If they yelled “Speech!” long enough he would stand on a chair and rattle something off, feeling the endorphins, which today were rendered unpredictable in their effect by the thought of the murdered man. Sometimes he was pretty vehement, and he never knew what he was going to say until it came out of him. We saw John Boone drunk on his ass, they would say, the day the Great Storm ended. Fine, he thought, let them say what they wanted. It never mattered what he did anymore anyway, as far as the legend was concerned.
One room contained a crowd of Egyptians, not like his Sufis but orthodox Moslems, talking like the wind and drinking cups of coffee, high on caffeine and sunlight, flashing white smiles under their moustaches, extremely cordial for once, in fact pleased to see him there. He warmed to that, and flying on the momentum of the day he said, “Look, we’re part of a new world. If you don’t base your actions on Martian reality then you become a kind of schizophrenic, with your body on one planet and your spirit on another. No society split like that can function for long.”
“Well, well,” one of them said with a smile. “You must understand we have traveled before. We are a traveling people. But wherever we are, Mecca is our spirit’s home. We could fly to the other side of the universe and that would still be true.”
Nothing to say to that; and in fact such direct honesty was so much cleaner than what he had been dealing with through the night that he nodded, and said, “I see. I understand.” Compare that after all to the hypocrisy of the West, where people talked of profit at prayer breakfasts, people who couldn’t articulate a single belief they had; people who thought their values were physical constants, who would say “That’s just the way things are,” like Frank so often did.
So John stayed and talked with the Egyptians for a while, and when he left them he was feeling better. He wandered back to his vault, listening to the rowdy voices pouring into the hallway from every room; shouts, shrieks, happy scientist talk, “these things are such halophytes that they don’t like brine because there’s too much water in it,” peals of laughter.
He had an idea. Spencer Jackson lived in the vault next door to John’s, and was passing through when John hurried in, so John told him the idea. “We ought to gather everyone we can for a big celebration of the storm’s end. All the sort-of Mars-centered groups, you know, or really everyone who can possibly make it. Anyone who wants to be there.”
“Where?”
“Up on Olympus Mons,” he said without considering it. “We could probably get Sax to time the arrival of his ice asteroid so that we could watch it from there.”
“Good idea!” Spencer said.
Olympus Mons is a shield volcano, and therefore a cone that is not steep in most places, its great height resulting from its even greater breadth; it is twenty-five kilometers higher than the surrounding plain, but eight hundred kilometers across, so its slope averages about six degrees. But around the circumference of its great bulk there is a circular escarpment some seven kilometers high, and this spectacular cliff, twice as tall as that at Echus Overlook, is in many places close to vertical. Sections of it had already lured the few climbers on the planet, but no one had yet succeeded in climbing it, and for most of the inhabitants of the planet it remained merely a spectacular impediment on the way to the summit caldera. Travelers on the ground made it up the escarpment by way of a wide ramp on the north side, where one of the last lava flows had overrun the cliff – areologists told tales of what it must have been like, of a river of molten rock a hundred kilometers wide, too bright to look at, falling seven thousand meters onto the black lava-crusted plain, piling higher and higher and higher. This spill of lava had left a rampway with nothing more than a slight jog in it where the escarpment had been overrun; it was an easy ascent, and after it, an uphill drive of some two hundred kilometers took one to the rim of the caldera.
The summit rim of Olympus Mons is so broad and flat that while it has an excellent view down into the many-ringed caldera, the rest of the planet cannot be seen from it; looking outward one sees only the outer edge of the rim, and then the sky. But on the south side of the rim there is a small meteor crater, with no name but its map designation, THA-Zp. The interior of this little crater is somewhat sheltered from the thin jet stream rushing over Olympus Mons, and standing on the southern arc of its fresh spiky rim, an observer finally has a view down the slope of the volcano, and then over the vast rising plain of west Tharsis: like looking down at the planet from a platform in low space.
It took almost nine months before the asteroid was brought to a rendezvous with Mars, and word of John’s celebration had had time to get around. So they came in scattered rover caravans, in twos and fives and tens, up the north ramp and around to the southern outer slope of Zp; and they erected a number of big crescent-shaped clear-walled tents, with rigid clear floors that stood two meters off the ground, resting on clear entry stalks. They were the very latest thing in temporary shelter, in fact, and all set with their inner arcs facing uphill, so that when they were done they had a row of crescents stacked like stairs, like greenhouse gardens on a terraced hillside, overlooking the immense sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.
The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet’s current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amazing. Although many were faces he had seen before, and quite a few he knew by name. So it was a collection of friends, in a way. It was as if a home town that he hadn’t known existed had suddenly sprung up around him. And since so many of the first hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Rya, Alex and Raul and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years – everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn’t replied to the invitation at all.
And it wasn’t just the first hundred; many of the others were old friends as well, or friends of friends: a lot of Swiss, including the roadbuilding gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet; his Sufi friends; and all of them scattered up and down the terraced crescent tents, in collections of caravan groups and dirigible teams, rushing from time to time to the locks to greet the latest arrivals.
During the days many of them wandered around outside the tents, collecting loose rock from the great curved slope. The Zp meteor’s impact had scattered chunks of brecciated lava everywhere, including shishtovite shattercones like pottery shards, some dead black, others a bright blood red, or flecked with impact diamonds. An areological team from Greece started laying these in a pattern on the ground under the raised floor of their tent, and they had brought a little kiln with them, so they could glaze some shards yellow or green or blue, to accent their designs. This idea caught on as soon as others saw it, and within two days each clear tent floor stood over a flagged parquet with a mosaic design: circuitry maps, pictures of birds and fish, fractal abstracts, Escher drawings, the Tibetan calligraphy spelling Om Mani Padme Hum, maps of the planet and of smaller regions, equations, people’s faces, landscapes, and so on.
John spent his time wandering from tent to tent, talking with people and enjoying the carnival atmosphere – an atmosphere which did not preclude arguments, there were a lot of those – but most people spent the time partying, talking, drinking, going out on excursions on the wavy surface of the old lava flows, making mosaic floors, dancing to music made by various amateur bands. The best of these was a magnesium drum band, the instruments local, the players from Trinidad and Tobago, a notorious transnational flag of convenience with a vigorous local resistance movement of which the band were representatives. There was also a country and western group with a good slide guitar player, and an Irish band with home-made instruments and a large shifting membership, which allowed it to play more or less non-stop. These three bands were all surrounded by crowds of dancers, and indeed the tents they occupied had all of their movement transformed into a kind of pulsing dance, as just getting from here to there was suddenly stuffed with the grace and exuberance of the music, the gravity, the view.
So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every waking moment. He didn’t need any omegendorph or pandorph; once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only laugh; “I don’t think so right now,” he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. “It’d be carrying coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would.”
“Carrying coals to Newcastle?”
“He means it’d be like taking permafrost to Borealis.”
“Or pumping more CO
into the atmosphere.”
“Bringing lava to Olympus.”
“Putting more salt in the goddamn soil.”
“Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!”
“Exactly,” John said, laughing. “I’m already full red.”
“Not as red as these folks,” one of them said, pointing down to the west. A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp’s rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. “That’s Hiroko,” Nadia said suddenly over the common band. The first hundred made their way quickly to the upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over the rim. And then the new visitors were walking down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko – Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.
Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn’t help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not – her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her – that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to what he saw. He was confused enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only said, “Oh, I’ve wanted to talk to you so!”
“And me to you,” she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting “Why didn’t you tell me?” again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady’s face over Hiroko’s shoulder, bunched in an expression that said there’s going to be questions answered later, and he lost his train of thought. There were going to be some hard things said – but still, here they were! Here they were. Down in the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibels. People were cheering their reunion.
Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.
It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain around it. Everything had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more complicated. And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes. They were in their seventies now, most of them. And the world was indeed larger – in many different ways: after all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.
So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating interference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or bemused or grinning like dolphins. In the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.
Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked around. Arkady had one arm over Maya’s shoulders, the other over Nadia’s, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said; Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaming. John had never seen that look on her face in the early years. It was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, “I can tell you who’s behind the sabotages.”
Sax blinked. “You can?”
“Yes.” He looked Hiroko in the eye. “It’s your people, Hiroko.”
That sobered her, though she still smiled: but it was the contained, private smile of old. “No no,” she said mildly, and shook her head. “You know I wouldn’t do that.”
“I figured not. But your people are doing it without your knowledge. Your children, in fact. Working with the Coyote.”
Her eyes narrowed, and she threw a quick glance down at the tents below.
When she looked at John again he went on. “You grew them, right? Fertilized a bunch of your eggs, and grew them in vitro?”
After a pause she nodded.
“Hiroko!” Ann said. “You don’t have any idea how well that ectogene process works!”
“We tested it,” Hiroko said. “The kids have turned out all right.”
Now the whole group was silent, and watching Hiroko and John. He said, “Maybe so, but some of them don’t share your ideas. They’re doing things on their own, like kids will. They have eyeteeth made of stone, isn’t that right?”
Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”
“And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”
After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them – there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”
He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three thousand kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”
Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”
