Voyager Classics

BLUE MARS

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Voyager 1996

Copyright © Kim Stanley Robinson 1996

Kim Stanley Robinson asserts to moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007121656

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007402175

Version: 2019-05-21

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Dedication

For Lisa, David and Timothy

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Calendar

PART ONE Peacock Mountain

PART TWO Areophany

PART THREE A New Constitution

PART FOUR Green Earth

PART FIVE Home at Last

PART SIX Ann in the Outback

PART SEVEN Making Things Work

PART EIGHT The Green and the White

PART NINE Natural History

PART TEN Werteswandel

PART ELEVEN Viriditas

PART TWELVE It Goes So Fast

PART THIRTEEN Experimental Procedures

PART FOURTEEN Phoenix Lake

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Kim Stanley Robinson

Chronology

About the Publisher

Calendar

PART ONE Peacock Mountain

Mars is free now. We’re on our own. No one tells us what to do.

Ann stood at the front of the train as she said this.

But it’s so easy to backslide into old patterns of behaviour. Break one hierarchy and another springs up to take its place. We will have to be on guard for that, because there will always be people trying to make another Earth. The areophany will have to be ceaseless, an eternal struggle. We will have to think harder than ever before what it means to be Martian.

Her listeners sat slumped in chairs, looking out of the windows at the terrain flowing by. They were tired, their eyes were scoured. Red-eyed Reds. In the harsh dawn light everything looked new, the windswept land outside bare except for a khaki scree of lichen and scrub. They had kicked all Earthly power off Mars, it had been a long campaign, capped by months of furious action; they were tired.

We came from Earth to Mars, and in that passage there was a certain purification. Things were easier to see, there was a freedom of action that we had not had before. A chance to express the best part of ourselves. So we acted. We are making a better way to live.

This was the myth, they had all grown up with it. Now as Ann told it to them again, the young Martians stared through her. They had engineered the revolution, they had fought all over Mars, and pushed the Terran police into Burroughs; then they had drowned Burroughs, and chased the Terrans up to Sheffield, on Pavonis Mons. They still had to force the enemy out of Sheffield, up the space cable and back to Terra; there was work still to be done. But in the successful evacuation of Burroughs they had won a great victory, and some of the blank faces staring at Ann or out of the window seemed to want a break, a moment for triumph. They were all exhausted.

Hiroko will help us, a young man said, breaking the silence of the train’s levitation over the land.

Ann shook her head. Hiroko is a Green, she said, the original Green.

Hiroko invented the areophany, the young native countered.

That’s her first concern: Mars. She will help us, I know. I met her. She told me.

Except she’s dead, someone else said.

Another silence. The world flowed under them.

Finally a tall young woman stood up and walked down the aisle, and gave Ann a hug. The spell was broken; words were abandoned; they got to their feet and clustered in the open space at the front of the train, around Ann, and hugged her, or shook her hand – or simply touched her, Ann Clayborne, the one who had taught them to love Mars for itself, who had led them in the struggle for its independence from Earth. And though her bloodshot eyes were still fixed, gazing through them at the rocky battered expanse of the Tyrrhena Massif, she was smiling. She hugged them back, she shook their hands, she reached up to touch their faces. It will be all right, she said. We will make Mars free. And they said yes, and congratulated each other. On to Sheffield, they said. Finish the job. Mars will show us how.

Except she’s not dead, the young man objected. I saw her last month in Arcadia. She’ll show up again. She’ll show up somewhere.

At a certain moment before dawn the sky always glowed the same bands of pink as in the beginning, pale and clear in the east, rich and starry in the west. Ann watched for this moment as her companions drove them west, toward a mass of black land rearing into the sky – the Tharsis bulge, punctuated by the broad cone of Pavonis Mons. As they rolled uphill from Noctis Labyrinthus they rose above most of the new atmosphere; the air pressure at the foot of Pavonis was only 180 millibars, and then as they drove up the eastern flank of the great shield volcano it dropped under 100 millibars, and continued to fall. Slowly they ascended above all visible foliage, crunching over dirty patches of wind-carved snow; then they ascended above even the snow, until there was nothing but rock, and the ceaseless thin cold winds of the Jetstream. The bare land looked just as it had in the prehuman years, as if they were driving back up into the past.

It wasn’t so. But something fundamental in Ann Clayborne warmed at the sight of this ferric world, stone on rock in the perpetual wind, and as the Red cars rolled up the mountain all their occupants grew as rapt as Ann, the cabins falling silent as the sun cracked the distant horizon behind them.

Then the slope they ascended grew less steep, in a perfect sine curve, until they were on the flat land of the round summit plateau. Here they saw tent towns ringing the edge of the giant caldera, clustered in particular around the foot of the space elevator, some thirty kilometres to the south of them.

They stopped their cars. The silence in the cabins had shifted from reverent to grim. Ann stood at one upper cabin window, looking south toward Sheffield, that child of the space elevator: built because of the elevator, smashed flat when the elevator fell, built again with the elevator’s replacement. This was the city she had come to destroy, as thoroughly as Rome had Carthage; for she meant to bring down the replacement cable too, just as they had the first one in 2061. When they did that, much of Sheffield would again be flattened. What remained would be located uselessly on the peak of a high volcano, above most of the atmosphere; as time passed the surviving structures would be abandoned and dismantled for salvage, leaving only the tent foundations, and perhaps a weather station, and, eventually, the long sunny silence of a mountain summit. The salt was already in the ground.

A cheerful Tharsis Red named Irishka joined them in a small rover, and led them through the maze of warehouses and small tents surrounding the intersection of the equatorial piste with the one circling the rim. As they followed her she described for them the local situation. Most of Sheffield and the rest of the Pavonis rim settlements were already in the hands of the Martian revolutionaries. But the space elevator and the neighbourhood surrounding its base complex were not, and there lay the difficulty. The revolutionary forces on Pavonis were mostly poorly equipped militias, and they did not necessarily share the same agenda. That they had succeeded as far as they had was due to many factors: surprise, the control of Martian space, several strategic victories, the support of the great majority of the Martian population, the unwillingness of the United Nations Transitional Authority to fire on civilians, even when they were making mass demonstrations in the streets. As a result the UNTA security forces had retreated from all over Mars to regroup in Sheffield, and now most of them were in elevator cars, going up to Clarke, the ballast asteroid and space station at the top of the elevator; the rest were jammed into the neighbourhood surrounding the elevator’s massive base complex, called the Socket. This district consisted of elevator support facilities, industrial warehouses, and the hostels, dormitories and restaurants needed to house and feed the port’s workforce. ‘Those are coming in useful now,’ Irishka said, ‘because even so they’re squeezed in like trash in a compactor, and if there hadn’t been food and shelter they would probably have tried a breakout. As it is things are still tense, but at least they can live.’

It somewhat resembled the situation just resolved in Burroughs, Ann thought. Which had turned out fine. It only took someone willing to act and the thing would be done – UNTA evacuated to Earth, the cable brought down, Mars’s link to Earth truly broken.

So Irishka led them through the jumble that was East Pavonis, and their little caravan came to the rim of the caldera, where they parked their rovers. To the south on the western edge of Sheffield they could just make out the elevator cable, a line that was barely visible, and then only for a few kilometres out of its twenty-four thousand. Nearly invisible, in fact, and yet its existence dominated every move they made, every discussion – every thought they had, almost, speared and strung out on that black thread connecting them to Earth.

When they were settled in their camp Ann called her son Peter on the wrist. He was one of the leaders of the revolution on Tharsis, and had directed the campaign against UNTA that had left its forces contained in the Socket and its immediate neighbourhood. A qualified victory at best, but it made Peter one of the heroes of the previous month.

Now he answered the call and his face appeared on her wrist. He looked quite like her, which she found disconcerting. He was absorbed, she saw, concentrating on something other than her call.

‘Any news?’ she asked.

‘No. We appear to be at something of an impasse. We’re allowing all of them caught outside free passage into the elevator district, so they’ve got control of the train station and the south rim airport, and the subway lines from those to the Socket.’

‘Did the planes that evacuated them from Burroughs come here?’

‘Yes. Apparently most of them are leaving for Earth. It’s very crowded in there.’

‘Are they going back to Earth, or into Mars orbit?’

‘Back to Earth. I don’t think they trust orbit any more.’

He smiled at that. He had done a lot in space, aiding Sax’s efforts and so on. Her son the spaceman, the Green. For many years they had scarcely spoken to each other.

Ann said, ‘So what are you going to do now?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t see that we can take the elevator, or the Socket either. It just wouldn’t work. Even if it did, they could always bring the elevator down.’

‘So?’

‘Well—’ He looked suddenly concerned. ‘I don’t think that would be a good thing. Do you?’

‘I think it should come down.’

Now he looked annoyed. ‘Better stay out of the fall line then.’

‘I will.’

‘I don’t want anyone bringing it down without a full discussion,’ he told her sharply. ‘This is important. It should be a decision made by the whole Martian community. I think we need the elevator, myself.’

‘Except we have no way to take possession of it.’

‘That remains to be seen. Meanwhile, it’s not something for you to take into your own hands. I heard what happened in Burroughs, but it’s different here, you understand? We decide strategy together. It needs to be discussed.’

‘It’s a group that’s very good at that,’ Ann said bitterly. Everything was always thoroughly discussed and then always she lost. It was past time for that. Someone had to act. But again Peter looked as if he were being taken from his real work. He thought he would be making the decisions about the elevator, she could see that. Part of a more general feeling of ownership of the planet, no doubt, the birthright of the nisei, displacing the First Hundred and all the rest of the issei. If John had lived that would not have been easy, but the king was dead, long live the king – her son, king of the nisei, the first true Martians.

But king or not, there was a Red army now converging on Pavonis Mons. They were the strongest military operation left on the planet, and they intended to complete the work begun when Earth had been hit by its great flood. They did not believe in consensus or compromise, and for them, knocking down the cable was killing two birds with one stone: it would destroy the last police stronghold, and it would also sever easy contact between Earth and Mars, a primary Red goal. No, knocking down the cable was the obvious thing to do.

But Peter did not seem to know this. Or perhaps he did not care. Ann tried to tell him, but he just nodded, muttering, ‘Yeah yeah, yeah yeah.’ So arrogant, like all the Greens, so blithe and stupid with all their prevaricating, their dealing with Earth, as if you could ever get anything from such a leviathan. No. It was going to take direct action, as in the drowning of Burroughs, as in all the acts of sabotage that had set the stage for the revolution. Without those the revolution wouldn’t even have begun, or if it had it would have been crushed immediately, as in 2061.

‘Yeah yeah. We’d better call a meeting then’ Peter said, looking as annoyed at her as she felt at him.

‘Yeah yeah,’ Ann said heavily. Meetings. But they had their uses; people could assume they meant something, while the real work went on elsewhere.

‘I’ll try to set one up,’ Peter said. She had got his attention at last, she saw; but there was an unpleasant look on his face, as if he had been threatened. ‘Before things get out of hand.’

‘Things are already out of hand,’ she told him, and cut the connection.

* * *

She checked the news on the various channels, Mangalavid, the Reds’ private nets, the Terran summaries. Though Pavonis and the elevator were now the focus of everyone on Mars, the physical convergence on the volcano was only partial. It appeared to her that there were more Red guerrilla units on Pavonis than the Green units of Free Mars and their allies; but it was hard to be sure. Kasei and the most radical wing of the Reds, called the Kakaze (‘fire wind’), had recently occupied the north rim of Pavonis, taking over the train station and tent at Lastflow. The Reds Ann had travelled with, most of them from the old Red mainstream, discussed moving around the rim and joining the Kakaze, but decided in the end to stay in East Pavonis. Ann observed this discussion silently but was glad at the result, as she wanted to keep her distance from Kasei and Dao and their crowd. She was pleased to stay in East Pavonis.

Many Free Mars troops were staying there as well, moving out of their cars into the abandoned warehouses. East Pavonis was becoming a major concentration of revolutionary groups of all kinds; and a couple of days after her arrival, Ann went in and walked over compacted regolith to one of the biggest warehouses in the tent, to take part in a general strategy session.

The meeting went about as she expected. Nadia was at the centre of the discussion, and it was useless talking to her now. Ann just sat on a chair against the back wall, watching the rest of them circle the situation. They did not want to say what Peter had already admitted to her in private: there was no way to get UNTA off the space elevator. Before they conceded that they were going to try to talk the problem out of existence.

Late in the meeting, Sax Russell came over to sit by her side.

‘A space elevator,’ he said. ‘It could be … used.’

Now, Ann was not the least bit comfortable talking to Sax. She knew that he had suffered brain damage at the hands of UNTA security, and had taken a treatment that had changed his personality; but somehow this had not helped at all; it only made things very strange, in that sometimes he seemed to her to be the same old Sax, as familiar as a much-hated brother; while at other times he did indeed seem like a completely different person, inhabiting Sax’s body. These two contrary impressions oscillated rapidly, even sometimes co-existed; just before joining her, as he had talked with Nadia and Art, he had looked like a stranger, a dapper old man with a piercing glare, talking in Sax’s voice and Sax’s old style. Now as he sat next to her, she could see that the changes to his face were utterly superficial. But though he looked familiar the stranger was now inside him – for here was a man who halted and jerked as he delved painfully after what he was trying to say, and then as often as not came out with something scarcely coherent.

‘The elevator is a, a device. For … raising up. A … a tool.’

‘Not if we don’t control it,’ Ann said to him carefully, as if instructing a child.

‘Control…’ Sax said, thinking over the concept as if it was entirely new to him. ‘Influence? If the elevator can be brought down by anyone who really wants to, then…’ He trailed away, lost in his thoughts.

‘Then what?’ Ann prompted.

‘Then it’s controlled by all. Consensual existence. It’s obvious?’

It was as if he were translating from a foreign language. This was not Sax; Ann could only shake her head, and try gently to explain. The elevator was the conduit for the metanationals to reach Mars, she told him. It was in the possession of the metanats now, and the revolutionaries had no means to kick their police forces off of it. Clearly the thing to do in such a situation was to bring it down. Warn people, give them a schedule, and then do it. ‘Loss of life would be minimal, and what there was would be pretty much the fault of anyone so stupid as to stay on the cable, or the equator.’

Unfortunately Nadia heard this from the middle of the room, and she shook her head so violently that her cropped grey locks flew out like a clown’s ruff. She was still very angry with Ann over Burroughs, for no good reason at all, and so Ann glared at her as she walked over to them and said curtly, ‘We need the elevator. It’s our conduit to Terra just as much as it’s their conduit to Mars.’

‘But we don’t need a conduit to Terra,’ Ann said. ‘It’s not a physical relationship for us, don’t you see? I’m not saying we don’t need to have an influence on Terra, I’m not an isolationist like Kasei or Coyote. I agree we need to try to work on them. But it’s not a physical thing, don’t you see? It’s a matter of ideas, of talk, and perhaps a few emissaries. It’s an information exchange. At least it is when it’s going right. It’s when it gets into a physical thing – a resource exchange, or mass emigration, or police control – that’s when the elevator becomes useful, even necessary. So if we took it down we would be saying, we will deal with you on our terms, and not yours.’

It was so obvious. But Nadia shook her head, at what Ann couldn’t imagine.

Sax cleared his throat, and in his old periodic table style said, ‘If we can bring it down, then in effect it is as if it already were down,’ blinking and everything. Like a ghost suddenly there at her side, the voice of the terraforming, the enemy she had lost to time and time again – Saxifrage Russell his own self, same as ever. And all she could do was make the same arguments she always had, the losing arguments, feeling the words’ inadequacy right in her mouth.

Still she tried. ‘People act on what’s there, Sax. The metanat directors and the UN and the governments will look up and see what’s there, and act accordingly. If the cable’s gone they just don’t have the resources or the time to mess with us right now. If the cable’s here, then they’ll want us. They’ll think, well, we could do it. And there’ll be people screaming to try.’ ‘They can always come. The cable is only a fuel-saver.’ ‘A fuel-saver which makes mass transfers possible.’ But now Sax was distracted, and turning back into a stranger. No one would pay attention to her for long enough. Nadia was going on about control of orbit and safe conduct passes and the like.

The strange Sax interrupted Nadia, having never heard her, and said, ‘We’ve promised to … help them out.’

‘By sending them more metals?’ Ann said. ‘Do they really need those?’

‘We could … take people. It might help.’

Ann shook her head. ‘We could never take enough.’ He frowned. Nadia saw they weren’t listening to her, returned to the table. Sax and Ann fell into silence.

Always they argued. Neither conceded anything, no compromises were made, nothing was ever accomplished. They argued using the same words to mean different things, and scarcely even spoke to one another. Once it had been different, very long ago, when they had argued in the same language, and understood each other. But that had been so long ago she couldn’t even remember when exactly it was. In Antarctica? Somewhere. But not on Mars.

‘You know,’ Sax said in a conversational tone, again very unSaxlike but in a different way, ‘it wasn’t the Red militia that caused the Transitional Authority to evacuate Burroughs and the rest of the planet. If guerrillas had been the only factor then the Terrans would have gone after us, and they might well have succeeded. But those mass demonstrations in the tents made it clear that almost everyone on the planet was against them. That’s what governments fear the most; mass protests in the cities. Hundreds of thousands of people going into the streets to reject the current system. That’s what Nirgal means when he says political power comes out of the look in people’s eye. And not out of the end of a gun.’

‘And so?’ Ann said.

Sax gestured at the people in the warehouse. ‘They’re all Greens.’

The others continued debating. Sax watched her like a bird.

Ann got up and walked out of the meeting, into the strangely unbusy streets of East Pavonis. Here and there militia bands held posts on street corners, keeping an eye to the south, toward Sheffield and the cable terminal. Happy, hopeful, serious young natives. There on one corner a group was in an animated discussion, and as Ann passed them a young woman, her face utterly intent, flushed with passionate conviction, cried out, ‘You can’t just do what you want!’

Ann walked on. As she walked she felt more and more uneasy, without knowing why. This is how people change – in little quantum jumps when struck by outer events – no intention, no plan. Someone says ‘the look in people’s eye’, and the phrase is suddenly conjoined with an image: a face glowing with passionate conviction, another phrase: you can’t just do what you want! And so it occurred to her (the look on that young woman’s face!) that it was not just the cable’s fate they were deciding – not just ‘should the cable come down’, but ‘how do we decide things?’ That was the critical postrevolutionary question, perhaps more important than any single issue being debated, even the fate of the cable. Up until now, most people in the underground had operated by a working method which said if we don’t agree with you we will fight you. That attitude was what had drawn people into the underground in the first place, Ann included. And once used to that method, it was hard to get away from it. After all, they had just proved that it worked. And so there was the inclination to continue to use it. She felt that herself.

But political power … say it did come out of the look in people’s eye. You could fight forever, but if people weren’t behind you …

Ann continued to think about that as she drove down into Sheffield, having decided to skip the farce of the afternoon strategy session in East Pavonis. She wanted to have a look at the seat of the action.

It was curious how little seemed to have changed in the day-to-day life of Sheffield. People still went to work, ate in restaurants, talked on the grass of the parks, gathered in the public spaces in this most crowded of tent towns. The shops and restaurants were jammed. Most businesses in Sheffield had belonged to the metanats, and now people read on their screens long arguments over what to do – what the employees’ new relationship to their old owners should be – where they should buy their raw materials, where they should sell – whose regulations they ought to obey, whose taxes they ought to pay. All very confusing, as the screen debates and nightly news vids and wrist nets indicated.

In the plaza devoted to the food market, however, things looked as they always did. Food was already mostly grown and distributed by co-ops; ag networks were in place, the greenhouses on Pavonis were still producing, and so in the market things ran as usual, goods paid for with UNTA dollars or with credit. Except once or twice Ann saw sellers in their aprons shouting red-faced at customers, who shouted right back, arguing over some point of government policy. As Ann passed by one of these arguments, which were no different than those going on among the leaders in East Pavonis, the disputants all stopped and stared at her. She had been recognized. The vegetable seller said loudly, ‘If you Reds would lay off they would just go away!’

‘Ah come on,’ someone retorted. ‘It isn’t her doing it.’

So true, Ann thought as she walked on.

A crowd stood waiting for a tram to come. The transport systems were still running, ready for autonomy. The tent itself was functioning, which was not something to be taken for granted, though clearly most people did; but every tent’s operators had their task obvious before them. They mined their raw materials themselves, mostly out of the air; their solar collectors and nuclear reactors were all the power they needed. So the tents were physically fragile, but if left alone, they could very well become politically autonomous; there was no reason for them to be owned, no justification for it.

So the necessities were served. Daily life plodded on, barely perturbed by revolution.

Or so it seemed at first glance. But there in the streets also were armed groups, young natives in threes and fours and fives, standing on street corners. Revolutionary militias around their missile launchers and remote sensing dishes – Green or Red, it didn’t matter, though they were almost certainly Greens. People eyed them as they walked by, or stopped to chat and find out what they were doing. Keeping an eye on the Socket, the armed natives said. Though Ann could see that they were functioning as police as well. Part of the scene, accepted, supported. People grinned as they chatted; these were their police, they were fellow Martians, here to protect them, to guard Sheffield for them. People wanted them there, that was clear. If they hadn’t, then every approaching questioner would have been a threat, every glance of resentment an attack; which eventually would have forced the militias from the street corners into some safer place. People’s faces, staring in concert; this ran the world.

So Ann brooded over the next few days. And even more so after she took a rim train in the direction opposite to Sheffield, counterclockwise to the north arc of the rim. There Kasei and Dao and the Kakaze were occupying apartments in the little tent at Lastflow. Apparently they had forcibly evicted some noncombatant residents, who naturally had trained down to Sheffield in fury, demanding to be reinstated in their homes, and reporting to Peter and the rest of the Green leaders that the Reds had set up truck – drawn rocket-launchers on the north rim, with the rockets aimed at the elevator and Sheffield more generally.

So Ann walked out into Lastflow’s little station in a bad mood, angry at the Kakaze’s arrogance, as stupid in its way as the Greens’. They had done well in the Burroughs campaign, seizing the dyke very visibly to give everyone a warning, then taking it on themselves to breach the dyke after all the other revolutionary factions had gathered on the heights to the south, ready to rescue the city’s civilian population while the metanat security were forced to retreat. The Kakaze had seen what had been needed and they had done it, without getting bogged down in debate. Without their decisiveness everyone would still be gathered around Burroughs, and the metanats no doubt organizing a Terran expeditionary force to relieve them. It had been a perfectly delivered coup.

Now it seemed that success had gone to their head.

Lastflow had been named after the depression it occupied, a fanshaped lava flow extending more than a hundred kilometres down the northeast flank of the mountain. It was the only blemish in what was otherwise a flawlessly circular summit cone and caldera, and clearly it had come very late in the volcano’s history of eruptions. Standing down in the depression, one’s view of the rest of the summit was cut off – it was like being in a shallow hanging valley, with little visible in any direction – until one walked out to the drop-off at rim’s edge, and saw the huge cylinder of the caldera coring the planet, and on the far rim the skyline of Sheffield, looking like a tiny Manhattan over forty kilometres away.

The curtailed view perhaps explained why the depression had been one of the last parts of the rim to be developed. But now it was filled by a fair-sized tent, six kilometres in diameter and a hundred metres high, heavily reinforced as all tents up here had to be. The settlement had been home mostly to commuter labourers in the rim’s many industries. Now the rimfront district had been taken over by the Kakaze, and just outside the tent stood a fleet of large rovers, no doubt the ones that had caused the rumours about rocket-launchers.

As Ann was led to the restaurant that Kasei had made his headquarters, she was assured by her guides that this was indeed the case; the rovers did haul rocket-launchers, which were ready to flatten UNTA’s last refuge on Mars. Her guides were obviously happy about this, and happy also to be able to tell her about it, happy to meet her and guide her around. A varied bunch – mostly natives, with some Terran newcomers and oldtimers, of all ethnic backgrounds. Among them were a few faces Ann recognized: Etsu Okakura, Al-Khan, Yussuf. A lot of young natives unknown to her stopped them at the restaurant door to shake her hand, grinning enthusiastically. The Kakaze: they were, she had to admit to herself, the wing of the Reds for which she felt the least sympathy. Angry ex-Terrans or idealistic young natives from the tents, their stone eye – teeth dark in their smiles, their eyes glittering as they got this chance to meet her, as they spoke of kami, the need for purity, the intrinsic value of rock, the rights of the planet, and so on. In short, fanatics. She shook their hands and nodded, trying not to let her discomfort show.

Inside the restaurant Kasei and Dao were sitting by a window, drinking dark beer. Everything in the room stopped on Ann’s entrance, and it took a while for people to be introduced, for Kasei and Dao to welcome her with hugs, for meals and conversations to resume. They got her something to eat from the kitchen. The restaurant workers came out to meet her; they were Kakaze as well. Ann waited until they were gone and people had gone back to their tables, feeling impatient and awkward. These were her spiritual children, the media were always saying; she was the original Red; but in truth they made her uncomfortable.

Kasei, in excellent spirits, as he had been ever since the revolution began, said, ‘We’re going to bring down the cable in about a week.’

‘Oh you are!’ Ann said. ‘Why wait so long?’

Dao missed her sarcasm, ‘it’s a matter of warning people, so they have time to get off the equator.’ Though normally a sour man, today he was as cheery as Kasei.

‘And off the cable too?’

‘If they feel like it. But even if they evacuate it and give it to us, it’s still coming down.’

‘How? Are those really rocket-launchers out there?’

‘Yes. But those are there in case they come down and try to retake Sheffield. As for bringing down the cable, breaking it here at the base isn’t the way to do it.’

‘The control rockets might be able to adjust to disruptions at the bottom,’ Kasei explained. ‘Hard to say what would happen, really. But a break just above the areosynchronous point would decrease damage to the equator, and keep New Clarke from flying off as fast as the first one did. We want to minimize the drama of this, you know, avoid any martyrs we can. Just demolition of a building, you know. Like a building past its usefulness.’

‘Yes,’ Ann said, relieved at this sign of good sense. But it was curious how hearing her idea expressed as someone else’s plan disturbed her. She located the main source of her concern: ‘What about the others – the Greens? What if they object?’

‘They won’t,’ Dao said.

‘They are!’ Ann said sharply.

Dao shook his head. ‘I’ve been talking to Jackie. It may be that some of the Greens are truly opposed to it, but her group is just saying that for public consumption, so that they look moderate to the Terrans, and can blame the dangerous stuff on radicals out of their control.’

‘On us,’ Ann said.

They both nodded. ‘Just like with Burroughs,’ Kasei said with a smile.

Ann considered it. No doubt it was true. ‘But some of them are genuinely opposed. I’ve been arguing with them about it, and it’s no publicity stunt.’

‘Uh huh,’ Kasei said slowly.

Both he and Dao watched her.

‘So you’ll do it anyway,’ she said at last.

They continued to watch her. She saw all of a sudden that they would no more do what she told them to do than would boys ordered about by a senile grandmother. They were humouring her. Figuring out how they could best put her to use.

‘We have to,’ Kasei said. ‘It’s in the best interest of Mars. Not just for Reds, but all of us. We need some distance between us and Terra, and the gravity well re-establishes that distance. Without it we’ll be sucked down into the maelstrom.’

It was Ann’s argument, it was just what she had been saying in the meetings in East Pavonis. ‘But what if they try to stop you?’

‘I don’t think they can,’ Kasei said.

‘But if they try?’

The two men glanced at each other. Dao shrugged.

So, Ann thought, watching them. They were willing to start a civil war.

People were still coming up the slopes of Pavonis to the summit, filling up Sheffield, East Pavonis, Lastflow and the other rim tents. Among them were Michel, Spencer, Vlad, Marina and Ursula; Mikhail and a whole brigade of Bogdanovists; Coyote, on his own; a group from Praxis; a large train of Swiss; rover caravans of Arabs, both Sufi and secular; natives from other towns and settlements on Mars. All coming up for the endgame. Everywhere else on Mars, the natives had consolidated their control; all the physical plants were being operated by local teams, in co-operation with Separation de L’Atmosphere. There were some small pockets of metanat resistance, of course, and there were some Kakaze out there systematically destroying terraforming projects; but Pavonis was clearly the crux of the remaining problem – either the endgame of the revolution or, as Ann was beginning to fear, the opening moves of a civil war. Or both. It would not be the first time.

So she went to the meetings, and slept poorly at night, waking from troubled sleep, or from naps in the transit between one meeting and the next. The meetings were beginning to blur: all contentious, all pointless. She was getting tired, and the broken sleep did not help. She was nearly one hundred and fifty years old, after all, and had not had a gerontological treatment in twenty-five years, and she felt weary all through, all the time. So she watched from a well of growing indifference as the others chewed over the situation. Earth was still in disarray; the great flood was indeed proving to be the ideal trigger mechanism for which General Sax had waited. Sax felt no remorse for taking advantage of Earth’s trouble, Ann could see; he never thought once about the many deaths the flood had caused down there. She could read his face thought by thought as he talked about it – what would be the point of remorse? The flood was an accident, a geological catastrophe like an ice age or a meteor impact. No one should waste time feeling remorse for it, not even if they were taking advantage of it for their own purposes. Best to take what good one possibly could from the chaos and disorder, and not worry. All this was right on Sax’s face as he discussed what they should do next vis a vis Earth. Send a delegation, he suggested. Diplomatic mission, personal appearance, something about throwing things together; incoherent on the surface, but she could read him like a brother, this old enemy! Well, Sax – the old Sax anyway – was nothing if not rational. Therefore easy to read. Easier than the young fanatics of the Kakaze, now that she thought of it.

And one could only meet him on his own ground, speak to him on his own terms. So she sat across from him in the meetings and tried to concentrate, even though her mind seemed to be hardening somehow, petrifying inside her head. Round and round the arguments went: what to do on Pavonis? Pavonis Mons, Peacock Mountain. Who would ascend the Peacock Throne? There were potential Shahs everywhere – Peter, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Kasei, Maya, Nadia, Mikhail, Ariadne, the invisible Hiroko …

Now someone was invoking the Dorsa Brevia conference as the framework for discussion they should use. All very well, but without Hiroko among them the moral centre was gone, the one person in all Martian history, apart from John Boone, to whom everyone would defer. But Hiroko and John were gone, along with Arkady, and Frank, who would have come in useful now, if he had been on her side, which he wouldn’t have been. All gone. And they were left with anarchy. Curious how at a crowded table those absent could be more visible than those present. Hiroko, for instance; people referred to her frequently; and no doubt she was somewhere in the outback, deserting them as usual in their hour of need. Pissing them out of the nest.

Curious too how the only child of their lost heroes, Kasei the son of John and Hiroko, should be the most radical leader there, a disquieting man even though he was on her side. There he sat, shaking his grey head at Art, a small smile twisting his mouth. He was nothing like either John or Hiroko – well, he had some of Hiroko’s arrogance, some of John’s simplicity. The worst of both. And yet he was a power, he did what he wanted, and a lot of people followed him. But he was not like his parents had been.

And Peter, sitting just two seats away from Kasei, was nothing like her or Simon. It was hard to see what blood relationships meant; nothing, obviously. Though it did twist her heart to hear Peter speak, as he argued with Kasei and opposed the Reds at every point, making a case for some kind of interplanetary collaborationism. And never in these sessions addressing her, or even looking at her. It was perhaps intended as some kind of courtesy – I will not argue with you in public. But it looked like a slight – I will not argue with you because you don’t matter.

He continued to argue for keeping the cable, and agreed with Art about the Dorsa Brevia document, naturally, given the Green majority that had existed then and persisted now. Using Dorsa Brevia as a guide would assure the cable’s survival. Meaning the continued presence of the United Nations Transitional Authority. And indeed some of them around Peter were talking about ‘semi-autonomy’ in relation to Terra, instead of independence, and Peter went along with that; it made her sick. And all without meeting her eye. It was Simonlike, somehow, a kind of silence. It made her angry.

‘We have no reason to talk about long-term plans until we have solved the cable problem,’ she said, interrupting him and earning a very black look indeed, as if she had broken an understanding; but there was no understanding, and why should they not argue, when they had no real relationship – nothing but biology …

Art claimed that the UN was now saying that it would be willing to agree to Martian semi-autonomy, as long as Mars remained in ‘close consultation’ with Earth, and an active aid in Earth’s crisis. Nadia said she was in communication with Derek Hastings, who was now up in New Clarke. Hastings had abandoned Burroughs without a bloody battle, it was true, and now she claimed he was willing to compromise. No doubt; his next retreat would not be so easy, nor would it take him to a very pleasant place, for despite all the emergency action, Earth was now a world of famine, plague, looting – breakdown of the social contract, which was so fragile after all. It could happen here too; she had to remember that fragility when she got angry enough, as now, to want to tell Kasei and Dao to abandon the discussions and fire away. If she did that it very likely would happen; a strange sensation of her own power came over her then, as she looked around the table at the anxious, angry, unhappy faces. She could tip the balance; she could knock this table right over.

Speakers were taking five-minute turns to make their case one way or the other. More were in favour of cutting the cable than Ann would have guessed, not just Reds, but representatives of cultures or movements that felt most threatened by the metanat order, or by mass emigration from Earth: Bedouins, the Polynesians, the Dorsa Brevia locals, some of the cannier natives. Still, they were in the minority. Not a tiny minority, but a minority. Isolationist versus interactive; yet another fracture to add to all the others rending the Martian independence movement.

Jackie Boone stood up and spoke for fifteen minutes in favour of keeping the cable, threatening anyone who wanted to bring it down with expulsion from Martian society. It was a disgusting performance, but popular, and afterward Peter stood and spoke in the same way, only slightly more subtly. It made Ann so angry that she stood up immediately after he had finished, to argue for bringing the cable down. This got her another poisonous look from Peter, but it scarcely registered – she talked in a white heat, forgetting all about the five-minute limit. No one tried to cut her off, and she went on and on, though she had no idea what she was going to say next, and no memory of what she had already said. Perhaps her subconscious had organized it all like a lawyer’s brief – hopefully so – on the other hand, a part of her thought as her mouth ran on, perhaps she was just saying the word Mars over and over again, or babbling, and the audience simply humouring her, or else miraculously comprehending her in a moment of glossolalic grace, invisible flames on their heads like caps of jewels – and indeed their hair looked to Ann like spun metal, the old men’s bald pates like chunks of jasper, inside which all languages dead and living were understood equally; and for a moment they appeared all caught up together with her, all inside an epiphany of Red Mars, free of Earth, living on the primal planet that had been and could be again.

She sat down. This time it was not Sax who rose to debate with her, as it had been so many times before. In fact he was cross-eyed with concentration, looking at her open-mouthed, in an amazement that she could not interpret. They stared at each other, the two of them, eyes locked; but what he was thinking she had no idea. She only knew she had caught his attention at last.

This time it was Nadia who rebutted her, Nadia her sister, arguing slowly and calmly for interaction with Earth, for intervention in the Terran situation. She spoke of the need to compromise, the need to engage, influence, transform. It was deeply contradictory, Ann thought; because they were weak, Nadia was saying, they could not afford to offend, and therefore they must change all Terran social reality.

‘But how!’ Ann cried. ‘When you have no fulcrum you can’t move a world! No fulcrum, no lever, no force—’

‘It isn’t just Earth,’ Nadia replied. ‘There are going to be other settlements in the solar system. Mercury, Luna, the big outer moons, the asteroids. We’ve got to be part of all that. As the original settlement, we’re the natural leader. An unbridged gravity well is just an obstruction to all that – a reduction in our ability to act, a reduction in our power.’

‘Getting in the way of progress,’ Ann said bitterly. ‘Think what Arkady would have said to that. No, look. We had a chance here to make something different. That was the whole point. We still have that chance. Everything that increases the space within which we can create a new society is a good thing. Everything that reduces our space is a bad thing. Think about it!’

Perhaps they did. But it made no difference. Any number of elements on Earth were sending up their arguments for the cable – arguments, threats, entreaties. They needed help down there. Any help. Art Randolph continued energetically lobbying for the cable on behalf of Praxis, which was looking to Ann as if it would become the next transitional authority, metanationalism in its latest manifestation or disguise.

But the natives were being won over by them slowly, intrigued by the possibility of ‘conquering Earth’, unaware of how impossible this was, incapable of imagining Earth’s vastness and immobility. One could tell them and tell them, but they would never be able to imagine it.

Finally it was time for an informal vote. It was representative voting, they had decided, one vote for each of the signatory groups to the Dorsa Brevia document, one vote also to all the interested parties that had arisen since then – new settlements in the outback, new political parties, associations, labs, companies, guerrilla bands, the several Red splinter groups. Before they started some generous naive soul even offered the First Hundred a vote, and everyone there laughed at the idea that the First Hundred might be able to vote the same way on anything. The generous soul, a young woman from Dorsa Brevia, then proposed that each of the First Hundred be given an individual vote, but this was turned down as endangering the tenuous grasp they had on representative governance. It would have made no difference anyway.

So they voted to allow the space elevator to remain standing, for the time being – and in the possession of UNTA, down to and including the Socket, without contestation. It was like King Canute deciding to declare the tide legal after all, but no one laughed except Ann. The other Reds were furious. Ownership of the Socket was still being actively contested, Dao objected loudly, the neighbourhood around it was vulnerable and could be taken, there was no reason to back off like this, they were only trying to sweep a problem under the rug because it was hard! But the majority were in agreement. The cable should remain.

* * *

Ann felt the old urge: escape. Tents and trains, people, the little Manhattan skyline of Sheffield against the south rim, the summit basalt all torn and flattened and paved over … There was a piste all the way around the rim, but the western side of the caldera was very nearly uninhabited. So Ann got in one of the smallest Red rovers, and drove around the rim counterclockwise, just inside the piste, until she came to a little meteorological station, where she parked the rover and went out through its lock, stiff in a walker that was much like the ones they had gone out in during the first years.

She was a kilometre or two away from the rim’s edge. She walked slowly east toward it, stumbling once or twice before she started to pay proper attention. The old lava on the flat expanse of the broad rim was smooth and dark in some places, rough and lighter in others. By the time she approached the edge she was in full areologist mode, doing a boulder ballet she could sustain all day, attuned to every knob and crack underfoot. And this was a good thing, because near the rim’s drop-off the land collapsed in a series of narrow curving ledges, the drops sometimes a step, sometimes taller than she was. And always the growing sense of empty air ahead, as the far side of the caldera and the rest of the great circle became visible. And then she was climbing down onto the last ledge, a bench only some five metres wide, with a curved back wall, shoulder-high: and below her dropped the great round chasm of Pavonis.

This caldera was one of the geological marvels of the solar system, a hole forty-five kilometres across and a full five kilometres deep, and almost perfectly regular in every way – circular, flat-floored, almost vertically walled – a perfect cylinder of space, cut into the volcano like a rock sampler’s coring. None of the other three big calderas even approached this simplicity of form; Ascraeus and Olympus were complicated palimpsests of overlapping rings, while the very broad, shallow caldera of Arsia was roughly circular, but shattered in every way. Pavonis alone was a regular cylinder: the Platonic ideal of a volcanic caldera.

Of course from this wonderful vantage point she now had, the horizontal stratification of the interior walls added a lot of irregular detail, rust and black and chocolate and umber bands indicating variations in the composition of the lava deposits; and some bands were harder than those above and below, so that there were many arcuate balconies lining the wall at different elevations – isolated curving benches, perched on the side of the immense rock throat, most never visited. And the floor so flat. The subsidence of the volcano’s magma chamber, located some one hundred and sixty kilometres below the mountain, had to have been unusually consistent; it had dropped in the same place every time. Ann wondered if it had been determined yet why that had been; if the magma chamber had been younger than the other big volcanoes, or smaller, or the lava more homogenous … Probably someone had investigated the phenomenon; no doubt she could look it up on the wrist. She tapped out the code for the Journal of Areological Studies, typed in Pavonis: ‘Evidence of Strombolian explosive activity found in west Tharsis clasts’. ‘Radial ridges in caldera and concentric graben outside the rim suggest late subsidence of the summit’. She had just crossed some of those graben. ‘Release of juvenile volatiles into atmosphere calculated by radiometric dating of Lastflow marks’.

She clicked off the wristpad. She no longer kept up with all the latest areology, she hadn’t for years. Even reading the abstracts would have taken far more time than she had. And of course a lot of areology had been badly compromised by the terraforming project. Scientists working for the metanats had concentrated on resource exploration and evaluation, and had found signs of ancient oceans, of the early warm wet atmosphere, possibly even of ancient life; on the other hand radical Red scientists had warned of increased seismic activity, rapid subsidence, mass wasting, and the disappearance of even a single surface sample left in its primal condition. Political stress had skewed nearly everything written about Mars in the past hundred years. The Journal was the only publication Ann knew of which tried to publish papers delimiting their inquiries very strictly to reporting areology in the pure sense, concentrating on what had happened in the five billion years of solitude; it was the only publication Ann still read, or at least glanced at, looking through the titles and some of the abstracts, and the editorial material at the front; once or twice she had even sent in a letter concerning some detail or other, which they had printed without fanfare. Published by the university in Sabishii, the Journal was peer-reviewed by like-minded areologists, and the articles were rigorous, well-researched and with no obvious political point to their conclusions; they were simply science. The journal’s editorials advocated what had to be called a Red position, but only in the most limited sense, in that they argued for the preservation of the primal landscape so that studies could be carried on without having to deal with gross contaminations. This had been Ann’s position from the very start, and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting the Reds. They were her natural peer group, really – the people she understood, and with whom she sympathized.

But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The regular contributors to the Journal more or less. As for the rest of the Reds, the Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of metaphysical position, a cult – they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of Hiroko’s Greens, members of some kind of rock-worshipping sect. Ann had very little in common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their Redness from a completely different worldview.

And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the Reds themselves, then what could one say about the Martian independence movement as a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening already.

Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good view. It appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor, though from five thousand metres up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of old Sheffield were scarcely visible – ah – there they were, on the floor under the new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by the fall of the city in ’61. It was hard to say.

The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim … many of them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180° of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at twenty-seven kilometres high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it was at the datum – or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.

Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it) spearing Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built a tent city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they would then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor – add about fifteen hundred square kilometres to the city, though it was a question who would want to live at the bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls rising up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral … perhaps it would appeal to some. The Bogdanovists had lived in moholes for years, after all. Grow forests, build climbers’ huts or rather millionaires’ penthouses on the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the rock, install glass elevators that took all day to go up or down … rooftops, terraces, skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat round roofs, pistes, flying freeways … oh yes, the whole summit of Pavonis Mons, caldera and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was always growing, growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system. Billions of people, trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close to immortal as they could make themselves …

She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals in Lastflow were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the summit of Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great world city. She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the awe of the symmetrical formation, the love of rock hard under her bottom. Her feet hung over the edge of the bench, she kicked her heels against basalt; she could throw a pebble and it would fall five thousand metres. But she couldn’t concentrate. She couldn’t feel it. Petrification. So numb, for so long … She sniffed, shook her head, pulled her feet in over the edge. Walked back up to her rover.

She dreamed of the long run-out. The landslide was rolling across the floor of Melas Chasma, about to strike her. Everything visible with surreal clarity. Again she remembered Simon, again she groaned and got off the little dyke, going through the motions, appeasing a dead man inside her, feeling awful. The ground was vibrating—

She woke, by her own volition she thought – escaping, running away – but there was a hand, pulling hard on her arm.

‘Ann, Ann, Ann.’

It was Nadia. Another surprise. Ann struggled up, disoriented. ‘Where are we?’

‘Pavonis, Ann. The revolution. I came over and woke you because a fight has broken out between Kasei’s Reds and the Greens in Sheffield.’

The present rolled over her like the landslide in her dream. She jerked out of Nadia’s grasp, groped for her shirt. ‘Wasn’t my rover locked?’

‘I broke in.’

‘Ah.’ Ann stood up, still foggy, getting more annoyed the more she understood the situation. ‘Now what happened?’

‘They launched missiles at the cable.’

‘They did!’ Another jolt, further clearing away the fog. ‘And?’

‘It didn’t work. The cable’s defence systems shot them down. They’ve got a lot of hardware up there now, and they’re happy to be able to use it at last. But now the Reds are moving into Sheffield from the west, firing more rockets, and the UN forces on Clarke are bombing the first launch sites, over on Ascraeus, and they’re threatening to bomb every armed force down here. This is just what they wanted. And the Reds think it’s going to be like Burroughs, obviously, they’re trying to force the action. So I came to you. Look, Ann, I know we’ve been fighting a lot. I haven’t been very, you know, patient, but look, this is just too much. Everything could fall apart at the last minute – the UN could decide the situation here is anarchy, and come up from Earth and try to take over again.’

‘Where are they?’ Ann croaked. She pulled on pants, went to the bathroom. Nadia followed her right in. This too was a surprise; in Underhill it might have been normal between them, but it had been a long long time since Nadia had followed her into a bathroom talking obsessively while Ann washed her face and sat down and peed. ‘They’re still based in Lastflow, but now they’ve cut the rim piste and the one to Cairo, and they’re fighting in west Sheffield, and around the Socket. Reds fighting Greens.’

‘Yes, yes.’

‘So will you talk to the Reds, will you stop them?’

A sudden fury swept through Ann. ‘You drove them to this,’ she shouted in Nadia’s face, causing Nadia to crash back into the door. Ann got up and took a step toward Nadia and yanked her trousers up, shouting still: ‘You and your smug, stupid terraforming, it’s all green green green green, with never a hint of compromise! It’s just as much your fault as theirs, since they have no hope!’

‘Maybe so,’ Nadia said mulishly. She didn’t care about that, it was the past and didn’t matter; she waved it aside and would not be swerved from her point: ‘But will you try?’

Ann stared at her stubborn old friend, at this moment almost youthful with fear, utterly focused and alive.

‘I’ll do what I can,’ Ann said grimly. ‘But from what you say, it’s already too late.’

It was indeed too late. The rover camp Ann had been staying in was deserted, and when she got on the wrist and called around, she got no answers. So she left Nadia and the rest of them stewing in the East Pavonis warehouse complex, and drove her rover around to Lastflow, hoping to find some of the Red leaders based there. But Lastflow had been abandoned by the Reds, and none of the locals knew where they had gone. People were watching TVs in the stations and cafe windows, but when Ann looked too she saw no news of the fighting, not even on Mangalavid. A feeling of desperation began to seep into her grim mood; she wanted to do something but did not know how. She tried her wristpad again, and to her surprise Kasei answered on their private band. His face in the little image looked shockingly like John Boone’s, so much so that in her confusion Ann didn’t at first hear what he said. He looked so happy, it was John to the life!

‘… had to do it,’ he was telling her. Ann wondered if she had asked him about that. ‘If we don’t do something they’ll tear this world apart. They’ll garden it right to the tops of the big four.’

This echoed Ann’s thoughts on the ledge enough to shock her again, but she collected herself and said, ‘We’ve got to work within the framework of the discussions, Kasei, or else we’ll start a civil war.’

‘We’re a minority, Ann. The framework doesn’t care about minorities.’

‘I’m not so sure. That’s what we have to work on. And even if we do decide on active resistance, it doesn’t have to be here and now. It doesn’t have to be Martians killing Martians.’

‘They’re not Martian.’ There was a glint in his eye, his expression was Hirokolike in its distance from the ordinary world. In that sense he was not like John at all. The worst of both parents; and so they had another prophet, speaking a new language.

‘Where are you now?’

‘West Sheffield.’

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Take the Socket, and then bring down the cable. We’re the ones with the weapons and the experience. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble.’

‘You didn’t bring it down first try.’

‘Too fancy. We’ll just chop it down this time.’

‘I thought that wasn’t the way to do it.’

‘It’ll work.’

‘Kasei, I think we need to negotiate with the Greens.’

He shook his head, impatient with her, disgusted that she had lost her nerve when push came to shove. ‘After the cable is down we’ll negotiate. Look Ann, I’ve gotta go. Stay out of the fall line.’

‘Kasei!’

But he was gone. No one listened to her – not her enemies, not her friends, not her family – though she would have to call Peter. She would have to try Kasei again. She needed to be there in person, to get his attention as she had Nadia’s – yes, it had come to that: to get their attention she had to shout right in their faces.

The possibility of getting blocked around East Pavonis kept her going west from Lastflow, circling counterclockwise as she had the day before, to come on the Red force from its rear, no doubt the best approach anyway. It was about a hundred and fifty kilometre drive from Lastflow to the western edge of Sheffield, and as she sped around the summit, just outside the piste, she spent the time trying to call the various forces on the mountain, with no success. Explosive static marked the fight for Sheffield, and memories of ’61 erupted with these brutal bursts of white noise, frightening her; she drove the rover as fast as it would go, keeping it on the piste’s narrow outside apron to make the ride smoother and faster – a hundred kilometres per hour, then faster – racing, really, to try to stave off the disaster of a civil war – there was a terrible dreamlike quality to it. And especially in that it was too late, too late. In moments like these she was always too late. In the sky over the caldera, starred clouds appeared instantaneously – explosions, without a doubt missiles fired at the cable and shot down in midflight, in white puffs like incompetent fireworks, clustered over Sheffield and peaking in the region of the cable, but puffing into existence all over the vast summit, then drifting off east on the Jetstream. Some of those rockets were getting nailed a long way from their target.

Looking up at the battle overhead she almost drove into the first tent of west Sheffield, which was already punctured. As the town had grown westward new tents had attached to the previous ones like lobes of pillow lava; now the construction moraines outside the latest tent were littered with bits of framework, like shards of glass, and the tent fabric was missing in the remaining soccer-ball shapes. Her rover bounced wildly over a mound of basalt rubble; she braked, drove slowly up to the wall. The vehicle lock doors were stuck shut. She put on her suit and helmet, ducked into the rover’s own lock, left the car. Heart pounding hard, she walked up to the city wall and climbed over it into Sheffield.

The streets were deserted. Glass and bricks and bamboo shards and twisted magnesium beams lay scattered on the streetgrass. At this elevation, tent failure caused flawed buildings to pop like balloons; windows gaped empty and dark, and here and there complete rectangles of unbroken windows lay scattered, like great clear shields. And there was a body, face frosted or dusted. There would be a lot of dead, people weren’t used to thinking about decompression any more, it was an old settlers’ worry. But not today.

Ann kept walking east. ‘Look for Kasei or Dao or Marion or Peter,’ she said to her wrist again and again. But no one replied.

She followed a narrow street just inside the southern wall of the tent. Harsh sunlight, sharp-edged black shadows. Some buildings had held, their windows in place, their lights on inside. No one to be seen in them, of course. Ahead, the cable was just visible, a black vertical stroke rising into the sky out of east Sheffield, like a geometric line become visible in their reality.

The Red emergency band was a signal transmitted in a rapidly varying wavelength, synchronized for everyone who had the current encryption. This system cut through some kinds of radio jamming very well; nevertheless Ann was surprised when a crow voice cawed from her wrist, ‘Ann, it’s Dao. Up here.’

He was actually in sight, waving at her from a doorway into a building’s little emergency lock. He and a group of some twenty people were working with a trio of mobile rocket-launchers out in the street. Ann ran over to them, ducked into the doorway beside Dao. ‘This has to stop!’ she cried.

Dao looked surprised. ‘We’ve almost got the Socket.’

‘But what then?’

Talk to Kasei about that. He’s up ahead, going for Arsiaview.’

One of their rockets whooshed away, its noise faint in the thin air. Dao was back at it. Ann ran forward up the street, keeping as close as she could to the buildings siding it. It was obviously dangerous, but at that moment she didn’t care if she were killed or not, so she had no fear. Peter was somewhere in Sheffield, in command of the Green revolutionaries who had been there from the beginning. These people had been efficient enough to keep the UNTA security forces trapped on the cable and up on Clarke, so they were by no means the hapless pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now—

She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.

While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.

‘It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,’ he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. ‘The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.’

It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, ‘Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it – make it. Make it new.’

Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: ‘They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution – devotion. You’re the – the personification of certain values – for the natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved – helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must – Ann – just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value.’

So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, seemed to pull himself together: ‘… logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests’. Just like his old self.

Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.

‘Ann!’ He stared intently at his own wristpad. ‘Listen, mother – I want you to stop these people!’

‘Don’t you mother me,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying. Can you tell me where they are?’

‘I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through – it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.’ Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. ‘Right.’ He looked back at her. ‘Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.’

‘I’ll talk to him.’

And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.

‘I’m Ann Clayborne,’ she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, ‘I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy.’

Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: ‘It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dyke. We’re trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.’

It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt as if Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth; she couldn’t stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back on line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall. ‘If they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counter-attack, I’ll give the word.’

‘Peter!’ she said without thinking.

The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.

‘You deal with Hastings,’ she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. ‘I’m going for Kasei.’

Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modelled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket-launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness – like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.

There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defences seemed to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.

But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ’61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to the elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: ’—taken ArsiaviewpM/cfc/c/c—’ ‘We need the AI back but I’d say X axis three two two, Y axis eightpkkkkk—’

Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.

Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she breathed. Peter had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a patch attempt, heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her earphones, she caught some garbled half-phrases – Peter, describing Red movements to Green forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the cable defence systems down onto them. Yes, that was Peter’s voice, bits of it all cut with static. Calling the shots. Then it was only static.

At the base of the elevator brief flashes of explosive light transformed the lower part of the cable from black to silver, then back to black again. Every alarm inside Arsiaview began ringing or howling. All the smoke whipped away toward the east end of the tent. Ann got into a north-south alley and leaned back against the east wall of a building, flat against concrete. No windows on the alley. Booms, crashes, wind. Then the silence of near airlessness.

She got up and wandered through the tent. Where did one go when people were being killed? Find your friends if you can. If you can tell who they are.

She collected herself and continued looking for Kasei’s group, going to where Dao had said they would be, and then trying to think where they would go next. Outside the city was a possibility; but having come inside they might try for the next tent to the east, try to take them one by one, decompress them, force everyone below and then move on. She stayed on the street paralleling the tent wall, jogging along as fast as she could. She was in good shape but this was ridiculous, she couldn’t catch her breath, and she was soaking the inside of her suit with sweat. The street was deserted, eerily silent and still, so that it was hard to believe she was in the middle of a battle, and impossible to believe she would ever find the group for which she was looking.

But there they were. Up ahead, in the streets around one of the triangular parks – figures in helmets and suits, carrying automatic weapons and mobile missile-launchers, firing at unseen opponents in a building fronted with chert. The red circles on their arms, Reds—

A blinding flash and she was knocked down. Her ears roared. She was at the foot of a building, pressed against its polished stone side. Jaspilite: red jasper and iron oxide, in alternating bands. Pretty. Her back and bottom and shoulder hurt, and her elbow. But nothing was agonizing. She could move. She crawled around, looked back up to the triangle park. Things were burning in the wind, the flames little oxygen-starved orange spurts, going out already. The figures there were cast about like broken dolls, limbs akimbo, in positions no bones could hold. She got up and ran to the nearest knot of them, drawn by a familiar grey-haired head that had come free of its helmet. That was Kasei, only son of John Boone and Hiroko Ai, one side of his jaw bloody, his eyes open and sightless. He had taken her too seriously. And his opponents not seriously enough. His pink stone eye-tooth lay there exposed by his wound, and seeing it Ann choked and turned away. The waste. All three of them dead now.

She turned back and crouched, undipped Kasei’s wristpad. It was likely that he had a direct access band to the Kakaze, and when she was back in the shelter of an obsidian building marred by great white shatter-stars, she tapped in the general call code, and said, ‘This is Ann Clayborne, calling all Reds. All Reds. Listen, this is Ann Clayborne. The attack on Sheffield has failed. Kasei is dead, along with a lot of others. More attacks here won’t work. They’ll cause the full UNTA security force to come back down onto the planet again.’ She wanted to say how stupid the plan had been in the first place, but she choked back the words. ‘Those of you who can, get off the mountain. Everyone in Sheffield, get back to the west and get out of the city, and off the mountain. This is Ann Clayborne.’

Several acknowledgements came in, and she half-listened to them as she walked west, back through Arsiaview toward her rover. She made no attempt to hide; if she was killed she was killed, but now she didn’t believe it would happen; she walked under the wings of some dark covering angel, who kept her from death no matter what happened, forcing her to witness the deaths of all the people she knew and all the planet she loved. Her fate. Yes; there was Dao and his crew, all dead right where she had left them, lying in pools of their own blood. She must have just missed it.

And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its centre, was another knot of bodies – not Reds – they wore green headbands, and one of them looked like Peter, it was his back – she walked over weak-kneed, under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.

She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without incident, got in and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield. There a piste ran down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia. Seeing it, she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but workable because of that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her recommendations as though they were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into South Saddle, then around Arsia on the western slope above the snowline, there to slip into the upper end of Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that contained a hidden Red refuge, a cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There they could hide and hide and start another long underground campaign, against the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia – they were all Green.

She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he answered. He was somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be alive no doubt, a bitter furious expression on his cracked face.

Ann told him her plan; he nodded.

‘After a time they’ll need to get farther away,’ he said.

Ann couldn’t help it: ‘It was stupid to attack the cable!’

‘I know,’ Coyote said wearily.

‘Didn’t you try to talk them out of it?’

‘I did.’ His expression grew blacker. ‘Kasei’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

Coyote’s face twisted with grief. ‘Ah, God. Those bastards.’

Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him much. Coyote on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko’s hidden colony, and from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions all over Mars. Now tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote’s cheeks, and Ann clenched her teeth.

‘Can you get them down to Aganippe?’ she asked. ‘I’ll stay and deal with the people in East Pavonis.’

Coyote nodded. ‘I’ll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at West Station.’

‘I’ll tell them that.’

‘The Greens will be mad at you.’

‘Fuck the Greens.’

Some part of the Kakaze sneaked into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers, their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted. Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day’s bad news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends everywhere in the town east of them.

‘A direct assault was a bad idea,’ she said, unable to help herself. ‘It worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable wasn’t worth that. We’re going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance, our next real chance.’

There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: ‘No! No! Never! Bring down the cable!’

Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent again.

‘It could backfire all too easily if we fight the Greens now. It could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?’

This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to. She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann Clayborne … A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same side …

They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that – without Kasei, without Dao – with the bulk of the natives Green, and firmly behind the leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor …

‘Coyote will get you off Tharsis,’ Ann said, feeling sick. She left the room, walked through the terminal and out of the lock, back into her rover. Kasei’s wristpad lay on the car’s dashboard, and she threw it across the compartment, sobbed. She sat in the driver’s seat and composed herself, and then started the car and went looking for Nadia and Sax and all the rest.

She drove sightlessly back around the caldera, clockwise this time. Eventually she found herself in East Pavonis, and there they were, all still in the warehouse complex; when she walked in the door they stared at her as if the attack on the cable had been her idea, as if she was personally responsible for everything bad that had happened, both on that day and throughout the revolution – just as they had stared at her after Burroughs, in fact. Peter was actually there, the traitor, and she veered away from him, and ignored the rest, or tried to, Irishka frightened, Jackie red-eyed and furious, her father killed this day after all, and though she was in Peter’s camp and so partly responsible for the crushing response to the Red offensive, you could see with one look at her that someone would pay – but Ann ignored all that, and walked across the room to Sax – who was in his nook in the far corner of the big central room, sitting before a screen reading long columns of figures, muttering things to his AI. Ann waved a hand between his face and his screen and he looked up, startled.

Strangely, he was the only one of the whole crowd who did not appear to blame her. Indeed he regarded her with his head tilted to the side, with a birdlike curiosity that almost resembled sympathy.

‘Bad news about Kasei,’ he said. ‘Kasei and all the rest. I’m glad that you and Desmond survived.’

She ignored that, and told him in a rapid undertone where the Reds were going, and what she had told them to do. ‘I think I can keep them from trying any more direct attacks on the cable,’ she said. ‘And from most acts of violence, at least in the short term.’

‘Good,’ Sax said.

‘But I want something for it,’ she said. ‘I want it and if I don’t get it, I’ll set them on you forever.’

‘The soletta?’ Sax asked.

She stared at him. He must have listened to her more often than she had thought. ‘Yes.’

His eyebrows came together as he thought it over. ‘It could cause a kind of ice age,’ he said.

‘Good.’

He stared at her as he thought about it. She could see him doing it, in quick flashes or bursts: ice age – thinner atmosphere – terraforming slowed – new ecosystems destroyed – perhaps compensate – greenhouse gases. And so on and so forth. It was almost funny how she could read this stranger’s face, this hated brother looking for a way out. He would look and look, but heat was the main driver of terraforming, and with the soletta gone, they would at least be restricted to Mars’s normal level of sunlight, thus slowed to a more ‘natural’ pace. It was possible that the inherent stability of that approach even appealed to Sax’s conservatism, such as it was.

‘Okay,’ he said.

‘You can speak for these people?’ she said, waving disdainfully at the crowd behind them, as if all her oldest companions were not among them, as if they were UNTA technocrats or metanat functionaries …

‘No,’ he said. ‘I only speak for me. But I can get rid of the soletta.’

‘You’d do it against their wishes?’

He frowned. ‘I think I can talk them into it. If not, I know I can talk the Da Vinci team into it. They like challenges.’

‘Okay.’

It was the best she could get from him, after all. She straightened up, still nonplussed. She hadn’t expected him to agree. And now that he had, she discovered that she was still angry, still sick at heart. This concession – now that she had it, meant nothing. They would figure out other ways to heat things. Sax would make his argument using that point, no doubt. Give the soletta to Ann, he would say, as a way of buying off the Reds. Then forge on.

She walked out of the big room without a glance at the others. Out of the warehouses to her rover.

For a while she drove blindly, without any sense of where she was going. Just get away, just escape. Thus by accident she headed westward, and in short order she had to stop or run over the rim’s edge.

Abruptly she braked the car.

In a daze she looked out the windshield. Bitter taste in her mouth, guts all knotted, every muscle tense and aching. The great encircling rim of the caldera was smoking at several points, chiefly from Sheffield and Lastflow, but also from a dozen other places as well. No sight of the cable over Sheffield – but it was still there, marked by a concentration of smoke around its base, lofting east on the thin, hard wind. Another peak banner, blown on the endless Jetstream. Time was a wind sweeping them away. The plumes of smoke marred the dark sky, obscuring some of the many stars that shone in the hour before sunset. It looked as if the old volcano was waking again, rousing from its long dormancy and preparing to erupt. Through the thin smoke the sun was a dark red glowing ball, looking much like an early molten planet must have looked, its colour staining the shreds of smoke maroon and rust and crimson. Red Mars. But red Mars was gone, and gone for good. Soletta or not, ice age or not, the biosphere would grow and spread until it covered everything, with an ocean in the north, and lakes in the south, and streams, forests, prairies, cities and roads, oh she saw it all; white clouds raining mud on the ancient highlands, while the uncaring masses built their cities as fast as they could, the long run-out of civilization burying her world.

PART TWO Areophany

To Sax it looked like that least rational of conflicts, civil war. Two parts of a group shared many more interests than disagreements, but fought anyway. Unfortunately it was not possible to force people to study cost-benefit analysis. Nothing to be done. Or – possibly one could identify a crux issue causing one or both sides to resort to violence. After that, try to defuse that issue.

Clearly in this case a crux issue was terraforming. A matter with which Sax was closely identified. This could be viewed as a disadvantage, as a mediator ought ideally to be neutral. On the other hand, his actions might speak symbolically for the terraforming effort itself. He might accomplish more with a symbolic gesture than anyone else. What was needed was a concession to the Reds, a real concession, the reality of which would increase its symbolic value by some hidden exponential factor. Symbolic value: it was a concept with which Sax was trying hard to come to grips. Words of all kinds gave him trouble now, so much so that he had taken to etymology to try to understand them better. A glance at the wrist: symbol, ‘something that stands for something else’, from the Latin symbolum, adopted from a Greek word meaning throw together. Exactly. It was alien to his understanding, this throwing together, a thing emotional and even unreal, and yet vitally important.

The afternoon of the battle for Sheffield, he called Ann on the wrist and got her briefly, and tried to talk to her, and failed. So he drove to the edge of the city’s wreckage, not knowing what else to do, looking for her. It was very disturbing to see how much damage a few hours’ fighting could do. Many years of work lay in smoking shambles, the smoke not fire – ash particulates for the most part but merely disturbed fines, old volcanic ash blown up and then torn east on the Jetstream. The cable stuck out of the ruins like a black line of carbon nanotube fibres.

There was no sign of any further Red resistance. Thus no way of locating Ann. She was not answering her phone. So Sax returned to the warehouse complex in East Pavonis, feeling balked. He went back inside.

And then there she was, in the vast warehouse, walking through the others toward him as if about to plunge a knife in his heart. He sank in his seat unhappily, remembering an overlong sequence of unpleasant interviews between them. Most recently they had argued on the train ride out of Libya Station. He recalled her saying something about removing the soletta and the annular mirror; which would be a very powerful symbolic statement indeed. And he had never been comfortable with such a major element of the terraforming’s heat input being so fragile.

So when she said, ‘I want something for it,’ he thought he knew what she meant, and suggested removing the mirrors before she could. This surprised her. It slowed her down, it took the edge off her terrible anger. Leaving something very much deeper, however – grief, despair – he could not be sure. Certainly a lot of Reds had died that day, and Red hopes as well. ‘I’m sorry about Kasei,’ he said.

She ignored that, and made him promise to remove the space mirrors. He did, meanwhile calculating the loss of light that would result, then trying to keep a wince off his face. Insolation would drop by about twenty per cent, a very substantial amount indeed. ‘It will start an ice age,’ he muttered.

‘Good,’ she said.

But she was not satisfied. And as she left the room, he could see by the set of her shoulders that his concession had done little if anything to comfort her. One could only hope her cohorts were more easily pleased. In any case it would have to be done. It might stop a civil war. Of course a great number of plants would die, mostly at the higher elevations, though it would affect every ecosystem to some extent. An ice age, no doubt about it. Unless they reacted very effectively. But it would be worth it, if it stopped the fighting.

It would have been easy just to cut the great band of the annular mirror and let it fly away into space, right out of the plane of the ecliptic. Same with the soletta: fire a few of its positioning rockets and it would spin away like a Catherine wheel.

But that would be a waste of processed aluminium silicate, which Sax did not like to see. He decided to investigate the possibility of using the mirrors’ directional rockets, and their reflectivity, to propel them elsewhere in the solar system. The soletta could be located in front of Venus, and its mirrors realigned so that the structure became a huge parasol, shading the hot planet and starting the process of freezing out its atmosphere; this was something that had been discussed in the literature for a long time, and no matter what other plans for terraforming Venus one had, this was the standard first step. Then having done that, the annular mirror would have to be placed in the corresponding polar orbit around Venus, as its reflected light helped to hold the soletta/parasol in its position against the push of solar radiation. So the two would still be put to use, and it would also be a gesture, another symbolic gesture, saying, Look here – this big world might be terraformable too. It wouldn’t be easy, but it was possible. Thus some of the psychic pressure on Mars, ‘the only other possible Earth’, might be relieved. This was not logical, but it didn’t matter; history was strange, people were not rational systems, and in the peculiar symbolic logic of the limbic system, it would be a sign to the people on Earth, a portent, a scattering of psychic seed, a throwing together. Look there! Go there! And leave Mars alone.

So he talked it over with the Da Vinci space scientists, who had effectively taken over control of the mirrors. The lab rats, people called them behind their backs, and his (though he heard anyway); the lab rats, or the saxaclones. Serious young native Martian scientists, in fact, with just the same variations of temperament as grad students and post-docs in any lab anywhere, any time; but the facts didn’t matter. They worked with him and so they were the saxaclones. Somehow he had become the very model of the modern Martian scientist; first as white-coated lab rat, then as full-blown mad scientist, with a crater-castle full of eager Igors, mad-eyed but measured in manner, little Mr Spocks, the men as skinny and awkward as cranes on the ground, the women drab in their protective non-coloration, their neuter devotion to Science. Sax was very fond of them. He liked their devotion to science, it made sense to him – an urge to understand things, to be able to express them mathematically. It was a sensible desire. In fact it often seemed to him that if everyone were a physicist then they would be very much better off. ‘Ah, no, people like the idea of a flat universe because they find negatively curved space difficult to deal with.’ Well, perhaps not. In any case the young natives at Da Vinci Crater were a powerful group, strange or not. At this point Da Vinci was in charge of a lot of the underground’s technological base, and with Spencer fully engaged there, their production capability was staggering. They had engineered the revolution, if the truth were told, and were now in de facto control of Martian orbital space.

This was one reason why many of them looked displeased or at least nonplussed when Sax first told them about the removal of the soletta and annular mirror. He did it in a screen meeting, and their faces squinched into expressions of alarm: Captain, it is not logical. But neither was civil war. And the one was better than the other.

‘Won’t people object?’ Aonia asked. ‘The Greens?’

‘No doubt,’ Sax said. ‘But right now we exist in, in anarchy. The group in East Pavonis is a kind of proto-government, perhaps. But we in Da Vinci control Mars space. And no matter the objections, this might avert civil war.’

He explained as best he could. They got absorbed in the technical challenge, in the problem pure and simple, and quickly forgot their shock at the idea. In fact giving them a technical challenge of that sort was like giving a dog a bone. They went away gnawing at the tough parts of the problem, and just a few days later they were down to the smooth polished gleam of procedure. Mostly a matter of instructions to AIs, as usual. It was getting to the point where having conceived a clear idea of what one wanted to do, one could just say to an AI, ‘please do thus and such’ – please spin the soletta and annular mirror into Venusian orbit, and adjust the slats of the soletta so that it becomes a parasol shielding the planet from all of its incoming insolation; and the AIs would calculate the trajectories and the rocket firings and the mirror angles necessary, and it would be done.

People were becoming too powerful, perhaps. Michel always went on about their godlike new powers, and Hiroko in her actions had implied that there should be no limit to what they tried with these new powers, ignoring all tradition. Sax himself had a healthy respect for tradition, as a kind of default survival behaviour. But the techs in Da Vinci cared no more for tradition than Hiroko had. They were in an open moment in history, accountable to no one. And so they did it.

Then Sax went to Michel. ‘I’m worried about Ann.’

They were in a corner of the big warehouse on East Pavonis, and the movement and clangour of the crowd created a kind of privacy. But after a look around Michel said, ‘Let’s go outside.’

They suited up and went out. East Pavonis was a maze of tents, warehouses, manufactories, pistes, parking lots, pipelines, holding tanks, holding yards; also junkyards and scrap-heaps, their mechanical detritus scattered about like volcanic ejecta. But Michel led Sax westward through the mess, and they came quickly to the caldera rim, where the human clutter was put into a new and larger context, a logarithmic shift that left the pharaonic collection of artefacts suddenly looking like a patch of bacterial growth.

At the very edge of the rim, the blackish speckled basalt cracked down in several concentric ledges, each lower than the last. A set of staircases led down these terraces, and the lowest was railed. Michel led Sax down to this terrace, where they could look over the side into the caldera. Straight down for five kilometres. The caldera’s large diameter made it seem less deep than that; still it was an entire round country down there, far, far below. And when Sax remembered how small the caldera was proportional to the volcano entire, Pavonis itself seemed to bulk under them like a conical continent, rearing right up out of the planet’s atmosphere into low space. Indeed the sky was only purple around the horizon, and blackish overhead, with the sun a hard gold coin in the west, casting clean, slantwise shadows. They could see it all. The fines thrown up by the explosions were gone, everything returned to its normal telescopic clarity. Stone and sky and nothing more – except for the thread of buildings cast around the rim. Stone and sky and sun. Ann’s Mars. Except for the buildings. And on Ascraeus and Arsia and Elysium, and even on Olympus, the buildings would not be there.

‘We could easily declare everything above about eight kilometres a primal wilderness zone,’ Sax said. ‘Keep it like this forever.’

‘Bacteria?’ Michel asked. ‘Lichen?’

‘Probably. But do they matter?’

‘To Ann they do.’

‘But why. Michel? Why is she like that?’

Michel shrugged.

After a long pause he said, ‘No doubt it is complex. But she was mistreated as a girl, did you know that?’

Sax shook his head. He tried to imagine what that meant.

Michel said, ‘Her father died. Her mother married her stepfather when she was eight. From then on he mistreated her, until she was sixteen, when she moved to the mother’s sister. I’ve asked her what the mistreatment consisted of, but she says she doesn’t want to talk about it. Abuse is abuse, she said. She doesn’t remember much anyway, she says.’

‘I believe that.’

Michel waggled a gloved hand. ‘We remember more than we think we do. More than we want to, sometimes.’

They stood there looking into the caldera.

‘It’s hard to believe,’ Sax said.

Michel looked glum. ‘Is it? There were fifty women in the First Hundred. Odds are more than one of them was abused by men in their lives. More like ten or fifteen, if the statistics are to be believed. Sexually violated, struck, mistreated … that’s just the way it was.’

‘It’s hard to believe.’

‘Yes.’

Sax recalled hitting Phyllis in the jaw, knocking her senseless with a single blow. There had been a certain satisfaction in that. He had needed to do it, though. Or so it had felt at the time.

‘Everyone has their reasons’ Michel said, startling him. ‘Or so they think.’ He tried to explain – tried, in his usual Michel fashion, to make it something other than plain evil. ‘At the base of human culture,’ he said as he looked down into the country of the caldera, ‘is a neurotic response to people’s earliest psychic wounds. Before birth and during infancy people exist in a narcissistic oceanic bliss, in which the individual is the universe. Then some time in late infancy we come to the awareness that we are separate individuals, different from our mother and everyone else. This is a blow from which we never completely recover. There are several neurotic strategies used to try to deal with it. First, merging back into the mother. Then denying the mother, and shifting our ego ideal to the father – this strategy often lasts forever, and the people of that culture worship their king and their father god, and so on. Or the ego ideal might shift again, to abstract ideas, or to the brotherhood of men. There are names and full descriptions for all these complexes – the Dionysian, the Persean, the Apollonian, the Heraclean. They all exist, and they are all neurotic, in that they all lead to misogyny, except for the Dionysian complex.’

‘This is one of your semantic rectangles?’ Sax asked apprehensively.

‘Yes. The Apollonian and the Heraclean complexes might describe Terran industrial societies. The Persean its earlier cultures, with strong remnants of course right up to this day. And they are all three patriarchal. They all denied the maternal, which was connected in patriarchy with the body and with nature. The feminine was instinct, the body, and nature; while the masculine was reason, mind, and law. And the law ruled.’

Sax, fascinated by so much throwing together, said only, ‘And on Mars?’

‘Well, on Mars it may be that the ego ideal is shifting back to the maternal. To the Dionysian again, or to some kind of post-Oedipal reintegration with nature, which we are still in the process of inventing. Some new complex that would not be so subject to neurotic over-investment.’

Sax shook his head. It was amazing how floridly elaborated a pseudo-science could get. A compensation technique, perhaps; a desperate attempt to be more like physics. But what they did not understand was that physics, while admittedly complicated, was always trying very hard to become simpler.

Michel, however, was continuing to elaborate. Correlated to patriarchy was capitalism, he was saying, a hierarchical system in which most men had been exploited economically, also treated like animals, poisoned, betrayed, shoved around, shot. And even in the best of circumstances under constant threat of being tossed aside, out of a job, poor, unable to provide for loved dependants, hungry, humiliated. Some trapped in this unfortunate system took out their rage at their plight on whomever they could, even if that turned out to be their loved ones, the people most likely to give them comfort. It was illogical, and even stupid. Brutal and stupid. Yes. Michel shrugged; he didn’t like where this train of reasoning had led him. It sounded to Sax as if the implication was that many men’s actions indicated that they were, alas, fairly stupid. And the limbic array got all twisted in some minds, Michel was going on, trying to veer away from that, to make a decent explanation. Adrenalin and testosterone were always pushing for a fight-or-flight response, and in some dismal situations a satisfaction circuit got established in the get hurt/hurt back axis, and then the men involved were lost, not only to fellow feeling but to rational self-interest. Sick, in fact.

Sax felt a little sick himself. Michel had explained away male evil in several different ways in no more than a quarter of an hour, and still the men of Earth had a lot to answer for. Marsmen were different. Although there had been torturers in Kasei Vallis, as he well knew. But they had been settlers from Earth. Sick. Yes, he felt sick. The young natives were not like that, were they? A Marsman who hit a woman or molested a child would be ostracized, excoriated, perhaps beaten up, he would lose his home, he would be exiled to the asteroids and never allowed back. Wouldn’t he?

Something to look into.

Now he thought again of Ann. Of how she was: her manner, so obdurate; her focus on science, on rock. A kind of Apollonian response, perhaps. Concentration on the abstract, denial of the body and therefore of all its pain. Perhaps.

‘What would help Ann now, do you think?’ Sax said.

Michel shrugged again. ‘I have wondered that for years. I think Mars has helped her. I think Simon helped her, and Peter. But they have all been at some kind of distance. They don’t change that fundamental no in her.’

‘But she – she loves all this,’ Sax said, waving at the caldera. ‘She truly does.’ He thought over Michel’s analysis. ‘It’s not just a no. There’s a yes in there as well. A love of Mars.’

‘But if you love stones and not people,’ Michel said, ‘it’s somehow a little … unbalanced? Or displaced? Ann is a great mind, you know—’

‘I know—’

‘—and she has achieved a great deal. But she does not seem content with it.’

‘She doesn’t like what’s happening to her world.’

‘No. But is that what she truly dislikes? Or dislikes the most? I’m not so sure. It seems displaced to me, again. Both the love and the hate.’

Sax shook his head. Astounding, really, that Michel could consider psychology any kind of science at all. So much of it consisted of throwing together. Of thinking of the mind as a steam engine, the mechanical analogy most ready to hand during the birth of modern psychology. People had always done that when they thought about the mind: clockwork for Descartes, geological changes for the early Victorians, computers or holography for the twentieth century, AIs for the twenty-first … and for the Freudian traditionalists, steam engines. Application of heat, pressure build-up, pressure displacement, venting, all shifted into repression, sublimation, the return of the repressed. Sax thought it unlikely steam engines were an adequate model for the human mind. The mind was more like – what? – an ecology – a fellfield – or else a jungle, populated by all manner of strange beasts. Or a universe, filled with stars and quasars and black holes. Well – a bit grandiose, that – really it was more like a complex collection of synapses and axons, chemical energies surging hither and yon, like weather in an atmosphere. That was better – weather-storm fronts of thought, high pressure zones, low pressure cells, hurricanes – the jetstreams of biological desires, always making their swift powerful rounds … life in the wind. Well. Throwing together. In fact the mind was poorly understood.

‘What are you thinking?’ Michel asked.

‘Sometimes I worry,’ Sax admitted, ‘about the theoretical basis of these diagnoses of yours.’

‘Oh no, they are very well supported empirically, they are very precise, very accurate.’

‘Both precise and accurate?’

‘Well, what, they’re the same, no?’

‘No. In estimates of a value, accuracy means how far away you are from the true value. Precision refers to the window size of the estimate. A hundred plus or minus fifty isn’t very precise. But if your estimate is a hundred plus or minus fifty, and the true value is a hundred and one, it’s quite accurate, while still being not very precise. Often true values aren’t really determinable, of course.’

Michel had a curious expression on his face. ‘You’re a very accurate person, Sax.’

‘It’s just statistics,’ Sax said defensively. ‘Every once in a while language allows you to say things precisely.’

‘And accurately.’

‘Sometimes.’

They looked down into the country of the caldera.

‘I want to help her,’ Sax said.

Michel nodded. ‘You said that. I said I didn’t know how. For her, you are the terraforming. If you are to help her, then terraforming has to help her. Do you think you can find a way that terraforming helps her?’

Sax thought about it for a while. ‘It could get her outdoors. Outdoors without helmets, eventually without even masks.’

‘You think she wants that?’

‘I think everyone wants that, at some level. In the cerebellum. The animal, you know. It feels right.’

‘I don’t know if Ann is very well attuned to her animal feelings.’

Sax considered it.

Then the whole landscape darkened.

They looked up. The sun was black. Stars shone in the sky around it. There was a faint glow around the black disc, perhaps the sun’s corona.

Then a sudden crescent of fire forced them to look away. That was the corona; what they had seen before had probably been the lit exosphere.

The darkened landscape lightened again, as the artificial eclipse came to an end. But the whole sun that returned was distinctly smaller than what had shone just moments before. The old bronze button of the Martian sun! It was like a friend come back for a visit. The world was dimmer, all the colours of the caldera one shade darker, as if invisible clouds obscured the sunlight. A very familiar sight, in fact – Mars’s natural light, shining on them again for the first time in twenty-eight years.

‘I hope Ann saw that,’ Sax said. He felt chilled, although he knew there had not been enough time for the air to have cooled, and he was suited up in any case. But there would be a chill. He thought grimly of the fellfields scattered all over the planet, up at the four or five kilometre elevation, and lower in the mid and high latitudes. Up at the edge of the possible, whole ecosystems would now start dying. Twenty per cent drop in insolation: it was worse than any Terran ice age, more like the darkness after the great extinction events – the KT event, the Ordovician, the Devonian, or the worst one of all, the Permian event two hundred and fifty million years ago, which killed up to ninety-five per cent of all the species alive at the time. Punctuated equilibrium; and very few species survived the punctuations. The ones that did were tough, or just lucky.

Michel said, ‘I doubt it will satisfy her.’

This Sax fully believed. But for the moment he was distracted by thinking how best to compensate for the loss of the soletta’s light. It would be better not to have any biomes suffering great losses. If he had his way, those fellfields were just something Ann was going to have to get used to.

It was Ls 123, right in the middle of the northern summer/southern winter, near aphelion, which along with higher elevation caused the south’s winter to be much colder than the north’s; temperatures regularly dipped to 230° K, not much warmer than the primal colds that had existed before their arrival. Now, with the soletta and annular mirror gone, temperatures would drop further still. No doubt the southern highlands were headed for a record winterkill.

On the other hand, a lot of snow had already fallen in the south, and Sax had gained a great respect for snow’s ability to protect living things from cold and wind. The subnivean environment was quite stable. It could be that a drop in light, and subsequently in surface temperature, would not do that much harm to snowed-over plants, already shut down by their winter hardening. It was hard to say. He wanted to get into the field and see for himself. Of course it would be months or perhaps years before any difference would be quantifiable. Except in the weather itself, perhaps. And weather could be tracked merely by watching the meteorological data, which he was already doing spending many hours in front of satellite pictures and weather maps, watching for signs. As were many other people, particularly meteorologists. It made for a useful diversion when people came by to remonstrate with him for removing the mirrors, an event so common in the week following the event that it became tiresome.

Unfortunately weather on Mars was so variable that it was difficult to tell if the removal of the big mirrors was affecting it or not. A very sad admission of the state of their understanding of the atmosphere, in Sax’s opinion. But there it was. Martian weather was a violent, semi-chaotic system. In some ways it resembled Earth’s, not surprising given that it was a matter of air and water moving around the surface of a spinning sphere: Coriolis forces were the same everywhere, and so here as on Earth there were tropical easterlies, temperate westerlies, polar easterlies, Jetstream anchor points and so on; but that was almost all one could say for sure about Martian weather. Well – you could say that it was colder and drier in the south than in the north. That there were rainshadows downwind of high volcanoes or mountain chains. That it was warmer near the equator, colder at the poles. But this sort of obvious generalization was all that they could assert with confidence, except for some local patterns, although most of those were subject to lots of variation – more a matter of highly analysed statistics than lived experience. And with only fifty-two M-years on record, with the atmosphere thickening radically all the while, with water being pumped onto the surface, etc, etc, it was actually fairly difficult to say what normal or average conditions might be.

Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on East Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defence of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-metre rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.

Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.

‘There’s no such thing as a fresh start,’ he said as he put water on to boil.

‘The Big Bang?’ Michel suggested.

‘As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the – the dumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier-dumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.’

‘I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.’

‘Singularities are strange – outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.’ Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. ‘But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.’

‘True.’ For some reason Michel was laughing. ‘We should go down there and see, eh?’

As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, ‘I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.’

‘You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim …’ Michel shuddered.

‘Yes, but that only makes me more curious.’

‘Well – we’ll hold down the fort for you.’

As if one had physically to occupy any given space in order to be there. ‘The cerebellum never gives up,’ Sax said.

Michel grinned. ‘Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.’

Sax frowned.

Before he left, he called Ann.

‘Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to South Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobio-sphere, together?’

She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over – the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: ‘No.’ And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.

Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.

Well, one couldn’t make people see things.

He went to say goodbye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann. As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it – to fall in love with all the objects of his ‘scientific study’. Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this unSaxlike behaviour, this ‘change in thinking’. Love, yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science – yes, that would be a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they co-operated in the study or not. In fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t co-operate, if they refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. ‘Be careful,’ Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.

Sax took a solo rover and drove it down the steep, bare southern slope of Pavonis Mons, then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around the great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down the southern flank of Arsia, and of the Tharsis bulge itself, until he was on the broken highlands of Daedalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a giant ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, by lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of the impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps but not in the landscape.

To the eye as one travelled over it, it looked like much of the rest of the southern highlands: rugged, bumpy, pitted, cracked land. A wild rockscape. The old lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark rock, like tidal swells fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark marked the land, indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there were light, long triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark chevrons to the northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless craters. The next big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.

Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down up, down down up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind chart. He was travelling not in a boulder car, with its low, dark room and its cockroach scurry from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big, boxy areologist’s camper, with windows on all four sides of the third-storey driver’s compartment. It was a very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the thin, bright daylight, down and up, down and up, down and up over the sand-streaked plain, the horizons very distant for Mars. There was no one to hide from; no one hunting for him. He was a free man on a free planet, and if he wanted to he could drive this car right around the world. Or anywhere he pleased.

The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of oppression or fear – but it seemed it had been there – since 2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always there – a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of things. ‘Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles of fear on the wall!’

Now gone. He was free, his world was free. He was driving down the wind-etched tilted plain, and earlier that day snow had begun to appear in the cracks, gleaming aquatically in a way dust never did; and then lichen; he was driving down into the atmosphere. And no reason, now, why his life ought not to continue this way, puttering about freely every day in his own world lab, and everybody else just as free as that!

It was quite a feeling.

Oh they could argue on Pavonis, and they most certainly would. Everywhere in fact. A most extraordinarily contentious lot they were. What was the sociology that would explain that? Hard to say. And in any case they had co-operated despite their bickering; it might have been only a temporary confluence of interests, but everything was temporary now – with so many traditions broken or vanished, it left what John used to called the necessity of creation; and creation was hard. Not everyone was as good at creation as they were at complaining.

But they had certain capabilities now as a group, as a – a civilization. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge was growing vast indeed, and that knowledge was giving them an array of powers that could scarcely be comprehended, even in outline, by any single individual. But powers they were, understood or not. Godlike powers, as Michel called them, though it was not necessary to exaggerate them or confuse the issue – they were powers in the material world, real but constrained by reality. Which nevertheless might allow – it looked to Sax as if they could – if rightly applied – make a decent human civilization after all. After all the many centuries of trying. And why not? Why not? Why not pitch the whole enterprise at the highest level possible? They could provide for everyone in an equitable way, they could cure disease, they could delay senescence until they lived for a thousand years, they could understand the universe from the Planck distance to the cosmic distance, from the Big Bang to the eskaton – all this was possible, it was technically achievable. And as for those who felt that humanity needed the spur of suffering to make it great, well they could go out and find anew the tragedies that Sax was sure would never go away, things like lost love, betrayal by friends, death, bad results in the lab. Meanwhile the rest of them could continue the work of making a decent civilization. They could do it! It was amazing, really. They had reached that moment in history when one could say it was possible. Very hard to believe, actually; it made Sax suspicious; in physics one became immediately dubious when a situation appeared to be somehow extraordinary or unique. The odds were against that, it suggested that it was an artefact of perspective, one had to assume that things were more or less constant and that one lived in average times – the so-called principle of mediocrity. Never a particularly attractive principle, Sax had thought; perhaps it only meant that justice had always been achievable; in any case, there it was, an extraordinary moment, right there outside his four windows, burnished under the light touch of the natural sun. Mars and its humans, free and powerful.

It was too much to grasp. It kept slipping out of his mind, then reoccurring to him, and surprised by joy he would exclaim, ‘Ha! Ha!’ The taste of tomato soup and bread; ‘Ha!’ The dusky purple of the twilight sky; ‘Ha!’ The spectacle of the dashboard instrumentation, glowing faintly, reflected in the black windows; ‘Ha! Ha! Ha! My oh my.’ He could drive anywhere he wanted to. No one told them what to do. He said that aloud to his darkened AI screen: ‘No one tells us what to do!’ It was almost frightening. Vertiginous. Ka, the yonsei would say. Ka, supposedly the little red people’s name for Mars, from the Japanese ka, meaning fire. The same word existed in several other early languages as well, including proto-Indo-European; or so the linguists said.

Carefully he got in the big bed at the back of the compartment, in the hum of the rover’s heating and electrical system, and he lay humming to himself under the thick coverlet that caught up his body’s heat so fast, and put his head on the pillow and looked out at the stars.

The next morning a high pressure system came in from the northwest, and the temperature rose to 262° K. He had driven down to five kilometres above the datum, and the exterior air pressure was 230 millibars. Not quite enough to breathe freely, so he pulled on one of the heated surface suits, then slipped a small air tank over his shoulders, and put its mask over his nose and mouth, and a pair of goggles over his eyes.

Even so, when he climbed out of the outer lock door and down the steps to the sand, the intense cold caused him to sniffle and tear up, to the point of impeding his vision. The whistle of the wind was loud, though his ears were inside the hood of his suit. The suit’s heater was up to the task, however, and with the rest of him warm, his face slowly got used to it.

He tightened the hood’s drawstring and walked over the land. He stepped from flat stone to flat stone; here they were everywhere. He crouched often to inspect cracks, finding lichen and widely scattered specimens of other life: mosses, little tufts of sedge, grass. It was very windy. Exceptionally hard gusts slapped him four or five times a minute, with a steady gale between. This was a windy place much of the time, no doubt, with the atmosphere sliding south around the bulk of Tharsis in massed quantities. High pressure cells would dump a lot of their moisture at the start of this rise, on the western side; indeed at this moment the horizon to the west was obscured by a flat sea of cloud, merging with the land in the far distance, out there two or three kilometres lower in elevation, and perhaps sixty kilometres away.

Underfoot there were only bits of snow, filling some of the shaded crack systems and hollows. These snowbanks were so hard that he could jump up and down on them without leaving a mark. Windslab, partially melted and then refrozen. One scalloped slab cracked under his boots, and he found it was several centimetres thick. Under that it was powder, or granules. His fingers were cold, despite his heated gloves.

He stood again and wandered, mapless over the rock. Some of the deeper hollows contained ice pools. Around midday he descended into one of these and ate his lunch by the ice pool, lifting the air mask to take bites out of a grain and honey bar. Elevation 4-5 kilometres above the datum; air pressure 267 millibars. A high pressure system indeed. The sun was low in the northern sky, a bright dot surrounded by pewter.

The ice of the pool was clear in places, like little windows giving him a view of the black bottom. Elsewhere it was bubbled or cracked, or white with rime. The bank he sat on was a curve of gravel, with patches of brown soil and black dead vegetation lying on it in a miniature berm – the high-water mark of the pond, apparently, a soil shore above the gravel one. The whole beach was no more than four metres long, one wide. The fine gravel was an umber colour, piebald umber or … He would have to consult a colour chart. But not now.

The soil berm was dotted by pale green rosettes of tiny grass blades. Longer blades stood in clumps here and there. Most of the taller blades were dead, and light grey. Right next to the pond were patches of dark green succulent leaves, dark red at their edges. Where the green shaded into red was a colour he couldn’t name, a dark lustrous brown stuffed somehow with both its constituent colours. He would have to call up a colour chart soon it seemed; lately when looking around outdoors he found that a colour chart came in handy about once a minute. Waxy almost-white flowers were tucked under some of these bi-coloured leaves. Further on lay some tangles, red-stalked, green-needled, like beached seaweed in miniature. Again that intermixture of red and green, right there in nature staring at him.

A distant wind-washed hum; perhaps the harping rocks, perhaps the buzz of insects. Black midges, bees … in this air they would only have to sustain about 30 millibars of CO₂, because there was so little partial pressure driving it into them, and at some point internal saturation was enough to hold any more out. For mammals that might not work so well. But they might be able to sustain 20 millibars, and with plant life flourishing all over the planet’s lower elevations, CO₂ levels might drop to 20 millibars fairly soon; and then they could dispense with the air tanks and the facemasks. Set loose animals on Mars.

In the faint hum of the air he seemed to hear their voices, immanent or emergent, coming in the next great surge of viriditas. The hum of distant voices; the wind; the peace of this little pool on its rocky moor; the Nirgalish pleasure he took in the sharp cold … ‘Ann should see this,’ he murmured.

Then again, with the space mirrors gone, presumably everything he saw here was doomed. This was the upper limit of the biosphere, and surely with the loss of light and heat the upper limit would drop, at least temporarily, perhaps for good. He didn’t like that; and it seemed possible there might be ways to compensate for the lost light. After all, the terraforming had been doing quite well before the mirrors’ arrival; they hadn’t been necessary. And it was good not to depend on something so fragile, and better to be rid of it now rather than later, when large animal populations might have died in the setback along with the plants.

Even so it was a shame. But the dead plant matter would only be more fertilizer in the end, and without the same kind of suffering as animals. At least so he assumed. Who knew how plants felt? When you looked closely at them, glowing in all their detailed articulation like complex crystals, they were as mysterious as any other life. And now their presence here made the entire plain, everything he could see, into one great fellfield, spreading in a slow tapestry over the rock; breaking down the weathered minerals, melding with them to make the first soils. A very slow process. There was a vast complexity in every pinch of soil; and the look of this fellfield was the loveliest thing he had ever seen.

To weather. This whole world was weathering. The first printed use of the word with that meaning had appeared in a book on Stonehenge, appropriately enough, in 1665. ‘The weathering of so many Centuries of Years.’ On this stone world. Weathering. Language as the first science, exact yet vague, or multivalent. Throwing things together. The mind as weather. Or being weathered.

There were clouds coming up over the nearby hillocks to the west, their bottoms resting on a thermal layer as levelly as if pressing down on glass. Streamers like spun wool led the way east.

Sax stood up and climbed out of the pool’s depression. Out of the shelter of the hole, the wind was shockingly strong – in it the cold intensified as if an ice age had struck full force that very second. Windchill factor, of course; if the temperature was 262° K, and the wind was blowing at about seventy kilometres an hour, with gusts much stronger, then the windchill factor would create a temperature equivalent of about 250° K. Was that right? That was very cold indeed to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb. His feet as well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask at the front of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick together; his tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.

He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to intensify cold. He had not experienced windchill like this since childhood, if then, and had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he climbed onto a low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his rover – big, vivid green, gleaming like a spaceship – about two kilometres up the slope. A very welcome sight.

But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic demonstration of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked against his goggles. He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and watching the snow swirl over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that he thought his goggles were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to wipe the insides, it became clear that the condensation was actually out in the air. Fine snow, mist, dust, it was hard to tell.

He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick with snow that he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but press on. It was lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with heating elements, because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold was cutting against his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility extended now something like twenty metres, shifting rapidly depending on how much snow was passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and contracting bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying snow, and what appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he was in the storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around his torso, his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of telling if he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed as if he was on the same course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also seemed as if he had gone a long way toward the rover.

There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems in his wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great deal of work – which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was being affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all.

So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method. The theory behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left something to be desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimetres across, so small that he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he spotted them, walked a while, and took another fix. But unfortunately his results indicated that he should be hiking at about a right angle to the direction he had been going.

This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted that it had been going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty certain that it was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume that he had gone off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was telling him – the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds – but there was no magnetic field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a thick dark grey everywhere. It had to be something like that, because the feeling that he was properly oriented was so strong!

Eventually the nausea of the disorientation passed, and in the end he stood and took off in the direction suggested by the wristpad, feeling horrible about it, listing a little uphill just to try and make himself feel better. But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science. And so he plodded on, traversing the slope, shading somewhat uphill, clumsier than ever. His nearly insensible feet ran into rocks that he did not see, even though they were directly beneath him; he stumbled time after time. It was surprising how thoroughly snow could obscure the vision.

After a while he stopped, and tried again to locate the rover by APS; and his wristpad map suggested an entirely new direction, behind him and to the left.

It was possible he had walked past the car. Was it? He did not want to walk back into the wind. But now that was the way to the rover, apparently. So he ducked his head down into the biting cold and persevered. His skin was in an odd state, itching under the heating elements crisscrossing his suit, numb everywhere else. His feet were numb. It was hard to walk. There was no feeling in his face; clearly frostbite was in the offing. He needed shelter.

He had a new idea. He called up Aonia, on Pavonis, and got her almost instantly.

‘Sax! Where are you?’

‘That’s what I’m calling about!’ he said. ‘I’m in a storm on Daedalia! And I can’t find my car! I was wondering if you would look at my APS and my rover’s! And see if you can tell me which direction I should go!’

He put the wristpad right against his ear. ‘Ka wow, Sax.’ It sounded like Aonia was shouting too, bless her. Her voice was an odd addition to the scene. ‘Just a second, let me check! … Okay! There you are! And your car too! What are you doing so far south? I don’t think anyone can get to you very quickly! Especially if there’s a storm!’

‘There is a storm,’ Sax said. ‘That’s why I called.’

‘Okay! You’re about three hundred and fifty metres to the west of your car.’

‘Directly west?’

‘—and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?’

Sax considered it. Mars’s lack of a magnetic field had never struck him as such a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind was directly out of the west, but that was just an assumption. ‘Can you check the nearest weather stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming from?’ he said.

‘Sure, but it won’t be much good for local variations! Here, just a second, I’m getting some help here from the others.’

A few long icy moments passed.

‘The wind is coming from west north west, Sax! So you need to walk with the wind at your back and a touch to your left!’

‘I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and then correct it.’

He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six painful minutes his wrist beeped.

Aonia said, ‘You’re right on course!’

This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed, though the wind was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.

‘Okay, Sax! Sax?’

‘Yes!’

‘You and your car are right on the same spot!’

But there was no car in view.

His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty metres; but no car. He had to get shelter fast. ‘Walk in an ever-increasing spiral from where you are,’ the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A good idea in theory, but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the wind. He stared dully at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be had there.

For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He shuffled over to investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a shoulder-high escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but there were some radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this must be one of them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator. Though it had little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers often dug into it to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.

He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one numb foot. It felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the question. But the effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at the foot of the bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a thick cake of windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be possible after all. He dug away at it.

‘Sax, Sax!’ cried the voice from his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Making a snow cave,’ he said. ‘A bivouac.’

‘Oh, Sax – we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning no matter what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!’

‘Fine.’

He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow, tossing it into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard to think. He bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so absorbed in the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed when things were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little hollow in the snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat down and wedged himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back with his boots. The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer than the ferocious wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague fear when it ceased. Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.

Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four p.m. He had been walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to survive another fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued. Or perhaps in the morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the rover become obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by huddling in a snow cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely it couldn’t be far away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be out looking for it.

He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a night out, though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that. Night temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might lessen in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before dark.

He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very concerned, but there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their voices.

It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was chilled, blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs – perhaps that was true for the cortex as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the necessary work would continue right to the end.

More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again. He was too cold – something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO₂ levels – some factor or combination of factors was making it worse than it should be. He could die of exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just that. Such a storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction event.

The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no doubt. Like faint shouts, howling, ‘Sax! Sax! Sax!’

Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the snowflakes somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white static.

Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out of the darkness. Short, round, helmeted. ‘Sax!’ The sound was distorted, it was coming from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were very resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to speak. Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it appeared to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully through the wind, moving like a skilful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving this way and that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and bent down and grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the faceplate, as clear as through a window. It was Hiroko.

She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling so hard on his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.

‘Ow!’ he said.

Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his left arm over her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the wristpad, she led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the gale.

‘My rover is near,’ he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to move his legs fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her again. A solid little person, very powerful as always.

‘It’s over here,’ she said through her loudspeaker. ‘You were pretty close.’

‘How did you find me?’

‘We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the storm hit I checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I came out to see how you were doing.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You have to be careful in storms.’

Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist, and it throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. ‘Go on in,’ she said.

He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened it; fell inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in the door. He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It was dusk; the snow now looked black. ‘Hiroko!’ he cried.

No answer.

He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen deprivation – he pumped the lock, fell through the inside door into the little changing room. It was shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked ineffectively at his clothes, made no progress. He went at it more methodically. Goggles and face-mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah – possibly his air supply had been restricted by ice in the tube between tank and mask. He sucked in several deep breaths, then sat still through another bout of nausea. Pulled off his hood, unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he could do to get his boots off. Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and clammy. His hands were burning as if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he was not substantially frostbitten; nevertheless it was agony.

His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What caused that, return of blood to capillaries? Return of sensation to chilled nerves? Whatever it was, it hurt almost unbearably. ‘Ow!’

He was in excellent spirits. It was not just that he had been spared from death, which was nice; but that Hiroko was alive. Hiroko was alive! It was incredibly good news. Many of his friends had assumed all along that she and her group had slipped away from the assault on Sabishii, moving through that town’s mound maze back out into their system of hidden refuges; but Sax had never been sure. There was no evidence to support the idea. And there were elements in the security forces perfectly capable of murdering a group of dissidents and disposing of their bodies. This, Sax had thought, was probably what had happened. But he had kept this opinion to himself, and reserved judgement. There had been no way of knowing for sure.

But now he knew. He had stumbled into Hiroko’s path, and she had rescued him from death by freezing, or asphyxiation, whichever came first. The sight of her cheery, somehow impersonal face – her brown eyes – the feel of her body supporting him – her hand clamped over his wrist … he would have a bruise because of that. Perhaps even a sprain. He flexed his hand, and the pain in his wrist brought tears to his eyes, it made him laugh. Hiroko!

After a time the fiery return of sensation to his skin banked down. Though his hands felt bloated and raw, and he did not have proper control of his muscles, or his thoughts, he was basically getting back to normal. Or something like normal.

‘Sax! Sax! Where are you? Answer us, Sax!’

‘Ah. Hello there. I’m back in my car.’

‘You found it? You left your snow cave?’

‘Yes. I – I saw my car, in the distance, through a break in the snow.’

They were happy to hear it.

He sat there, barely listening to them babble, wondering why he had spontaneously lied. Somehow he was not comfortable telling them about Hiroko. He assumed that she would want to stay concealed; perhaps that was it. Covering for her …

He assured his associates that he was all right, and got off the phone. He pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat on it. Warmed soup and drank it in loud slurps, scalding his tongue. Frostbitten, scalded, shaky – slightly nauseous – once weeping – mostly stunned – despite all this, he was very, very happy. Sobered by the close call, of course, and embarrassed or even ashamed at his ineptitude, staying out, getting lost and so on – all very sobering indeed – and yet still he was happy. He had survived, and even better, so had Hiroko. Meaning no doubt that all of her group had survived with her, including the half-dozen of the First Hundred who had been with her from the beginning, Iwao, Gene, Rya, Raul, Ellen, Evgenia … Sax ran a bath and sat in the warm water, adding hotter water slowly as his body core warmed; and he kept returning to that wonderful realization. A miracle – well not a miracle of course – but it had that quality, of unexpected and undeserved joy.

When he found himself falling asleep in the bath he got out, dried off, limped on sensitive feet to his bed, crawled under the coverlet, and fell asleep, thinking of Hiroko. Of making love with her in the baths in Zygote, in the warm relaxed lubriciousness of their bathhouse trysts, late at night when everyone else was asleep. Of her hand clamped on his wrist, pulling him up. His left wrist was very sore. And that made him happy.

The next day he drove back up the great southern slope of Arsia, now covered with clean white snow to an amazingly high altitude, 10.4 kilometres above the datum to be exact. He felt a strange mix of emotions, unprecedented in their strength and flux, although they somewhat resembled the powerful emotions he had felt during the synaptic stimulus treatment he had taken after his stroke – as if sections of his brain were actively growing – the limbic system, perhaps, the home of the emotions, linking up with the cerebral cortex at last. He was alive, Hiroko was alive, Mars was alive; in the face of these joyous facts the possibility of an ice age was as nothing, a momentary swing in a general warming pattern, something like the almost-forgotten Great Storm. Although he did want to do what he could to mitigate it.

Meanwhile, in the human world there were still fierce conflicts going on everywhere, on both worlds. But it seemed to Sax that the crisis had somehow got beyond war. Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos, revolution; perhaps things had become so bad that humanity had shifted into some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of the postcapitalist era.

Or maybe he was just getting overconfident, buoyed by the events on Daedalia Planitia. His Da Vinci associates were certainly very worried, they spent hours onscreen telling him every little thing about the arguments ongoing in East Pavonis. But he had no patience for that. Pavonis was going to become a standing wave of argument, it was obvious. And the Da Vinci crowd, worrying so – that was simply them. At Da Vinci if someone even raised his voice two decibels people worried that things were getting out of control. No. After his experience on Daedalia, these things simply weren’t interesting enough to engage him. Despite the encounter with the storm, or perhaps because of it, he only wanted to get back out into the country. He wanted to see as much of it as he could – to observe the changes wrought by the removal of the mirror – to talk to various terraforming teams about how to compensate for it. He called Nanao in Sabishii, and asked him if he could come visit and talk it over with the university crowd. Nanao was agreeable.

‘Can I bring some of my associates?’ Sax asked.

Nanao was agreeable.

And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas jumping out of his head. What would Hiroko do about this possible ice age? That he couldn’t guess. But he had a large group of associates in the labs at Da Vinci who had spent the last decades working on the problem of independence, building weapons and transport and shelters and the like. Now that was a problem solved, and there they were, and an ice age was coming. Many of them had come to Da Vinci from his earlier terraforming effort, and could be talked into returning to it, no doubt. But what to do? Well, Sabishii was four kilometres above the datum, and the Tyrrhena Massif went up to five. The scientists there were the best in the world at high altitude ecology. So: a conference. Another little Utopia enacted. It was obvious.

That afternoon Sax stopped his rover in the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia, at the spot called Four Mountain View – a sublime place, with two of the continent – volcanoes filling the horizons to north and south, and then the distant bump of Olympus Mons off to the northwest, and on clear days (this one was too hazy) a glimpse of Ascraeus, in the distance just to the right of Pavonis. In this spacious, sere highland he ate his lunch, then turned east, and drove down toward Nicosia, to catch a flight to Da Vinci, and then on to Sabishii.

He had to spend a lot of screen time with the Da Vinci team and many other people on Pavonis, trying to explain this move, reconciling them to his departure from the warehouse meetings. ‘I am in the warehouse in every sense that matters,’ he said, but they wouldn’t accept that. Their cerebellums wanted him there in the flesh, a touching thought in a way. ‘Touching’ – a symbolic statement that was nevertheless quite literal. He laughed, but Nadia came on and said irritably, ‘Come on Sax, you can’t give up just because things are getting sticky; in fact that’s exactly when you’re needed, you’re General Sax now, you’re the great scientist, you have to stay in the game.’

But Hiroko showed just how present an absent person could be. And he wanted to go to Sabishii.

‘But what should we do?’ Nirgal asked him, and others too in less direct ways.

The situation with the cable was at an impasse; on Earth there was chaos; on Mars there were still pockets of meta-national resistance, and other areas in Red control, where they were systematically tearing out all terraforming projects, and much of the infrastructure as well. There were also a variety of small revolutionary splinter movements that were taking this opportunity to assert their independence, sometimes over areas as small as a tent or a weather station.

‘Well,’ Sax said, thinking about all this as much as he could bear to, ‘whoever controls the life support system is in charge.’

Social structure as life support system – infrastructure, mode of production, maintenance … he really ought to speak to the folks at Separation de L’Atmosphere, and to the tentmakers. Many of whom had a close relation to Da Vinci. Meaning that in certain senses he himself was as much in charge as anyone. A bad thought.

‘But what do you suggest we do?’ Maya demanded; something in her voice made it clear she was repeating the question.

By now Sax was closing in on Nicosia, and impatiently he said, ‘Send a delegation to Earth? Or convene a constitutional congress, and formulate a first approximation constitution, a working draft.’

Maya shook her head. ‘That won’t be easy, with this crowd.’

‘Take the constitutions of the twenty or thirty most successful Terran countries,’ Sax suggested, thinking out loud, ‘and see how they work. Have an AI compile a composite document, perhaps, and see what it says.’

‘How would you define most successful?’ Art asked.

‘Country Futures Index, Real Values Gauge, Costa Rica Comparisons – even Gross Domestic Product, why not?’ Economics was like psychology, a pseudo-science trying to hide that fact with intense theoretical hyper-elaboration. And Gross Domestic Product was one of those unfortunate measurement concepts, like inches or the British Thermal Unit, that ought to have been retired long before. But what the hell—‘Use several different sets of criteria, human welfare, ecologic success, what have you.’

‘But Sax,’ Coyote complained, ‘the very concept of the nation-state is a bad one. That idea by itself will poison all those old constitutions.’

‘Could be,’ Sax said. ‘But as a starting point.’

‘All this is just sidestepping the problem of the cable,’ Jackie said.

It was strange how certain elements of the Greens were as obsessed by total independence as the radical Reds. Sax said, ‘In physics I often bracket the problems I can’t solve, and try to work around them and see if they don’t get solved retroactively, so to speak. To me the cable looks like that kind of problem. Think of it as a reminder that Earth isn’t going to go away.’

But they ignored that, arguing as they were over what to do about the cable, what they might do about a new government, what to do about the Reds who had apparently abandoned the discussion, and so on and so forth, ignoring all his suggestions and getting back to their ongoing wrangles. So much for General Sax in the postrevolutionary world.

Nicosia’s airport was almost shut down, and yet Sax did not want to go into the town; he ended up flying to Da Vinci with some friends of Spencer’s from Dawes’s Forked Bay, flying a big new ultralight they had built just before the revolt, in anticipation of the freedom from the need for stealth. As the AI pilot floated the big silver-winged craft over the great maze of Noctis Labyrinthus, the five passengers sat in a chamber on the bottom of the fuselage which had a large clear floor, so that they could look over the arms of their chairs at the view below; in this case, the immense linked network of troughs which was the Chandelier. Sax stared down at the smooth plateaus that stood between the canyons, often islanded; they looked like nice places to live, somewhat like Cairo, there on the north rim, looking like a model town in a glass bottle.

The plane’s crew started talking about Separation de L’Atmosphere, and Sax listened closely. Although these people had been concerned with the revolution’s armaments and with basic materials research, while ‘Sep’ as they called it had dealt with the more mundane world of mesocosm management, they still had a healthy respect for it. Designing strong tents and keeping them functioning was a task with very severe consequences for failure, as one of them said. Criticalities everywhere, and every day a potential adventure.

Sep was associated with Praxis, apparently, and each tent or covered canyon was run by a separate organization. They pooled information and shared roving consultants and construction teams. Since they deemed themselves necessary services, they ran on a co-operative basis – on the Mondragon plan, one said, non-profit version – though they made sure to provide their members with very nice living situations and lots of free time. ‘They think they deserve it, too. Because when something goes wrong they have to act fast or else.’ Many of the covered canyons had had close calls, sometimes the result of meteor strike or other drama, other times more ordinary mechanical failures. The usual format for covered canyons had the physical plant consolidated at the higher end of the canyon, and this plant sucked in the appropriate amounts of nitrogen, oxygen and trace gases from the surface winds. The proportions of gases and the pressure range they were kept at varied from mesocosm to mesocosm, but they averaged around 500 millibars, which gave some lift to the tent roofs, and was pretty much the norm for indoor spaces on Mars, in a kind of invocation of the eventual goal for the surface at the datum. On sunny days, however, the expansion of air inside the tents was very significant, and the standard procedures for dealing with it included simply releasing air back into the atmosphere, or else saving it by compressing it into huge container chambers hollowed out of the canyon cliffs. ‘So one time I was in Dao Vallis,’ one of the techs said, ‘and the excess air chamber blew up, shattering the plateau and causing a big landslide that fell down onto Reull Gate and tore open the tent roof. Pressures dropped to the local ambient, which was about 260, and everything started to freeze, and they had the old emergency bulkheads,’ which were clear curtains only a few molecules thick but very strong, as Sax recalled, ‘and when they deployed automatically around the break, this one woman got pinned to the ground by the super-sticky at the bottom of the bulkhead, with her head on the wrong side! We ran over to her and did some quick cut and paste and got her loose, but she almost died.’

Sax shivered, thinking of his own recent brush with cold; and 260 millibars was the pressure one would find on the peak of Everest. The others were already talking about other famous blowouts, including the time Hiranyagarbha’s dome had fallen in its entirety under an ice rain, despite which no one had died.

Then they were descending over the great cratered high plain of Xanthe, coming down on the Da Vinci Crater floor’s big sandy runway, which they had just started using during the revolution. The whole community had been preparing for years for the day when stealthing would become unnecessary, and now a big curve of copper-mirrored windows had been installed in the arc of the southern crater rim. There was a layer of snow in the bottom of the crater, which the central knob broke out of quite dramatically. It was possible they could arrange for a lake in the crater floor, with a central knob island, which would have as its horizon the circling cliffy hills of the crater rim. A circular canal could be built just under the rim cliffs, with radial canals connecting it to the inner lake; the resulting alternation of circular water and land would resemble Plato’s description of Atlantis. In this configuration Da Vinci could support, in near self-sufficiency, some twenty or thirty thousand people, Sax guessed; and there were scores of craters like Da Vinci. A commune of communes, each crater a city-state of sorts, its polis fully capable of supporting itself, of deciding what kind of culture it might have; and then with a vote in a global council of some kind … No regional association larger than the level of the town, except for arrangements of local interchange … might it work?

Da Vinci made it seem as if it might. The south arc of the rim was alive with arcades and wedge-shaped pavilions and the like, now all shot through with sunlight. Sax toured the whole complex one morning, visiting one lab after the next, and congratulating the occupants on the success of their preparations for a smooth removal of UNTA from Mars. Some political power came out of the end of a gun, after all, and some out of the look in the eye; and the look in the eye changed depending on whether a gun was pointed at it or not. They had spiked the guns, these people, the saxaclones, and so they were in high spirits – happy to see him, and already looking for different work – back to basic research, or figuring out uses for the new materials that Spencer’s alchemists were constantly churning out; or studying the terraforming problem.

They were also paying attention to what was going on in space and on Earth. A fast shuttle from Earth, contents unknown, had contacted them requesting permission to make an orbital insertion without a keg of nails being thrown in its way. So a Da Vinci team was now nervously working out security protocols, in heavy consultation with the Swiss embassy, which had taken an office in a suite of apartments at the northwest end of the arc. From rebels to administrators; it was an awkward transition.

‘What political parties do we support?’ Sax asked.

‘I don’t know. The usual array I guess.’

‘No party gets much support. Whatever works, you know.’

Sax knew. That was the old tech position, held ever since scientists had become a class in society, a priest caste almost, intervening between the people and their power. They were apolitical, supposedly, like civil servants – empiricists, who only wanted things managed in a rational scientific style, the greatest good for the greatest number, which ought to be fairly simple to arrange, if people were not so trapped in emotions, religions, governments and other mass delusional systems of that sort.

The standard scientist politics, in other words. Sax had once tried to explain this outlook to Desmond, causing his friend for some reason to laugh prodigiously, even though it made perfect sense. Well, it was a bit naive, therefore a bit comical, he supposed; and like a lot of funny things, it could be that it was hilarious right up to the moment it turned horrible, because it was an attitude that had kept scientists from going at politics in any useful way for centuries now; and dismal centuries they had been.

But now they were on a planet where political power came out of the end of a mesocosm aerating fan. And the people in charge of that great gun (holding the elements at bay) were at least partly in charge. If they cared to exercise the power. Gently Sax reminded people of this when he visited them in their labs; and then to ease their discomfort with the idea of politics, he talked to them about the terraforming problem. And when he finally got ready to leave for Sabishii, about sixty of them were willing to come with him, to see how things were going down there. ‘Sax’s alternative to Pavonis,’ he heard one of the lab techs describe the trip. Which was not a bad thought.

Sabishii was located on the western side of a five-kilometre high prominence called the Tyrrhena Massif, south of Jarry-Desloges Crater, in the ancient highlands between Isidis and Hellas, centred at longitude 275°, latitude 15° south. A reasonable choice for a tent town site, as it had long views to the west, and low hills backing it to the east, like moors. But when it came to living in the open air, or growing plants out in the rocky countryside, it was a bit high; in fact it was, if you excluded the very much larger bulges of Tharsis and Elysium, the highest region on Mars, a kind of bioregion island, which the Sabishiians had been cultivating for decades.

They proved to be severely disappointed by the loss of the big mirrors, one might even say thrown into emergency mode, an all-out effort to do what they could to protect the plants of the biome; but it was precious little. Sax’s old colleague Nanao Nakayama shook his head. ‘Winterkill will be very bad. Like ice age.’

‘I’m hoping we can compensate for the loss of light,’ Sax said. ‘Thicken the atmosphere, add greenhouse gases – it’s possible we could do some of that with more bacteria and suralpine plants, right?’

‘Some,’ Nanao said dubiously. ‘A lot of niches are already full. The niches are quite small.’

They settled in over a meal to talk about it. All the techs from Da Vinci were there in the big dining hall of the Claw, and many Sabishiians were there to greet them. It was a long, interesting, friendly talk. The Sabishiians were living in the mound maze of their mohole, behind one talon of the dragon figure it made, so that they didn’t have to look at the burned ruins of their city when they weren’t working on it. The rebuilding was much reduced now, as most of them were out dealing with the results of the mirror loss. Nanao said to Tariki, in what was clearly the continuation of a long-standing argument, ‘It makes no sense to rebuild it as a tent city anyway. We might as well wait, and build it open air.’

‘That may be a long wait,’ Tariki said, glancing at Sax. ‘We’re near the top of the viability atmosphere named in the Dorsa Brevia document.’

Nanao looked at Sax. ‘We want Sabishii under any limit that is set.’

Sax nodded, shrugged; he didn’t know what to say. The Reds would not like it. But if the viable altitude limit was raised a kilometre or so, it would give the Sabishiians this massif, and make little difference on the larger bulges – so it seemed to make sense. But who knew what they would decide on Pavonis? He said, ‘Maybe we should focus now on trying to keep atmospheric pressures from dropping.’

They looked sombre.

Sax said, ‘You’ll take us out and show us the massif?’

They cheered up. ‘Most happy.’

The land of the Tyrrhena Massif was what the areologists in Sax’s day had called the ‘dissected unit’ of the southern highlands, which was much the same as the ‘cratered unit’, but further broken by small channel networks. The lower and more typical highlands surrounding the massif also contained areas of ‘ridged unit’ and ‘hilly unit’. In fact, as quickly became obvious the morning they drove out onto the land, all aspects of the rough terrain of the southern highlands were on view, often all at once: cratered, broken, uneven, ridged, dissected and hilly land, the quintessential Noachian landscape. Sax and Nanao and Tariki sat on the observation deck of one of the Sabishii university rovers; they could see other cars carrying other colleagues, and there were teams out walking ahead of them. On the last hills before the horizon to the east, a few energetic people were fell-running. The hollows of the land were all lightly dusted with dirty snow. The massif was centred 15° south of the equator, and they got a fair bit of precipitation around Sabishii, Nanao said. The southeast side of the massif was drier, but here, the cloud masses pushed south over the ice in Isidis Planitia and climbed the slope and dropped their loads.

Indeed, as they drove uphill great waves of dark cloud rolled in from the northwest, pouring over them as if chasing the fell-runners. Sax shuddered, remembering his recent exposure to the elements; he was happy to be in a rover, and felt he would need only short walks away from it to be satisfied.

Eventually, however, they stopped on a high point in a low old ridge, and got out. They made their way over a surface littered with boulders and knobs, cracks, sand drifts, very small craters, breadloafed bedrock, scarps and alases, and the old shallow channels that gave the dissected unit its name. In truth there were deformational features of every kind to be seen, for the land here was four billion years old. A lot had happened to it, but nothing had ever happened to destroy it completely and clean the slate, so all four billion years were still there to be seen, in a veritable museum of rockscapes. It had been thoroughly pulverized in the Noachian, leaving regolith several kilometres deep, and craters and deformities that no aeolian stripping could remove. And during this early period the other side of the planet had had its lithosphere to a depth of six kilometres blasted into space by the so-called Big Hit; a fair amount of that ejecta had eventually landed in the south. That was the explanation for the Great Escarpment, and the lack of ancient highlands in the north; and one more factor in the extremely disordered look of this land.

Then also, at the end of the Hesperian had come the brief warm wet period, when water had occasionally run on the surface. These days most areologists thought that this period had been quite wet but not really very warm, annual averages of well under 273 still allowing for surface water sometimes, replenished by hydrothermal convection rather than precipitation. This period had lasted for only a hundred million years or so, according to current estimates, and it had been followed by billions of years of winds, in the arid cold Amazonian Age, which had lasted right up to the point of their arrival. ‘Is there a name for the age starting with M-l?’ Sax asked.

‘The Holocene.’

And then lastly, everything had been scoured by two billion years of ceaseless wind, scoured so hard that the older craters were completely rimless, everything stripped by the relentless winds stratum by stratum, leaving behind a wilderness of rock. Not chaos, technically speaking, but wild, speaking its unimaginable age in polyglot profusion, in rimless craters and etched mesas, dips, hummocks, escarpments, and oh so many blocky pitted rocks.

Often they stopped the rover to walk around. Even small mesas seemed to tower over them. Sax found himself staying near their rover, but nevertheless he came upon all kinds of interesting features. Once he discovered a rover-shaped rock, cracked vertically all the way through. To the left of the block, off to the west, he had a view to a distant horizon, the rocky land out there a smooth yellow glaze. To the right, the waist-high wall of some old fault, pocked as if by cuneiform. Then a sand drift bordered by ankle-high rocks, some of them pyramidal dark basaltic ventifacts, others lighter, pitted, granulated rocks. There a balanced shattercone, big as any dolmen. There a sand tail. There a crude circle of ejecta, like an almost completely weathered Stonehenge. There a deep snake-shaped hollow – the fragment of a watercourse, perhaps – behind it another gentle rise – then a distant prominence like a lion’s head. The prominence next to it was like the lion’s body.

In the midst of all this stone and sand, plant life was unobtrusive. At least at first. One had to look for it, to pay close attention to colour, above all else to green, green in all its shades, but especially its desert shades – sage, olive, khaki and so on. Nanao and Tariki kept pointing out specimens he hadn’t seen. Closer he looked, and closer again. Once attuned to the pale, living colours, which blended so well with the ferric land, they began to jump out from the rust and brown and umber and ochre and black of the rockscape. Hollows and cracks were likely places to see them, and near the shaded patches of snow. The closer he looked, the more he saw; and then, in one high basin, it seemed there were plants tucked everywhere. In that moment he understood; it was all fellfield, the whole Tyrrhena Massif.

Then, coating entire rockfaces, or covering the inside areas of drip catchments, were the dayglow greens of certain lichens, and the emerald or dark velvet greens of the mosses. Wet fur.

The diversicoloured palette of the lichen array; the dark green of pine needles. Bunched sprays of Hokkaido pines, foxtail pines, Sierra junipers. Life’s colours. It was somewhat like walking from one great roofless room to another, over ruined walls of stone. A small plaza; a kind of winding gallery; a vast ballroom; a number of tiny interlocked chambers; a sitting room. Some rooms held krummholz bansei against their low walls, the trees no higher than their nooks, gnarled by wind, cut along the top at the snow level. Each branch, each plant, each open room, as shaped as any bonsai – and yet effortless.

Actually, Nanao told him, most of the basins were intensively cultivated. ‘This basin was planted by Abraham.’ Each little region was the responsibility of a certain gardener or gardening group.

‘Ah!’ Sax said. ‘And fertilized, then?’

Tariki laughed. ‘In a manner of speaking. The soil itself has been imported, for the most part.’

‘I see.’

This explained the diversity of plants. A little bit of cultivation, he knew, had been done around Arena Glacier, where he had first encountered the fellfields. But here they had gone far beyond those early steps. Labs in Sabishii, Tariki told him, were trying their best to manufacture topsoil. A good idea; soil in fellfields appeared naturally at a rate of only a few centimetres a century. But there were reasons for this, and manufacturing soil was proving to be extremely difficult.

Still, ‘We pick up a few million years at the start,’ Nanao said. ‘Evolve from there.’ They hand-planted many of their specimens, it seemed, then for the most part left them to their fate, and watched what developed.

‘I see,’ Sax said.

He looked more closely yet. The clear dim light: it was true that each great open room displayed a slightly different array of species. ‘These are gardens, then.’

‘Yes … or things like that. Depends.’

Some of the gardeners, Nanao said, worked according to the precepts of Muso Soseki, others according to other Japanese Zen masters; others still to Fu Hsi, the legendary inventor of the Chinese system of geomancy called feng shui; others to Persian gardening gurus, including Omar Khayyam; or to Leopold or Jackson, or other early American ecologists, like the nearly forgotten biologist Oskar Schnelling; and so on.

These were influences only, Tariki added. As they did the work, they developed visions of their own. They followed the inclination of the land, as they saw that some plants prospered, and others died. Co-evolution, a kind of epigenetic development.

‘Nice,’ Sax said, looking around. For the adepts, the walk from Sabishii up onto the massif must have been an aesthetic journey, filled with allusions and subtle variants of tradition that were invisible to him. Hiroko would have called it areo-formation, or the areophany. ‘I’d like to visit your soil labs.’

‘Of course.’

They returned to the rover, drove on. Late in the day, under dark threatening clouds, they came to the very top of the massif, which turned out to be a kind of broad, undulating moor. Small ravines were filled with pine needles, sheered off by winds so that they looked like the blades of grass on a well-mowed yard. Sax and Tariki and Nanao again got out of the car, walked around. The wind cut through their suits, and the late afternoon sun broke out from under the dark cloud cover, casting their shadows all the way out to the horizon. Up here on the moors there were many big masses of smooth, bare bedrock; looking around, the landscape had the red, primal look Sax remembered from the earliest years; but then they would walk to the edge of a small ravine, and suddenly be looking down into green.

Tariki and Nanao talked about ecopoesis, which for them was terraforming redefined, subtilized, localized. Transmuted into something like Hiroko’s areoformation. No longer powered by heavy industrial global methods, but by the slow, steady, and intensely local process of working on individual patches of land. ‘Mars is all a garden. Earth too for that matter. This is what humans have become. So we have to think about gardening, about that level of responsibility to the land. A human-Mars interface that does justice to both.’

Sax waggled a hand uncertainly. ‘I’m used to thinking of Mars as a kind of wilderness,’ he said, as he looked up the etymology of the word garden. French, Teutonic, Old Norse, gard, enclosure. Seemed to share origins with guard, or keeping. But who knew what the supposedly equivalent word in Japanese meant? Etymology was hard enough without translation thrown into the mix. ‘You know – get things started, let loose the seeds, then watch it all develop on its own. Self-organizing ecologies, you know.’

‘Yes,’ Tariki said, ‘but wilderness too is a garden now. A kind of garden. That’s what it means to be what we are.’ He shrugged, his forehead wrinkled; he believed the idea was true, but did not seem to like it. ‘Anyway, ecopoesis is closer to your vision of wilderness than industrial terraforming ever was.’

‘Maybe,’ Sax said. ‘Maybe they’re just two stages of a process. Both necessary.’

Tariki nodded, willing to consider it. ‘And now?’

‘It depends on how we want to deal with the possibility of an ice age,’ Sax said. ‘If it’s bad enough, kills off enough plants, then ecopoesis won’t have a chance. The atmosphere could freeze back onto the surface, the whole process crash. Without the mirrors, I’m not confident that the biosphere is robust enough to continue growing. That’s why I want to see those soil labs you have. It may be that industrial work on the atmosphere remains to be done. We’ll have to try some modelling and see.’

Tariki nodded, and Nanao too. Their ecologies were being snowed under, right before their eyes; flakes drifted down through the transient bronze sunlight at this very moment, tumbling in the wind. They were open to suggestion.

Meanwhile, as throughout these drives, their young associates from Da Vinci and Sabishii were running over the massif together, and returning to Sabishii’s mound maze babbling through the night about geomancy and areomancy, ecopoetics, heat exchange, the five elements, greenhouse gases, and so on. A creative ferment that looked to Sax very promising. ‘Michel should be here,’ he said to Nanao. ‘John should be here. How he would love a group like this.’

And then it occurred to him: ‘Ann should be here.’

So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.

Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.

‘Good idea,’ Sax said. ‘Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.’

Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldn’t.

He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis – gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.

After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.

Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraforming … there was evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was very like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal – then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning.

He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.

The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of the Tempe Fossae, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.

Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation – not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air out rather than in. ‘Hmm,’ Sax said, startled at the idea.

Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended the stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected – not a plant to be seen – just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking the canyons.

They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall; made of bits of coloured stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on – big, dusty – the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.

As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window-seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveller might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much any more, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Grey flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around one hundred and fifty years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments … she would soon die.

Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.

But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say to her.

Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.

‘I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena Massif,’ he said lamely.

She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.

Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.

He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to you,’ the taller one informed him.

‘Very astute of you,’ Sax said.

Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window: spellbound, or else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.

Sax stopped before her.

‘I want to get your impressions of it,’ he said. ‘Your suggestions for what we might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions. Of course it could be that strictly scientific questions aren’t of interest to you any more—’

She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face. He found himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his bottom. Ann was nowhere to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who clearly didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even than his face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he might cry before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating everything enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could not go on his knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldn’t.

‘Where did she go?’ he managed to say.

‘She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,’ the tall one declared.

‘Maybe you should wait and try later,’ the other advised.

‘Oh shut up!’ Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was like rage. ‘I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill herself!’

‘It’s her right,’ the tall one pontificated.

‘Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal. Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.’

‘You’re no friend of hers.’

‘I most certainly am.’ He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed. He approached her, slowing like Apollo in Zeno’s paradox.

She swivelled and glared at him.

‘It’s you who abandoned science, right from the start,’ she snarled. ‘So don’t you give me that shit about not being interested in science!’

‘True,’ Sax said. ‘It’s true.’ He held out both hands. ‘But now I need advice. Scientific advice. I want to learn. And I want to show you some things as well.’

But after a moment’s consideration she was up and off again, right past him, so that he flinched despite himself. He hurried after her; her gait was much longer than his, and she was moving fast, so that he had almost to jog. His bones hurt.

‘Perhaps we could go out here,’ Sax suggested. ‘It doesn’t matter where we go out.’

‘Because the whole planet is wrecked,’ she muttered.

‘You must still go out for sunsets occasionally.’ Sax persisted. ‘I could join you for that, perhaps.’

‘No.’

‘Please, Ann.’ She was a fast walker, and enough taller than him that it was hard to keep up with her and talk as well. He was huffing and puffing, and his cheek still hurt. ‘Please, Ann.’

She did not answer, she did not slow down. Now they were walking down a hall between suites of living quarters, and Ann sped up to go through a doorway and slam the door behind her. Sax tried it; it was locked.

Not, on the whole, a promising beginning.

Hound and hind. Somehow he had to change things so that it was not a hunt, a pursuit. Nevertheless: ‘I huff, I puff, I blow your house down.’ he muttered. He blew at the door. But then the two young women were there, staring hard at him.

One evening later that week, near sunset, he went down to the changing room and suited up. When Ann came in he jumped several centimetres. ‘I was just going out,’ he stammered. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘It’s a free country.’ she said heavily.

And they went out of the lock together, into the land. The young women would have been amazed.

* * *

He had to be very careful. Naturally, although he was out there with her to show to her the beauty of the new biosphere, it would not do to mention plants, or snow, or clouds. One had to let things speak for themselves. This was perhaps true of all phenomena. Nothing could be spoken for. One could only walk over the land, and let it speak for itself.

Ann was not gregarious. She barely spoke to him. It was her usual route, he suspected as he followed her. He was being allowed to come along.

It was perhaps permissible to ask questions: this was science. And Ann stopped often enough, to look at rock formations up close. It made sense at those times to crouch beside her, and with a gesture or a word ask what she was finding. They wore suits and helmets, even though the altitude was low enough to have allowed breathing with only the aid of a CO₂ filter mask. Thus conversations consisted of voices in the ear, as of old. Asking questions.

So he asked. And Ann would answer, sometimes in some detail. Tempe Terra was indeed the Land of Time, its basement material a surviving piece of the southern highlands, one of those lobes of it that stuck far into the northern plains – a survivor of the Big Hit. Then later Tempe had fractured extensively, as the lithosphere was pushed up from below by the Tharsis bulge to the south. These fractures included both the Mareotis Fossae and the Tempe Fossae surrounding them now.

The spreading land had cracked enough to allow some latecomer volcanoes to emerge, spilling over the canyons. From one high ridge they saw a distant volcano like a black cone dropped from the sky; then another, looking just like a meteor crater as far as Sax could see. Ann shook her head at this observation, and pointed out lava flows and vents, features all visible once they were pointed out, but not at all obvious under a scree of later ejecta rubble and (one had to admit it) a dusting of dirty snow, collecting like sand drifts in wind shelters, turning sand-coloured in the sunset light.

To see the landscape in its history, to read it like a text, written by its own long past; that was Ann’s vision, achieved by a century’s close observation and study, and by her own native gift, her love for it. Something to behold, really – something to marvel at. A kind of resource, or treasure – a love beyond science, or something into the realm of Michel’s mystical science. Alchemy. But alchemists wanted to change things. A kind of oracle, rather. A visionary, with a vision just as powerful as Hiroko’s, really. Less obviously visionary, perhaps, less spectacular, less active; an acceptance of what was there; love of rock, for rock’s sake. For Mars’s sake. The primal planet, in all its sublime glory, red and rust, still as death; dead; altered through the years only by matter’s chemical permutations, the immense slow life of geophysics. It was an odd concept – abiologic life – but there it was, if one cared to see it, a kind of living, out there spinning, moving through the stars that burned, moving through the universe in its great systolic/diastolic movement, its one big breath, one might say. Sunset somehow made it easier to see that.

Trying to see things Ann’s way. Glancing furtively at his wristpad, behind her back. Stone, from Old English stdn, cognates everywhere, back to proto-Indo-Eurdpean sti, a pebble. Rock, from medieval Latin rocca, origin unknown; a mass of stone. Sax abandoned the wristpad and fell away into a kind of rock reverie, open and blank. Tabula rasa, to the point where apparently he did not hear what Ann herself was saying to him; for she snorted and walked on. Abashed, he followed, and steeled himself to ignore her displeasure, and ask more questions.

There seemed to be a lot of displeasure in Ann. In a way this was reassuring; lack of affect would have been a very bad sign; but she still seemed quite emotional. At least most of the time. Sometimes she focused on the rock so intently it was almost like watching her obsessed enthusiasm of old, and he was encouraged; other times it seemed she was just going through the motions, doing areology in a desperate attempt to stave off the present moment; stave off history; or despair; or all of that. In those moments she was aimless, and did not stop to look at obviously interesting features they passed, and did not answer his questions about same. The little Sax had read about depression alarmed him; not much could be done, one needed drugs to combat it, and even then nothing was sure. But to suggest anti-depressants was more or less the same as suggesting the treatment itself; and so he could not speak of it. And besides, was despair the same as depression?

Happily, in this context, plants were pitifully few. Tempe was not like Tyrrhena, or even the banks of the Arena Glacier. Without active gardening, this was what one got. The world was still mostly rock.

On the other hand, Tempe was low in altitude, and humid, with the ice ocean just a few kilometres to the north and west. And various Johnny Appleseed flights had passed over the entire southern shoreline of the new sea-part of Biotique’s efforts, begun some decades ago, when Sax had been in Burroughs. So there was some lichen to be seen, if you looked hard. And small patches of fellfield. And a few krummholz trees, half-buried in snow. All these plants were in trouble in this northern summer-turned-winter, except for the lichen of course. There was a fair bit of miniaturized fall colour already, there in the tiny leaves of the ground-hugging koenigia, and pygmy buttercup, and icegrass, and, yes, arctic saxifrage. The reddening leaves served as a kind of camouflage in the ambient redrock; often Sax didn’t see plants until he was about to step on them. And of course he wasn’t drawing attention to them anyway, so when he did stumble on one, he gave it a quick evaluative glance and walked on.

They climbed a prominent knoll overlooking the canyon west of the refuge, and there it was: the great ice sea, all orange and brass in the late light. It filled the lowland in a great sweep and formed its own smooth horizon, from southwest to northeast. Mesas of the fretted terrain now stuck out of the ice like sea stacks or cliff-sided islands. In truth this part of Tempe was going to be one of the most dramatic coastlines on Mars, with the lower ends of some fossae filling to become long fjords or lochs. And one coastal crater was right at sea level, and had a break in its sea side, making it a perfect round bay some fifteen kilometres wide, with an entry channel about two kilometres across. Farther south, the fretted terrain at the foot of the Great Escarpment would create a veritable Hebrides of an archipelago, many of the islands visible from the cliffs of the mainland. Yes, a dramatic coastline. As one could see already, looking at the broken sheets of sunset ice.

But of course this was not to be noted. No mention at all of the ice, the jagged bergs jumbled on the new shoreline. The bergs had been formed by some process Sax wasn’t aware of, though he was curious – but it could not be discussed. One could only stand in silence, as if having stumbled into a cemetery.

Embarrassed, Sax kneeled to look at a specimen of Tibetan rhubarb he had almost stepped on. Little red leaves, in a floret from a central red bulb.

Ann was looking over his shoulder. ‘Is it dead?’

‘No.’ He pulled off a few dead leaves from the exterior of the floret, showed her the brighter ones beneath. ‘It’s hardening for the winter already. Fooled by the drop in light.’ Then Sax went on, as if to himself: ‘A lot of the plants will die, though. The thermal overturn,’ which was when air temperatures turned colder than the ground temperatures, ‘came more or less overnight. There won’t be much chance for hardening. Thus lots of winterkill. Plants are better at handling it than animals would have been. And insects are surprisingly good, considering they’re little containers of liquid. They have supercooling cryoprotectants. They can stand whatever happens, I think.’

Ann was still inspecting the plant, and so Sax shut up. It’s alive, he wanted to say. Insofar as the members of a biosphere depend on each other for existence, it is part of your body. How can you hate it?

But then again, she wasn’t taking the treatment.

The ice sea was a shattered blaze of bronze and coral. The sun was setting, they would have to get back. Ann straightened and walked away, a black silhouette, silent. He could speak in her ear, even now when she was a hundred metres away, then two hundred, a small black figure in the great sweep of the world. He did not; it would have been an invasion of her privacy, almost of her thoughts. But how he wondered what those thoughts were. How he longed to say Ann, Ann, what are you thinking? Talk to me, Ann. Share your thoughts.

The intense desire to talk with someone, sharp as any pain; this was what people meant when they talked about love. Or rather; this was what Sax would acknowledge to be love. Just the super-heightened desire to share thoughts. That alone. Oh Ann, please talk to me.

* * *

But she did not talk to him. On her the plants seemed not to have had the effect they had had on him. She seemed truly to abominate them, these little emblems of her body, as if viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer. Even though in the growing piles of wind-drifted snow, plants were scarcely visible any more. It was getting dark, another storm was sweeping in, low over the black-and-copper sea. A pad of moss, a lichened rockface; mostly it was rock alone, just as it had ever been. Nevertheless.

Then as they were getting back into the refuge lock, Ann fell in a faint. On the way down she hit her head on the door-jamb. Sax caught her body as she was landing on a bench against the inner wall. She was unconscious, and Sax half-carried her, half-dragged her all the way into the lock. Then he pulled the outer door shut, and when the lock was pumped, pulled her through the inner door into the changing room. He must have been shouting over the common band, because by the time he got her helmet off, five or six Reds were there in the room, more than he had seen in the refuge so far. One of the young women who had so impeded him, the short one, turned out to be the medical person of the station, and when they got Ann up onto a rolling table that could be used as a gurney, this woman led the way to the refuge’s medical clinic, and there took over. Sax helped where he could, getting Ann’s walker boots off her long feet with shaking hands. His pulse rate – he checked his wristpad – was a hundred and forty-five beats a minute – and he felt hot, even light-headed.

‘Has she had a stroke?’ he said. ‘Has she had a stroke?’

The short woman looked surprised. ‘I don’t think so. She fainted. Then struck her head.’

‘But why did she faint?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looked at the tall young woman, who sat next to the door. Sax understood that they were the senior authorities in the refuge. ‘Ann left instructions for us not to put her on any kind of life support mechanism, if she were ever incapacitated like this.’

‘No,’ Sax said.

‘Very explicit instructions. She forbade it. She wrote it down.’

‘You put her on whatever it takes to keep her alive,’ Sax said, his voice harsh with strain. Everything he had said since Ann’s collapse had been a surprise to him; he was a witness to his actions just as much as they were. He heard himself say, ‘It doesn’t mean you have to keep her on it, if she doesn’t come around. It’s just a reasonable minimum, to make sure she doesn’t go for nothing.’

The doctor rolled her eyes at this distinction, but the tall woman sitting in the doorway looked thoughtful.

Sax heard himself go on: ‘I was on life support for some four days, as I understand it, and I’m glad no one decided to turn it off. It’s her decision, not yours. Anyone who wants to die can do it without having to make a doctor compromise her Hippocratic oath.’

The doctor rolled her eyes even more disgustedly than before. But with a glance at her colleague, she began to pull Ann onto the life support bed; Sax helped her; and then she was turning on the medical AI, and getting Ann out of her walker. A rangy old woman, now breathing with an oxygen mask over her face. The tall woman stood and began to help the doctor, and Sax went and sat down. His own physiological symptoms were amazingly severe, marked chiefly by heat all through him, and a kind of incompetent hyperventilation; and an ache that made him want to cry.

After a time the doctor came over. Ann had fallen into a coma, she said. It looked like a small heart rhythm abnormality had caused her to faint in the first place. She was stable at the moment.

Sax sat in the room. Much later the doctor returned. Ann’s wristpad had recorded an episode of rapid irregular heartbeat, at the time she fainted. Now there was still a small arrhythmia. And apparently anoxia, or the blow to the head, or both, had initiated a coma.

Sax asked what a coma was, and felt a sinking feeling when the doctor shrugged. It was a catch-all term, apparently, for unconscious states of a certain kind. Pupils fixed, body insensitive, and sometimes locked into decorticate postures. Ann’s left arm and leg were twisted. And unconsciousness of course. Sometimes odd vestiges of responsiveness, clenching hands and the like. Duration of coma varied widely. Some people never came out of them.

Sax looked at his hands until the doctor left him alone. He sat in the room until everyone else was gone. Then he got up and stood at Ann’s side, looking down at her masked face. Nothing to be done. He held her hand; it did not clench. He held her head, as he had been told Nirgal had held his when he was unconscious. It felt like a useless gesture.

He went to the AI screen, and called up the diagnostic program. He called up Ann’s medical data, and ran back the heart monitor data from the incident in the lock. A small arrhythmia, yes; rapid, irregular pattern. He fed the data into the diagnostic program, and looked up heart arrhythmia on his own. There were a lot of aberrant cardiac rhythm patterns, but it appeared that Ann might have a genetic predisposition to suffer from a disorder called long QT syndrome, named for a characteristic abnormal long wave in the electrocardiogram. He called up Ann’s genome, and instructed the AI to run a search in the relevant regions of chromosomes three, seven and eleven. In the gene called HERG, in her chromosome seven, the AI identified a small mutation: one reversal of adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine. Small, but HERG contained instructions for the assembly of a protein that served as a potassium ion channel in the surface of heart cells, and these ion channels acted as a switch to turn off contracting heart cells. Without this brake the heart could go arrhythmic, and beat too fast to pump blood effectively.

Ann also appeared to have another problem, with a gene on chromosome three called SCN5A. This gene encoded a different regulatory protein, which provided a sodium ion channel on the surface of heart cells. This channel functioned as an accelerator, and mutations here could add to the problem of rapid heartbeat. Ann had a CG bit missing.

These genetic conditions were rare, but for the diagnostic AI, that was not an issue. It contained a symptomology for all known problems, no matter how rare. It seemed to consider Ann’s case to be fairly straightforward, and it listed the treatments that existed to counteract the problems presented by the condition. There were a lot of them.

One of the treatments suggested was the recoding of the problem genes, in the course of the standard gerontological treatments. Persistent gene recodings through several longevity treatments should erase the cause of the problem right at the root, or rather in the seed. It seemed strange that this hadn’t been done already, but then Sax saw that the recommendation was only about two decades old; it came from a period after the last time Ann had taken the treatments.

For a long time Sax sat there, staring at the screen. Much later he got up. He began to inspect the Reds’ medical clinic, instrument by instrument, room by room. The nursing attendants let him wander; they thought he was distraught.

This was a major Red refuge, and it seemed likely to him that one of the rooms might contain the equipment necessary to administer the gerontological treatments. Indeed it was so. A small room at the back of the clinic appeared to be devoted to the process. It didn’t take much: a bulky AI, a small lab, the stock proteins and chemicals, the incubators, the MRIs, the IV equipment. Amazing, when you considered what it did. But that had always been true. Life itself was amazing: simple protein sequences only, at the start, and yet here they were.

So. The main AI had Ann’s genome record. But if he ordered this lab to start synthesizing her DNA strands for her (adding the recodings of HERG and SCN5A) the people here would surely notice. And then there would be trouble.

He went back to his tiny room to make a coded call to Da Vinci. He asked his associates there to start the synthesis, and they agreed without any questions beyond the technical ones. Sometimes he loved those saxaclones with all his heart.

After that it was back to waiting. Hours passed; more hours; more hours. Eventually several days had passed, with no change in Ann. The doctor’s expression grew blacker and blacker, though she said nothing more about unhooking Ann. But it was in her eye. Sax took to sleeping on the floor in Ann’s room. He grew to know the rhythm of her breathing. He spent a lot of time with a hand cradling her head, as Michel had told him Nirgal had done with him. He very much doubted that this had ever cured anybody of anything, but he did it anyway. Sitting for so long in such a posture, he had occasion to think about the brain plasticity treatments that Vlad and Ursula had administered to him after his stroke. Of course a stroke was a very different thing to a coma. But a change of mind was not necessarily a bad thing, if one’s mind was in pain.

More days passed without a change, each day slower and blanker and more fearful than the one before. The incubators in the Da Vinci labs had long since cooked up a full set of corrected Ann – specific DNA strands, and anti-sense rein-forcers, and glue-ons – the whole gerontological package, in its latest configuration.

So one night he called up Ursula, and had a long consultation with her. She answered his questions calmly, even as she struggled with the idea of what he wanted to do. ‘The synaptic stimulus package we gave you would produce too much synaptic growth in undamaged brains,’ she said firmly. ‘It would alter personality to no set pattern.’ Creating madmen like Sax, her alarmed look said.

Sax decided to skip the synaptic supplements. Saving Ann’s life was one thing, changing her mind another. Random change was not the goal anyway. Acceptance was. Happiness – Ann’s true happiness, whatever that might be – now so far away, so hard to imagine. He ached to think of it. It was extraordinary how much physical pain could be generated by thought alone – the limbic system a whole universe in itself, suffused with pain, like the dark matter that suffused everything in the universe.

‘Have you talked to Michel?’ Ursula asked.

‘No. Good idea.’

He called Michel, explained what had happened, and what he had in mind to do. ‘My God, Sax,’ Michel said, looking shocked. But in only a few moments he was promising to come. He would get Desmond to fly him to Da Vinci to pick up the treatment supplies, and then fly on up to the refuge.

So Sax sat in Ann’s room, a hand to her head. A bumpy skull; no doubt a phrenologist would have had a field day.

Then Michel and Desmond were there, his brothers, standing beside him. The doctor was there too, escorting them, and the tall woman and others as well; so everything had to be communicated by looks, or the absence of looks. Nevertheless everything was perfectly clear. Desmond’s face was if anything too clear. They had Ann’s longevity package with them. They only had to wait their chance.

Which came quite soon; with Ann settled into her coma, the situation in the little hospital was routine. The effects of the longevity treatment on a coma, however, were not fully known; Michel had scanned the literature, and the data were sparse. It had been tried as an experimental treatment in a few unresponsive comas before, and had been successful in rousing victims almost half the time. Because of that Michel now thought it was a good idea.

And so, soon after their arrival, the three of them got up in the middle of the night, and tiptoed past the sleeping attendant in the medical centre’s anteroom. Medical training had had its usual effect, and the attendant was sound asleep, though awkwardly propped in her chair. Sax and Michel hooked Ann up to the IVs, and stuck the needles in the veins on the backs of her hands, working slowly, carefully, precisely. Quietly. Soon she was hooked up, the IVs were flowing, the new protein strands were in her bloodstream. Her breathing grew irregular, and Sax felt hot with fear. He groaned silently. It was comforting to have Michel and Desmond here, each holding an arm as if supporting him, keeping him from falling; but he wished desperately for Hiroko. This was what she would have done, he was certain of it. Which made him feel better. Hiroko was one of the reasons he was doing this. Still he longed for her support, her physical presence, he wished she would show up to help him like she had on Daedalia Planitia. To help Ann. She was the expert at this kind of radically irresponsible human experimentation, this would have been small potatoes to her …

When the operation was finished, they took out the IV needles and put the equipment away. The attendant slept on, mouth open, looking like the girl she was. Ann was still unconscious, but breathing easier, Sax felt. More strongly.

The three men stood looking down at Ann together. Then they slipped out, and tiptoed back down the hall to their rooms. Desmond was dancing on his toes like a fool, and the other two shushed him. They got back in their beds but couldn’t sleep; and couldn’t talk; and so lay there silently, like brothers in a big house, late at night, after a successful expedition out into the nocturnal world.

The next morning the doctor came in. ‘Her vital signs are better.’

The three men expressed their pleasure at this.

Later, down in the dining hall, Sax had a strong urge to tell Michel and Desmond about his encounter with Hiroko. The news would mean more to these two than anyone else. But something in him was afraid to do it. He was afraid of seeming overwrought, perhaps even delusional. That moment when Hiroko had left him at the rover, and walked off into the storm – he didn’t know what to think of that. In his long hours with Ann he had done some thinking, and some research, and he knew now that Terran climbers alone at high altitude, suffering from oxygen loss, not infrequently hallucinated companion climbers. Some kind of doppelganger figure. Rescue by anima. And his air tube had been partially clogged.

He said, ‘I thought this was what Hiroko would have done.’

Michel nodded. ‘It’s bold, I’ll hand you that. It has her style. No, don’t misunderstand me – I’m glad you did it.’

‘About fucking time, if you ask me,’ said Desmond. ‘Someone should have tied her down and made her take the treatment years ago. Oh my Sax, my Sax—’ he laughed happily. ‘I only hope she doesn’t come to as crazy as you did.’

‘But Sax had a stroke,’ Michel said.

‘Well,’ Sax said, concerned to set the record straight, ‘actually I was somewhat eccentric before.’

His two friends nodded, mouths pursed. They were in high spirits, though the situation was still unresolved. Then the tall doctor came in; Ann had come out of her coma.

Sax felt that his stomach was still too contracted by tension to take in food, but he noted that he was disposing of a pile of buttered toast quite handily. Wolfing it down, in fact.

‘But she’s going to be very angry at you,’ Michel said.

Sax nodded. It was, alas, probable. Likely, even. A bad thought. He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.

‘You should come with us to Earth,’ Michel suggested. ‘Maya and I are going with the delegation, and Nirgal.’

‘There’s a delegation going to Earth?’

‘Yes, someone suggested it, and it seems like a good idea. We need to have some representatives right there on Earth talking to them. And by the time we get back from that, Ann will have had time to think it over.’

‘Interesting,’ Sax said, relieved at the mere suggestion of an escape from the situation. In fact it was almost frightening how quickly he could think of ten good reasons for going to Earth. ‘But what about Pavonis, and this conference they’re talking about?’

‘We can stay part of that by video.’

‘True.’ It was just what he had always maintained.

The plan was attractive. He did not want to be there when Ann woke up. Or rather, when she found out what he had done. Cowardice, of course. But still. ‘Desmond, are you going?’

‘Not a fucking chance.’

‘But you say Maya is going too?’ Sax asked Michel.

‘Yes.’

‘Good. The last time I, I, I tried to save a woman’s life, Maya killed her.’

‘What? What – Phyllis? You saved Phyllis’s life?’

‘Well – no. That is to say, I did, but I was also the one who put her in danger in the first place. So I don’t think it counts.’ He tried to explain what had happened that night in Burroughs, with little success. It was fuzzy in his own mind, except for certain vivid horrible moments. ‘Never mind. It was just a thought. I shouldn’t have spoken. I’m …’

‘You’re tired,’ Michel said. ‘But don’t worry. Maya will be away from the scene here, and safely under our eye.’

Sax nodded. It was sounding better all the time. Give Ann some time to cool off; think it over; understand. Hopefully. And it would be very interesting of course to see conditions on Earth at first hand. Extremely interesting. So interesting that no rational person could pass up the opportunity.

PART THREE A New Constitution

Ants came to Mars as part of the soil project, and soon they were everywhere, as is their way. And so the little red people encountered ants, and they were amazed. These creatures were just the right size to ride; it was like the Native Americans meeting the horse. Tame the things and they would run wild.

Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not believed such creatures were even possible, because of surface area-to-volume constraints, but there they were, clumping around like intelligent robots, so the little red scientists had to explain them. To get some help they climbed up into the humans’ reference books, and read up on ants. They learned about the ants’ pheromones, and they synthesized the ones they needed to control the soldier ants of a particularly small docile red species, and after that, they were in business. Little red cavalry. They charged around everywhere on antback, having a fine old time, twenty or thirty of them on each ant, like pashas on elephants. Look close at enough ants and you’ll see them, right there on top.

But the little red scientists continued to read the texts, and learned about human pheromones. They went back to the rest of the little red people, awestruck and appalled. Now we know why these humans are such trouble, they reported. Humans have no more will than these ants we are riding around on. They are giant meat ants.

The little red people tried to comprehend such a travesty of life.

Then a voice said, No they’re not, to all of them at once. The little red people talk to each other telepathically, you see, and this was like a telepathic loudspeaker announcement. Humans are spiritual beings, this voice insisted.

How do you know? the little red people asked telepathically. Who are you? Are you the ghost of John Boone?

I am the Gyatso Rimpoche, the voice answered. The eighteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. I am travelling the Bardo in search of my next reincarnation. I’ve looked everywhere on Earth, but I’ve had no luck, and I decided to look somewhere new. Tibet is still under the thumb of the Chinese, and they show no signs of letting up. The Chinese, although I love them dearly, are hard bastards. And the other governments of the world long ago turned their backs on Tibet. So no one will challenge the Chinese. Something needs to be done. So I came to Mars.

Good idea, the little red people said.

Yes, the Dalai Lama agreed, but I must admit I am having a hard time finding a new body to inhabit. For one thing there are very few children anywhere. Then also it does not look as if anyone is interested. I looked in Sheffield but everyone was too busy talking. I went to Sabishii but everyone there had their heads stuck in the dirt. I went to Elysium but everyone had assumed the lotus position and could not be roused. I went to Christianopolis but everyone there had other plans. I went to Hiranyagarbha but everyone there said we’ve already done enough for Tibet. I’ve gone everywhere on Mars, to every tent and station, and everywhere people are just too busy. No one wants to be the nineteenth Dalai Lama. And the Bardo is getting colder and colder.

Good luck, the little red people said. We’ve been looking ever since John died and we haven’t even found anyone worth talking to, much less living inside. These big people are all messed up.

The Dalai Lama was discouraged by this response. He was getting very tired, and could not last much longer in the Bardo. So he said, What about one of you?

Well, sure, the little red people said. We’d be honoured. Only it will have to be all of us at once. We do everything like that together.

Why not, said the Dalai Lama, and he transmigrated into one of the little red specks, and that same instant he was there in all of them, all over Mars. The little red people looked up at the humans crashing around above them, a sight which before they had tended to regard as some kind of bad wide-screen movie, and now they found they were filled with all the compassion and wisdom of the eighteen previous lives of the Dalai Lama. They said to each other, Ka wow, these people really are messed up. We thought it was bad before, but look at that, it’s even worse than we thought. They’re lucky they can’t read each other’s minds or they’d kill each other. That must be why they’re killing each other – they know what they’re thinking themselves, and so they suspect all the others. How ugly. How sad.

They need your help, the Dalai Lama said inside them all. Maybe you can help them.

Maybe, the little red people said. They were dubious, to tell the truth. They had been trying to help humans ever since John Boone died, they had set up whole towns in the porches of every ear on the planet, and talked continuously ever since, sounding very much like John had, trying to get people to wake up and act decently, and never with any effect at all, except to send a lot of people to ear, nose and throat specialists. Lots of people on Mars thought they had tinnitus, but no one ever understood their little red people. It was enough to discourage anyone.

But now the little red people had the compassionate spirit of the Dalai Lama infusing them, and so they decided to try one more time. Perhaps it will take more than whispering in their ears, the Dalai Lama pointed out, and they all agreed. We’ll have to get their attention some other way.

Have you tried your telepathy on them? the Dalai Lama asked.

Oh no, they said. No way. Too scary. The ugliness might kill us on the spot. Or at least make us real sick.

Maybe not, the Dalai Lama said. Maybe if you blocked off your reception of what they thought, and just beamed your thoughts at them, it would be all right. Just send lots of good thoughts, like an advice beam. Compassion, love, agreeableness, wisdom, even a little common sense.

We’ll give it a try, the little red people said. But we’re all going to have to shout at the top of our telepathic voices, all in chorus, because these folks just aren’t listening.

I’ve faced that for nine centuries now, the Dalai Lama said. You get used to it. And you little ones have the advantage of numbers. So give it a try.

And so all the little red people all over Mars looked up and took a deep breath.

Art Randolph was having the time of his life.

Not during the battle for Sheffield, of course – that had been a disaster, a breakdown of diplomacy, the failure of everything Art had been trying to do – a miserable few days, in fact, during which he had run around sleeplessly trying to meet with every group he thought might help defuse the crisis, and always with the feeling that it was somehow his fault, that if he had done things right it would not have happened. The fight went right to the brink of torching Mars, as in 2061; for a few hours on the afternoon of the Red assault, it had teetered.

But fallen back. Something – diplomacy, or the realities of battle (a defensive victory for those on the cable), common sense, sheer chance – something had tipped things back from the edge.

And with that nightmare interval past, people had returned to East Pavonis in a thoughtful mood. The consequences of failure had been made clear. They needed to agree on a plan. Many of the radical Reds were dead, or escaped into the outback, and the moderate Reds left in East Pavonis, while angry, were at least there. It was a very uncomfortable and uncertain period. But there they were.

So once again Art began flogging the idea of a constitutional congress. He ran around under the big tent through warrens of industrial warehouses and storage zones and concrete dormitories, down broad streets crowded with a museum’s worth of heavy vehicles, and everywhere he urged the same thing: constitution. He talked to Nadia, Nirgal, Jackie, Zeyk, Maya, Peter, Ariadne, Rashid, Tariki, Nanao, Sung and H. X. Bor-azjani. He talked to Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and to the Coyote. He talked to a few score young natives he had never met before, all major players in the recent unrest; there were so many of them it began to seem like a textbook demonstration of the polycephalous nature of mass social movements. And to every head of this new hydra Art made the same case: ‘A constitution would legitimate us to Earth, and it would give us a framework for settling disputes among ourselves. And we’re all gathered here, we could start right away. Some people have plans ready to look at.’ And with the events of the past week fresh in their minds, people would nod and say, ‘Maybe so,’ and wander off thinking about it.

Art called up William Fort and told him what he was doing, and got an answer back later the same day. The old man was at a new refugee town in Costa Rica, looking just as distracted as always. ‘Sounds good,’ he said. And after that Praxis people were checking with Art daily to see what they could do to help organize things. Art became busier than he had ever been, doing what the Japanese there called nema-washi, the preparations for an event: starting strategy sessions for an organizing group, revisiting everyone he had spoken to before, trying, in effect, to talk to every individual on Pavonis Mons. ‘The John Boone method,’ Coyote commented with his cracked laugh. ‘Good luck!’

Sax, packing his few belongings for the diplomatic mission to Earth, said, ‘You should invite the, the United Nations.’

Sax’s adventure in the storm had knocked him back a bit; he tended to stare around at things, as if stunned by a blow to the head. Art said gently, ‘Sax, we just went to a lot of trouble to kick their butts off this planet.’

‘Yes,’ Sax said, staring at the ceiling. ‘But now co-opt them.’

‘Co-opt the UN!’ Art considered it. Co-opt the United Nations: it had a certain ring to it. It would be a challenge, diplomatically speaking.

Just before the ambassadors left for Earth, Nirgal came to the Praxis offices to say goodbye. Embracing his young friend, Art was seized with a sudden irrational fear. Off to Earth!

Nirgal was as blithe as ever, his dark brown eyes alight with anticipation. After saying goodbye to the others in the outer office, he sat with Art in an empty corner room of the warehouse.

‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ Art asked.

‘Very sure. I want to see Earth.’

Art waggled a hand, uncertain what to say.

‘Besides,’ Nirgal added, ‘someone has to go down there and show them who we are.’

‘None better for that than you, my friend. But you’ll have to watch out for the metanats. Who knows what they’ll be up to. And for bad food – those areas affected by the flood are sure to have problems with sanitation. And disease vectors. And you’ll have to be careful about sunstroke, you’ll be very susceptible—’

Jackie Boone walked in. Art stopped his travel advisory; Nirgal was no longer listening in any case, but watching Jackie with a suddenly blank expression, as if he had put on a Nirgal mask. And of course no mask could do justice to Nirgal, because the mobility of his face was its essential characteristic; so he did not look like himself at all.

Jackie, of course, saw this instantly. Shut off from her old partner … naturally she glared at him. Something had gone awry, Art saw. Both of them had forgotten Art, who would have slipped out of the room if he could have, feeling as if he was holding a lightning rod in a storm. But Jackie was still standing in the doorway, and Art did not care to disturb her at that moment.

‘So you’re leaving us,’ she said to Nirgal.

‘It’s just a visit.’

‘But why? Why now? Earth means nothing to us now.’

‘It’s where we came from.’

‘It is not. We came from Zygote.’

Nirgal shook his head. ‘Earth is the home planet. We’re an extension of it, here. We have to deal with it.’

Jackie waved a hand in disgust, or bafflement: ‘You’re leaving just when you’re needed here the most!’

Think of it as an opportunity.’

‘I will,’ she snapped. He had made her angry. ‘And you won’t like it.’

‘But you’ll have what you want.’

Fiercely she said, ‘You don’t know what I want!’

The hair on the back of Art’s neck had raised; lightning was about to strike. He would have said he was an eavesdropper by nature, almost a voyeur in fact; but standing right there in the room was not the same, and he found now there were some things he did not care to witness. He cleared his throat. The other two were startled by his noise. With a waggle of the hand he sidled past Jackie and out of the door. Behind him the voices went on – bitter, accusatory, filled with pain and baffled fury.

Coyote stared gravely out of the windshield as he drove the ambassadors to Earth south to the elevator, with Art sitting beside him. They rolled slowly through the battered neighbourhoods that bordered the Socket, in the southwest part of Sheffield where the streets had been designed to handle enormous freight container gantries, so that things had an ominous Speeresque quality to them, inhuman and gigantic. Sax was explaining once again to Coyote that the trip to Earth would not remove the travellers from the constitutional congress, that they would contribute by vid, that they would not end up like Thomas Jefferson in Paris, missing the whole thing. ‘We’ll be on Pavonis,’ Sax said, ‘in all the senses that matter.’

‘Then everyone will be on Pavonis,’ Coyote said ominously. He didn’t like this trip to Earth for Sax and Maya and Michel and Nirgal; he didn’t seem to like the constitutional congress; nothing these days pleased him, he was jumpy, uneasy, irritable. ‘We’re not out of the woods yet,’ he would mutter, ‘you mark my words.’

Then the Socket stood before them, the cable emerging black and glossy from the great mass of concrete, like a harpoon plunged into Mars by Earthly powers, holding it fast. After identifying themselves the travellers drove right into the complex, down a big, straight passageway to the enormous chamber at the centre where the cable came down through the Socket’s collar, and hovered over a network of pistes crisscrossing the floor. The cable was so exquisitely balanced in its orbit that it never touched Mars at all, but merely hung there with its ten-metre diameter end floating in the middle of the room, the collar in the roof doing no more than stabilizing it; for the rest, its positioning was up to the rockets installed up and down the cable, and, more importantly, to the balance between centrifugal force and gravity which kept it in its areo-synchronous orbit.

A row of elevator cars floated in the air like the cable itself, though for a different reason, as they were electromagnetically suspended. One of them levitated over a piste to the cable, and latched on to the track inlaid in the cable’s west side, and rose up soundlessly through a valve-door in the collar.

The travellers and their escorts got out of their car. Nirgal was withdrawn, already on his way; Maya and Michel excited; Sax his usual self. One by one they hugged Art and Coyote, stretching up to Art, leaning down to Desmond. For a time they all talked at once, staring at each other, trying to comprehend the moment; it was just a trip, but it felt like more than that. Then the four travellers crossed the floor, and disappeared into a jetway leading up into the next elevator car.

After that Coyote and Art stood there, and watched the car float over to the cable and rise through the valve-door and disappear. Coyote’s asymmetrical face clenched into a most uncharacteristic expression of worry, even fear. That was his son, of course, and three of his closest friends, going to a very dangerous place. Well, it was just Earth; but it felt dangerous, Art had to admit. ‘They’ll be okay,’ Art said, giving the little man a squeeze on the shoulder. ‘They’ll be stars down there. It’ll go fine.’ No doubt true. In fact he felt better himself at his own reassurances. It was the home planet, after all. Humans were made for it. They would be fine. It was the home planet. But still …

Back in East Pavonis the congress had begun.

It was Nadia’s doing, really. She simply started working in the main warehouse on draft passages, and people started joining her, and things snowballed. Once the meetings were going people had to attend or risk losing a say. Nadia shrugged if anyone complained that they weren’t ready, that things had to be regularized, that they needed to know more, etc; ‘Come on,’ she said impatiently. ‘Here we are, we might as well get to it.’

So a fluctuating group of about three hundred people began meeting daily in the industrial complex of East Pavonis. The main warehouse, designed to hold piste parts and train cars, was huge, and scores of mobile-walled offices were set up against its walls, leaving the central space open, and available for a roughly circular collection of mismatched tables. ‘Ah,’ Art said when he saw it, ‘the table of tables.’

Of course there were people who wanted a list of delegates, so that they knew who could vote, who could speak, and so on. Nadia, who was quickly taking on the role of chairperson, suggested they accept all requests to become a delegation from any Martian group, as long as the group had had some tangible existence before the conference began. ‘We might as well be inclusive.’

The constitutional scholars from Dorsa Brevia agreed that the congress should be conducted by members of voting delegations, and the final result then voted on by the populace at large. Charlotte, who had helped to draft the Dorsa Brevia document twelve M-years before, had led a group since then in working up plans for a government, in anticipation of a successful revolution. They were not the only ones to have done this; schools in South Fossa and at the university in Sabishii had taught courses in the matter, and many of the young natives in the warehouse were well versed in the issues they were tackling. ‘It’s kind of scary,’ Art remarked to Nadia. ‘Win a revolution and a bunch of lawyers pop out of the woodwork.’

‘Always.’

Charlotte’s group had made a list of potential delegates to a constitutional congress, including all Martian settlements with populations over five hundred. Quite a few people would therefore be represented twice, Nadia pointed out, once by location and again by political affiliation. The few groups not on the list complained to a new committee, which allowed almost all petitioners to join. And Art made a call to Donald Hastings, and extended an invitation to UNTA to join as a delegation as well; the surprised Hastings got back to them a few days later, with a positive response. He would come down the cable himself.

And so after about a week’s jockeying, with many other matters being worked on at the same time, they had enough agreement to call for a vote of approval of the delegate list; and because it had been so inclusive, it passed almost unanimously. And suddenly they had a real congress. It was made up of the following delegations, with anywhere from one to ten people in each delegation:

 Towns

 Acheron

 Nicosia

 Cairo

 Odessa

 Harmakhis Vallis

 Sabishii

 Christianopolis

 Bogdanov Vishniac

 Hiranyagarbha

 Mauss Hyde

 New Clarke

 Bradbury Point

 Sergei Korolyov

 Dumartheray Crater

 South Station

 Reull Vallis

 southern caravanserai

 Nuova Bologna

 Nirgal Vallis

 Montepulciano

 Sheffield

 Senzeni Na

 Echus Overlook

 Dorsa Brevia

 Dao Vallis

 South Fossa

 Rumi

 New Vanuatu

 Prometheus

 Gramsci

 Mareotis

 Burroughs refugees organization

 Libya Station

 Tharsis Tholus

 Overhangs

 Margaritifer Plinth

 Great Escarpment caravanserai

 Da Vinci

 The Elysian League

 Hell’s Gate

 Political Parties and Other Organizations

 Booneans

 Reds

 Bogdanovists

 Schnellingistas

 Marsfirst

 Free Mars

 TheKa

 Praxis

 Qahiran Majarhi League

 Green Mars

 United Nations Transitional Authority

 Ka Kaze

 Editorial Board of The journal of Areological Studies

 Space Elevator Authority

 Christian Democrats

 The Metanational Economic Activity Co-ordination Committee

 Bolognan Neomarxists

 Friends of the Earth

 Biotique

 Separation de L’Atmosphere

General meetings began in the morning around the table of tables, then moved out in many small working groups to offices in the warehouse, or buildings nearby. Every morning Art showed up early and brewed great pots of coffee, kava and kavajava, his favourite. It perhaps was not much of a job, given the significance of the enterprise, but Art was happy doing it. Every day he was surprised to see a congress convening at all; and observing the size of it, he felt that helping to get it started was probably going to be his principal contribution. He was not a scholar, and he had few ideas about what a Martian constitution ought to include. Getting people together was what he was good at, and he had done that. Or rather he and Nadia had, for Nadia had stepped in and taken the lead just when they had needed her. She was the only one of the First Hundred on hand who had everyone’s trust; this gave her a bit of genuine natural authority. Now, without any fuss, without seeming to notice she was doing it, she was exerting that power.

And so now it was Art’s great pleasure to become, in effect, Nadia’s personal assistant. He arranged her days, and did everything he could to make sure they ran smoothly. This included making a good pot of kavajava first thing every morning, for Nadia was one of many of them fond of that initial jolt toward alertness and general good will. Yes, Art thought, personal assistant and drug dispenser, that was his destiny at this point in history. And he was happy. Just watching people look at Nadia was a pleasure in itself. And the way she looked back: interested, sympathetic, sceptical, an edge developing quickly if she thought someone was wasting her time, a warmth kindling if she was impressed by their contribution. And people knew this, they wanted to please her. They tried to keep to the point, to make a contribution. They wanted that particular warm look in her eye. Very strange eyes they were, really, when you looked close: hazel, basically, but flecked with innumerable tiny patches of other colours, yellow, black, green, blue. A mesmerizing quality to them. Nadia focused her full attention on people – she was willing to believe you, to take your side, to make sure your case didn’t get lost in the shuffle; even the Reds, who knew she had been fighting with Ann, trusted her to make sure they were heard. So the work coalesced around her; and all Art really had to do was watch her at work, and enjoy it, and help where he could.

And so the debates began.

In the first week many arguments concerned simply what a constitution was, what form it should take, and whether they should have one at all. Charlotte called this the metaconflict, the argument about what the argument was about – a very important matter, she said when she saw Nadia squint unhappily, ‘because in settling it, we set the limits on what we can decide. If we decide to include economic and social issues in the constitution, for instance, then this is a very different kind of thing than if we stick to purely political or legal matters, or to a very general statement of principles.’

To help structure even this debate, she and the Dorsa Brevia scholars had come with a number of different ‘blank constitutions’, which blocked out different kinds of constitutions without actually filling in their contents. These blanks did little, however, to stop the objections of those who maintained that most aspects of social and economic life ought not to be regulated at all. Support for such a ‘minimal state’ came from a variety of viewpoints that otherwise made strange bedfellows: anarchists, libertarians, neotraditional capitalists, certain Greens, and so on. To the most extreme of these anti-statists, writing up any government at all was a kind of defeat, and they conceived of their role in the congress as making the new government as small as possible.

Sax heard about this argument in one of the nightly calls from Nadia and Art, and he was as willing to think about it seriously as he was anything else. ‘It’s been found that a few simple rules can regulate very complex behaviour. There’s a classic computer model for flocking birds, for instance, which only has three rules – keep an equal distance from everyone around you – don’t change speed too fast – avoid stationary objects. Those will model the flight of a flock quite nicely.’

‘A computer flock maybe,’ Nadia scoffed. ‘Have you ever seen chimney-swifts at dusk?’

After a moment Sax’s reply arrived: ‘No.’

‘Well, take a look when you get to Earth. Meanwhile we can’t be having a constitution that says only “don’t change speed too fast”.’

Art thought this was funny, but Nadia was not amused. In general she had little patience for the minimalist arguments. ‘Isn’t it the equivalent of letting the metanats run things?’ she would say. ‘Letting might be right?’

‘No, no,’ Mikhail would protest. ‘That’s not what we mean at all!’

‘It seems very like what you are saying. And for some it’s obviously a kind of cover – a pretend principle that is really about keeping the rules that protect their property and privileges, and letting the rest go to hell.’

‘No, not at all.’

Then you must prove it at the table. Everything that government might involve itself in, you have to make the case against. You have to argue it point by point.’

And she was so insistent about this, not scolding like Maya would have but simply adamant, that they had to agree: everything was at least on the table for discussion. Therefore the various blank constitutions made sense, as starting points; and therefore they should get on with it. A vote on it was taken, and the majority agreed to give it a try.

And so there they were, the first hurdle jumped. Everyone had agreed to work according to the same plan. It was amazing, Art thought, zooming from meeting to meeting, filled with admiration for Nadia. She was not your ordinary diplomat, she by no means followed the empty vessel model that Art aspired to; but things got done nevertheless. She had the charisma of the sensible. He hugged her every time he passed her, he kissed the top of her head; he loved her. He ran around with that wealth of good feeling, and dropped in on all the sessions he could, watching to see how he could help keep things going. Often it was just a matter of supplying people with food and drink, so that they could continue through the day without getting irritable.

At all hours the table of tables was crowded; fresh-faced young Valkyries towering over sunbaked old vets; all races, all types; this was Mars, M-year 52, a kind of de facto united nations all on its own. With all the potential fractiousness of that notoriously fractious body; so that sometimes, looking at all their disparate faces and listening to the melange of languages, English augmented by Babel, Art was nearly overwhelmed by their variety. ‘Ka, Nadia,’ he said as they sat eating sandwiches and going over their notes for the day, ‘we’re trying to write a constitution that every Terran culture could agree to!’

She waved the problem away, swallowed. ‘About time,’ she said.

Charlotte suggested that the Dorsa Brevia declaration made a logical starting point for discussing the content that would fill the constitutional forms. This suggestion caused more trouble than even the blanks had, for the Reds and several other delegations disliked various points of the old declaration, and they argued that using it was a way of pisting the congress from the start.

‘So what?’ Nadia said. ‘We can change every word of it if we want, but we have to start with something.’

This view was popular among most of the old underground groups, many of whom had been at Dorsa Brevia in M-39. The declaration that had resulted remained the underground’s best effort to write down what they had agreed on back when they were out of power, so it made sense to start with it; it gave them some precedent, some historical continuity.

When they pulled it out and looked at it, however, they found that the old declaration had become frighteningly radical. No private property? No appropriation of surplus value? Had they really said such things? How were things supposed to work? People pored over the bare uncompromising sentences, shaking their heads. The declaration had not bothered to say how its lofty goals were to be enacted, it had only stated them. ‘The stone tablet routine,’ as Art characterized it. But now the revolution had succeeded, and the time had come to do something in the real world. Could they really stick to concepts as radical as those in the Dorsa Brevia declaration?

Hard to say. ‘At least the points are there to discuss,’ Nadia said. And along with them, on everyone’s screen, were the blank constitutions with their section headings, suggesting all by themselves the many problems they were going to have to come to grips with: ‘Structure of Government, Executive; Structure of Government, Legislative; Structure of Government, Judicial; Rights of Citizens; Military and Police; Taxation; Election Procedures; Property Law; Economic Systems; Environmental Law; Amendment Procedures’, and so on, in some blanks for pages on end – all being juggled on everyone’s screens, scrambled, formatted, endlessly debated. ‘Just filling in the blanks,’ as Art sang one night, looking over Nadia’s shoulder at one particularly forbidding flowchart pattern, like something out of Michel’s alchemical combinatoires. And Nadia laughed.

The working groups focused on different parts of government as outlined in a new composite blank constitution, now being called the blank of blanks. Political parties and interest groups gravitated to the issues that most concerned them, and the many tent town delegations chose or were assigned to remaining areas. After that it was a matter of work.

For the moment, the Da Vinci Crater technical group was in control of Martian space. They were keeping all space shuttles from docking at Clarke, or aerobraking into Martian orbit. No one believed that this alone made them truly free, but it did give them a certain amount of physical and psychic space to work in – this was the gift of the revolution. They were also driven by the memory of the battle for Sheffield; the fear of civil war was strong among them. Ann was in exile with the Kakaze, and sabotage in the outback was a daily occurrence. There were also tents that had declared independence from anyone, and a few metanat holdouts; there was turmoil generally, and a sense of barely-contained confusion. They were in a bubble in history, a moment only; it could collapse at any time, and if they didn’t act soon, it would collapse. It was, simply put, time to act.

This was the one thing everyone agreed on, but it was a very important thing. As the days passed, a core group of workers slowly emerged, people who recognized each other for their willingness to get the job done, for their desire to finish paragraphs rather than posture. Inside all the rest of the debate these people went at it, guided by Nadia, who was very quick to recognize such people and give them all the help she could.

Art meanwhile ran around in his usual manner. Up early, supply drinks and food, and information concerning the work ongoing in other rooms. It seemed to him that things were going pretty well. Most of the subgroups took the responsibility to fill in their blank seriously, writing and rewriting drafts, hammering them out concept by concept, phrase by phrase. They were happy to see Art when he came by in the course of the day, as he represented a break, some food, some jokes. One judicial group tacked foam wings on his shoes, and sent him with a caustic message along to an executive group with whom they were fighting. Pleased, Art kept the wings on; why not? What they were doing had a kind of ludicrous majesty, or majestic ludicrousness – they were rewriting the rules, he was flying around like Hermes or Puck, it was perfectly appropriate. And so he flew, through the long hours into the night, every night. And after all the sessions had closed down for the evening, he went back to the Praxis offices he shared with Nadia, and they would eat, and talk over the day’s progress, and make a call to the travellers to Earth, and talk with Nirgal and Sax and Maya and Michel. And after that Nadia would go back to work at her screens, usually falling asleep there in her chair. Then Art would often go back out into the warehouse, and the buildings and rovers clustered around it. Because they were holding the congress in a warehouse tent, there was not the same party scene that had existed after hours in Dorsa Brevia; but the delegates often stayed up, sitting on the floors of their rooms drinking and talking about the day’s work, or the revolution just past. Many of the people there had never met before, and they were getting to know each other. Relationships were forming, romances, friendships, feuds. It was a good time to talk, and learn more about what was going on during the daytime congress; it was the underside of the congress, the social hour, out there scattered in concrete rooms. Art enjoyed it. And then the moment would come when he would suddenly hit the wall, a wave of sleepiness would roll over him and sometimes he wouldn’t even have time to stagger back to his offices, to the couch next to Nadia’s; he would simply roll over on the floor and sleep there, waking cold and stiff to hurry off to their bathroom, a shower, and back to the kitchens to start up that day’s kava and Java. Round and round, his days a blur; it was glorious.

In sessions on many different subjects people were having to grapple with questions of scale. Without any nations, without any natural or traditional political units, who governed what? And how were they to balance the local against the global, and past versus future – the many ancestral cultures against the one Martian culture?

Sax, observing this recurring problem from the rocket-ship to Earth, sent back a message proposing that the tent towns and covered canyons become the principal political units: city-states, basically, with no larger political units except for the global government itself, which would regulate only truly global concerns. Thus there would be local and global, but no nation-states in between.

The reaction to this proposal was fairly positive. For one thing it had the advantage of conforming to the situation that already existed. Mikhail, leader of the Bogdanovist party, noted that it was a variant of the old commune of communes, and because Sax had been the source of the suggestion, this quickly got it called the ‘lab of labs’ plan. But the underlying problem still remained, as Nadia quickly pointed out; all Sax had done was to define their particular local and global. They still had to decide just how much power the proposed global confederation was going to have over the proposed semi-autonomous city-states. Too much, and it was back to a big centralized state, Mars itself as a nation, a thought which many delegations abhorred. ‘But too little,’ Jackie said emphatically in the human rights workshop, ‘and there could be tents out there deciding slavery is okay, or female genital mutilation is okay, or any other crime based on some Terran barbarism is okay, excused in the name of “cultural values”. And that is just not acceptable.’

‘Jackie is right,’ Nadia said, which was unusual enough to get people’s attention. ‘People claiming that some fundamental right is foreign to their culture – that stinks no matter who says it, fundamentalists, patriarchs, Leninists, metanats, I don’t care who. They aren’t going to get away with it here, not if I can help it.’

Art noticed more than a few delegates frowning at this sentiment, which no doubt struck them as a version of Western secular relativism, or perhaps John Boone’s hyperamericanism. Opposition to the metanats had included many people trying to hold on to older cultures, and these often had their hierarchies pretty well intact; the ones at the top end of the hierarchies liked them that way, and so did a surprisingly large number of people farther down the ladder.

The young Martian natives, however, looked surprised that this was even considered an issue. To them the fundamental rights were innate and irrevocable, and any challenge to that struck them as just one more of the many emotional scars that the issei were always revealing, as a result of their traumatic dysfunctional Terran upbringings. Ariadne, one of the most prominent of the young natives, stood up to say that the Dorsa Brevia group had studied many Terran human rights documents, and had written a comprehensive list of their own. The new master list of fundamental individual rights was available for discussion and, she implied, adoption wholesale. Some argued about one point or another; but it was generally agreed that a global bill of rights of some kind should be on the table. So Martian values as they existed in M-year 52 were about to be codified, and made a principal component of the constitution.

The exact nature of these rights was still a matter of controversy. The so-called ‘political rights’ were generally agreed to be ‘self-evident’ – things citizens were free to do, things governments were forbidden to do – habeus corpus, freedom of movement, of speech, of association, of religion, a ban on weapons – all these were approved by a vast majority of Martian natives, though there were some issei from places like Singapore, Cuba, Indonesia, Thailand, China and so on, who looked askance at so much emphasis on individual liberty. Other delegates had reservations about a different kind of right, the so-called ‘social’ or ‘economic’ rights, such as the right to housing, health care, education, employment, a share of the value generated by natural resource use, etc. Many issei delegates with actual experience in Terran government were quite worried about these, pointing out that it was dangerous to enshrine such things in the constitution; it had been done on Earth, they said, and then when it was found impossible to meet such promises, the constitution guaranteeing them was seen as a propaganda device, and flouted in other areas as well, until it became a bad joke.

‘Even so,’ Mikhail said sharply, ‘if you can’t afford housing, then it is your right to vote that is the bad joke.’

The young natives agreed, as did many others there. So economic or social rights were on the table too, and arguments over how actually to guarantee these rights in practice continued through many a long session. ‘Political, social, it’s all one,’ Nadia said. ‘Let’s make all the rights work.’

So the work went on, both around the big table and in the offices where the subgroups were meeting. Even the UN was there, in the person of Donald Hastings himself, who had come down the elevator and was participating vigorously in the debates, his opinion always carrying a peculiar kind of weight. He even began to exhibit symptoms of hostage syndrome, Art thought, becoming more and more sympathetic the more he stood around in the warehouse arguing with people. And this might affect his superiors on Earth as well.

Comments and suggestions were also pouring in from all over Mars, and from Earth as well, filling several screens covering one wall of the big room. Interest in the congress was high everywhere, rivalling even Earth’s great flood in the public’s attention. ‘The soap opera of the moment,’ Art said to Nadia. Every night the two of them met in their little office suite, and put in their call to Nirgal and the rest. The delays in the travellers’ responses got longer and longer, but Art and Nadia didn’t really mind; there was a lot to think about while waiting for Sax and the others’ part of the conversation to arrive.

‘This global versus local problem is going to be hard,’ Art said one night. ‘It’s a real contradiction, I think. I mean it’s not just the result of confused thinking. We truly want some global control, and yet we want freedom for the tents as well. Two of our most essential values are in contradiction.’

‘Maybe the Swiss system,’ Nirgal suggested a few minutes later. ‘That’s what John Boone always used to say.’

But the Swiss on Pavonis were not encouraging about this idea. ‘A counter-model rather,’ Jurgen said, making a face. ‘The reason I’m on Mars is the Swiss federal government. It stifles everything. You need a licence to breathe.’

‘And the cantons have no power any more,’ Priska said. ‘The federal government took it away.’

‘In some of the cantons,’ Jurgen added, ‘this was a good thing.’

Priska said, ‘More interesting than Berne might be the Graubunden. That means Grey League. They were a loose confederation of towns in southeast Switzerland, for hundreds of years. A very successful organization.’

‘Could you call up whatever you can get on that?’ Art said.

The next night he and Nadia looked over descriptions of the Graubunden that Priska had sent over. Well … there was a certain simplicity to affairs during the Renaissance, Art thought. Maybe that was wrong, but somehow the extremely loose agreements of the little Swiss mountain towns did not seem to translate well to the densely interpenetrated economies of the Martian settlements. The Graubunden hadn’t had to worry about generating unwanted changes in atmospheric pressure, for instance. No – the truth was, they were in a new situation. There was no historical analogy that would be much help to them now.

‘Speaking of global versus local,’ Irishka said, ‘what about the land outside the tents and covered canyons?’ She was emerging as the leading Red remaining on Pavonis, a moderate who could speak for almost all wings of the Red movement, therefore becoming quite a power as the weeks passed. ‘That’s most of the land on Mars, and all we said at Dorsa Brevia is that no individual can own it, that we are all stewards of it together. That’s good as far as it goes, but as the population rises and new towns are built, it’s going to be more and more of a problem figuring out who controls it.’

Art sighed. This was true, but too difficult to be welcome. Recently he had made a resolution to devote the bulk of his daily efforts to attacking what he and Nadia judged to be the worst outstanding problem they were facing, and so in theory he was happy to recognize them. But sometimes they were just too hard.

As in this case. Land use, the Red objection: more aspects of the global-local problem, but distinctively Martian. Again there was no precedent. Still, as it was probably the worst outstanding problem …

Art went to the Reds. The three who met with him were Marion, Irishka, and Tiu, one of Nirgal and Jackie’s creche-mates from Zygote. They took Art out to their rover camp, which made him happy; it meant that despite his Praxis background he was now seen as a neutral or impartial figure, as he wanted to be. A big, empty vessel, stuffed with messages and passed along.

The Reds’ encampment was west of the warehouses, on the rim of the caldera. They sat down with Art in one of their big upper-level compartments, in the glare of a late afternoon sun, talking and looking down into the giant, silhouetted country of the caldera.

‘So what would you like to see in this constitution?’ Art said.

He sipped the tea they had given him. His hosts looked at each other, somewhat taken aback. ‘Ideally,’ Marion said after a while, ‘we’d like to be living on the primal planet, in caves and cliff-dwellings, or excavated crater rings. No big cities, no terraforming.’

‘You’d have to stay suited all the time.’

‘That’s right. We don’t mind that.’

‘Well.’ Art thought it over. ‘Okay, but let’s start from now. Given the situation at this moment, what would you like to see happen next?’

‘No further terraforming.’

‘The cable gone, and no more immigration.’

‘In fact it would be nice if some people went back to Earth.’

They stopped speaking, stared at him. Art tried not to let his consternation show.

He said, ‘Isn’t the biosphere likely to grow on its own at this point?’

‘It’s not clear,’ Tiu said. ‘But if you stopped the industrial pumping, any further growth would certainly be very slow. It might even lose ground, as with this ice age that’s starting.’

‘Isn’t that what some people call ecopoesis?’

‘No. The ecopoets just use biological methods, but they’re very intensive with them. We think they all should stop, ecopoets or industrialists or whatever.’

‘But especially the heavy industrial methods,’ Marion said. ‘And most especially the inundation of the north. That’s simply criminal. We’ll blow up those stations no matter what happens here, if they don’t stop.’

Art gestured out at the huge, stony caldera. ‘The higher elevations look pretty much the same, right?’

They weren’t willing to admit that. Irishka said, ‘Even the high ground shows ice deposition and plant life. The atmosphere lofts high here, remember. No place escapes when the winds are strong.’

‘What if we tented the four big calderas?’ Art said. ‘Kept them sterile underneath, with the original atmospheric pressure and mix? Those would be huge wilderness parks, preserved in the true primal state.’

‘Parks are just what they would be.’

‘I know. But we have to work with what we have now, right? We can’t go back to M-l and rerun the whole thing. And given the current situation, it might be good to preserve three or four big places in the original state, or close to it.’

‘It would be nice to have some canyons protected as well,’ Tiu said tentatively. Clearly they had not considered this kind of possibility before; and it was not really satisfactory to them, Art could see. But the current situation could not be wished away, they had to start from there.

‘Or Argyre Basin.’

‘At the very least, keep Argyre dry.’

Art nodded encouragingly. ‘Combine that kind of preservation with the atmosphere limits set in the Dorsa Brevia document. That’s a five kilometre breathable ceiling, and there’s a hell of a lot of land above five kilometres. It won’t take the northern ocean away, but nothing’s going to do that now. Some form of slow ecopoesis is about the best you can hope for at this point, right?’

Perhaps that was putting it too baldly. The Reds stared down into Pavonis caldera unhappily, thinking their own thoughts.

* * *

‘Say the Reds come on board,’ Art said to Nadia. ‘What do you think the next worst problem is?’

‘What?’ She had been nearly asleep, listening to some tinny old jazz from her AI. ‘Ah. Art.’ Her voice was low and quiet, the Russian accent light but distinct. She sat slumped on the couch. A pile of paper balls lay around her feet, like pieces of some structure she was putting together. The Martian way of life. Her face was oval under a cap of straight white hair, the wrinkles of her skin somehow wearing away, as if she were a pebble in the stream of years. She opened her flecked eyes, luminous and arresting under their Cossack eyelids. A beautiful face, looking now at Art perfectly relaxed. ‘The next worst problem.’

‘Yes.’

She smiled. Where did that calmness come from, that relaxed smile? She wasn’t worried about anything these days. Art found it surprising, given the political highwire act they were performing. But then again it was politics, not war. And just as Nadia had been terribly frightened during the revolution, always tense, always expecting disaster, she was now always relatively calm. As if to say, Nothing that happens here matters all that much – tinker with the details all you want – my friends are safe, the war is over, this that remains is a kind of game, or work like construction work, full of pleasures.

Art moved around to the back of the couch, massaged her shoulders. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Problems. Well, there are a lot of problems that are about equally sticky.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like, I wonder if the Mahjaris will be able to adapt to democracy. I wonder if everyone will accept Vlad and Marina’s eco-economics. I wonder if we can make a decent police. I wonder if Jackie will try to create a system with a strong president, and use the natives’ numerical superiority to become queen.’ She looked over her shoulder, laughed at Art’s expression. ‘I wonder about a lot of things. Should I go on?’

‘Maybe not.’

She laughed. ‘You go on. That feels good. These problems – they aren’t so hard. We’ll just keep going to the table and pounding away at them. Maybe you could talk to Zeyk.’

‘Okay.’

‘But now do my neck.’

Art went to talk to Zeyk and Nazik that very night, after Nadia had fallen asleep. ‘So what’s the Mahjari view of all this?’ he asked.

Zeyk growled. ‘Please don’t ask stupid questions,’ he said. ‘Sunnis are fighting Shiites – Lebanon is devastated – the oil-rich states are hated by the oil-poor states – the North African countries are a metanat – Syria and Iraq hate each other – Iraq and Egypt hate each other – we all hate the Iranians, except for the Shiites – and we all hate Israel of course, and the Palestinians too – and even though I am from Egypt I am actually Bedouin, and we despise the Nile Egyptians, and in fact we don’t get along well with the Bedouin from Jordan. And everyone hates the Saudis, who are as corrupt as you can get. So when you ask me what is the Arab view, what can I say to you?’ He shook his head darkly.

‘I guess you say it’s a stupid question,’ Art said. ‘Sorry. Thinking in constituencies, it’s a bad habit. How about this – what do you think of it?’

Nazik laughed. ‘You could ask him what the rest of the Qahiran Mahjaris think. He knows them only too well.’

‘Too well,’ Zeyk repeated.

‘Do you think the human rights section will go with them?’

Zeyk frowned. ‘No doubt we will sign the constitution.’

‘But these rights … I thought there were no Arab democracies still?’

‘What do you mean? There’s Palestine, Egypt … Anyway it’s Mars we are concerned with. And here every caravan has been its own state since the very beginning.’

‘Strong leaders, hereditary leaders?’

‘Not hereditary. Strong leaders, yes. We don’t think the new constitution will end that, not anywhere. Why should it? You are a strong leader yourself, yes?’

Art laughed uncomfortably. ‘I’m just a messenger.’

Zeyk shook his head. ‘Tell that to Antar. Now there is where you should go, if you want to know what the Qahirans think. He is our king now.’

He looked as if he had bitten into something sour, and Art said, ‘So what does he want, do you think?’

‘He is Jackie’s creature,’ Zeyk muttered, ‘nothing more.’

‘I should think that would be a point against him.’

Zeyk shrugged.

‘It depends who you talk to,’ Nazik said. ‘For the older Muslim immigrants, it is a bad association, because although Jackie is very powerful, she has had more than one consort, and so Antar looks …’

‘Compromised,’ Art suggested, forestalling some other word from the glowering Zeyk.

‘Yes,’ Nazik said. ‘But on the other hand, Jackie is powerful. And all of the people now leading the Free Mars party are in a position to become even more powerful in the new state. And the young Arabs like that. They are more native than Arab, I think. It’s Mars that matters to them more than Islam. From that point of view, a close association with the Zygote ectogenes is a good thing. The ectogenes are seen as the natural leaders of the new Mars – especially Nirgal, of course, but with him off to Earth, there’s a certain transfer of his influence to Jackie and the rest of her crowd. And thus to Antar.’

‘I don’t like him,’ Zeyk said.

Nazik smiled at her husband. ‘You don’t like how many of the native Muslims are following him rather than you. But we are old, Zeyk. It could be time for retirement.’

‘I don’t see why,’ Zeyk objected. ‘If we’re going to live a thousand years, then what difference does a hundred make?’

Art and Nazik laughed at him, and briefly Zeyk smiled. It was the first time Art had ever seen him smile.

In fact, age didn’t matter. People wandered around, old or young or somewhere in between, talking and arguing, and it would have been an odd thing for the length of someone’s lifetime to become a factor in such discussions.

And youth or age was not what the native movement was about anyway. If you were born on Mars your outlook was simply different, areocentric in a way that no Terran could even imagine – not just because of the whole complex of areorealities they had known from birth, but also because of what they didn’t know. Terrans knew just how vast Earth was, while for the Martian-born, that cultural and biological vastness was simply unimaginable. They had seen the screen images, but that wasn’t enough to allow them to grasp it. This was one reason Art was glad Nirgal had chosen to join the diplomatic mission to Earth; he would learn what they were up against.

But most of the natives wouldn’t. And the revolution had gone to their heads. Despite their cleverness at the table in working the constitution toward a form that would privilege them, they were in some basic sense naive; they had no idea how unlikely their independence was, nor how possible it was for it to be taken away from them again. And so they were pressing things to the limit – led by Jackie, who floated through the warehouse just as beautiful and enthusiastic as ever, her drive to power concealed behind her love of Mars, and her devotion to her grandfather’s ideals, and her essential good will, even innocence; the college girl who wanted passionately for the world to be just.

Or so it seemed. But she and her Free Mars colleagues certainly seemed to want to be in control as well. There were twelve million people on Mars now, and seven million of those had been born there; and almost every single one of these natives could be counted on to support the native political parties, usually Free Mars.

‘It’s dangerous,’ Charlotte said when Art brought this matter up in the nightly meeting with Nadia. ‘When you have a country formed out of a lot of groups that don’t trust each other, with one a clear majority, then you get what they call “census voting”, where politicians represent their groups, and get their votes, and election results are always just a reflection of population numbers. In that situation the same thing happens every time, so the majority group has a monopoly on power, and the minorities feel hopeless, and eventually rebel. Some of the worst civil wars in history began in those circumstances.’

‘So what can we do?’ Nadia asked.

‘Well, some of it we’re doing already, designing structures that spread the power around, and diminish the dangers of majoritarianism. Decentralization is important, because it creates a lot of small local majorities. Another strategy is to set up an array of Madisonian checks and balances, so that the government’s a kind of cat’s cradle of competing forces. This is called polyarchy, spreading power around to as many groups as you can.’

‘Maybe we’re a bit too polyarchic right now,’ Art said.

‘Perhaps. Another tactic is to deprofessionalize governing. You make some big part of the government a public obligation, like jury duty, and then draft ordinary citizens in a lottery, to serve for a short time. They get professional staff help, but make the decisions themselves.’

‘I’ve never heard of that one,’ Nadia said.

‘No. It’s been often proposed, but seldom enacted. But I think it’s really worth considering. It tends to make power as much a burden as an advantage. You get a letter in the mail; oh no; you’re drafted to do two years in congress. It’s a drag, but on the other hand it’s a kind of distinction too, a chance to add something to the public discourse. Citizen government.’

‘I like that,’ Nadia said.

‘Another method to reduce majoritarianism is voting by some version of the Australian ballot, where voters vote for two or more candidates in ranked fashion, first choice, second choice, third choice. Candidates get some points for being second or third choice, so to win elections they have to appeal outside their own group. It tends to push politicians toward moderation, and in the long run it can create trust among groups where none existed before.’

‘Interesting,’ Nadia exclaimed. ‘Like trusses in a wall’

‘Yes.’ Charlotte mentioned some examples of Terran ‘fractured societies’ that had healed their rifts by a clever governmental structure: Azania, Cambodia, Armenia … as she described them Art’s heart sank a bit; these had been bloody, bloody lands.

‘It seems like political structures can only do so much,’ he said.

‘True,’ Nadia said, ‘but we don’t have all those old hatreds to deal with yet. Here the worst we have is the Reds, and they’ve been marginalized by the terraforming that’s already happened. I bet these methods could be used to pull even them into the process.’

Clearly she was encouraged by the options Charlotte had described; they were structures, after all. Engineering of an imaginary sort, which nevertheless resembled real engineering. So Nadia was tapping away at her screen, sketching out designs as if working on a building, a small smile tugging the corners of her mouth.

‘You’re happy,’ Art said.

She didn’t hear him. But that night in their radio talk with the travellers, she said to Sax, ‘It was so nice to find that political science had abstracted something useful in all these years.’

Eight minutes later his reply came in. ‘I never understood why they call it that.’

Nadia laughed, and the sound filled Art with happiness. Nadia Cherneshevsky, laughing in delight! Suddenly Art was sure that they were going to pull it off.

So he went back to the big table, ready to tackle the next worst problem. That brought him back to Earth again. There were a hundred next worst problems, all small until you actually took them on, at which point they became insoluble. In all the squabbling it was very hard to see any signs of growing accord. In some areas, in fact, it seemed to be getting worse. The middle points of the Dorsa Brevia document were causing trouble; the more people considered them, the more radical they became. Many around the table clearly believed that Vlad and Marina’s eco-economic system, while it had worked for the underground, was not something that should be codified in the constitution. Some complained because it impinged on local autonomy, others because they had more faith in traditional capitalist economics than in any new system. Antar spoke often for this last group, with Jackie sitting right next to him, obviously in support. This along with his ties to the Arab community gave his statements a kind of double weight, and people listened. ‘This new economy that’s being proposed,’ he declared one day at the table of tables, repeating his theme, ‘is a radical and unprecedented intrusion of government into business.’

Suddenly Vlad Taneev stood up. Startled, Antar stopped speaking and looked over.

Vlad glared at him. Stooped, massive-headed, shaggy-eyebrowed, Vlad rarely if ever spoke in public; he hadn’t said a thing in the congress so far. Slowly the greater part of the warehouse went silent, watching him. Art felt a quiver of anticipation; of all the brilliant minds of the First Hundred, Vlad was perhaps the most brilliant – and, except for Hiroko, the most enigmatic. Old when they had left Earth, intensely private, Vlad had built the Acheron labs early on and stayed there as much as possible thereafter, living in seclusion with Ursula Kohl and Marina Tokareva, two more of the great first ones. No one knew anything for certain about the three of them, they were a limit case illustration of the insular nature of other people’s relationships; but this of course did not stop gossip; on the contrary, people talked about them all the time, saying that Marina and Ursula were the real couple, that Vlad was a kind of friend, or pet; or that Ursula had done most of the work on the longevity treatment, and Marina most of the work on eco-economics; or that they were a perfectly balanced equilateral triangle, collaborating on all that emerged from Acheron; or that Vlad was a bigamist of sorts who used two wives as fronts for his work in the separate fields of biology and economics. But no one knew for sure, for none of the three ever said a word about it.

Watching him stand there at the table, however, one had to suspect that the theory about him being just a front man was wrong. He was looking around in a fiercely intent, slow glare, capturing them all before he turned his eye again on Antar.

‘What you said about government and business is absurd,’ he stated coldly. It was a tone of voice that had not been heard much at the congress so far, contemptuous and dismissive. ‘Governments always regulate the kinds of business they allow. Economics is a legal matter, a system of laws. So far, we have been saying in the Martian underground that as a matter of law, democracy and self-government are the innate rights of every person, and that these rights are not to be suspended when a person goes to work. You—’ he waved a hand to indicate he did not know Antar’s name ‘—do you believe in democracy and self-rule?’

‘Yes!’ Antar said defensively.

‘Do you believe in democracy and self-rule as the fundamental values that government ought to encourage?’

‘Yes!’ Antar repeated, looking more and more annoyed.

‘Very well. If democracy and self-rule are the fundamentals, then why should people give up these rights when they enter their work place? In politics we fight like tigers for freedom, for the right to elect our leaders, for freedom of movement, choice of residence, choice of what work to pursue – control of our lives, in short. And then we wake up in the morning and go to work, and all those rights disappear. We no longer insist on them. And so for most of the day we return to feudalism. That is what capitalism is – a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings. But the hierarchy remains. And so we still hand over our lives’ labour, under duress, to feed rulers who do no real work.’

‘Business leaders work,’ Antar said sharply. ‘And they take the financial risks—’

‘The so-called risk of the capitalist is merely one of the privileges of capital.’

‘Management—’

‘Yes yes. Don’t interrupt me. Management is a real thing, a technical matter. But it can be controlled by labour just as well as by capital. Capital itself is simply the useful residue of the work of past labourers, and it could belong to everyone as well as to a few. There is no reason why a tiny nobility should own the capital, and everyone else therefore be in service to them. There is no reason they should give us a living wage and take all the rest that we produce. No! The system called capitalist democracy was not really democratic at all. That’s why it was able to turn so quickly into the metanational system, in which democracy grew ever weaker and capitalism ever stronger. In which one per cent of the population owned half of the wealth, and five per cent of the population owned ninety-five per cent of the wealth. History has shown which values were real in that system. And the sad thing is that the injustice and suffering caused by it were not at all necessary, in that the technical means have existed since the eighteenth century to provide the basics of life to all.

‘So. We must change. It is time. If self-rule is a fundamental value, if simple justice is a value, then they are values everywhere, including in the work place where we spend so much of our lives. That was what was said in point four of the Dorsa Brevia agreement. It says everyone’s work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away. It says that the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations. It says that the world is something we all steward together. That is what it says. And in our years on Mars, we have developed an economic system that can keep all those promises. That has been our work these last fifty years. In the system we have developed, all economic enterprises are to be small cooperatives, owned by their workers and by no one else. They hire their management, or manage themselves. Industry guilds and co-op associations will form the larger structures necessary to regulate trade and the market, share capital, and create credit.’

Antar said scornfully, ‘These are nothing but ideas. It is utopianism and nothing more.’

‘Not at all.’ Again Vlad waved him away. ‘The system is based on models from Terran history, and its various parts have all been tested on both worlds, and have succeeded very well. You don’t know about this partly because you are ignorant, and partly because metanationalism itself steadfastly ignored and denied all alternatives to it. But most of our micro-economy has been in successful operation for centuries in the Mondragon region of Spain. The different parts of the macro-economy have been used in the pseudo-metanat Praxis, in Switzerland, in India’s state of Kerala, in Bhutan, in Bologna Italy, and in many other places, including the Martian underground itself. These organizations were the precursors to our economy, which will be democratic in a way capitalism never even tried to be.’

A synthesis of systems. And Vladimir Taneev was a very great synthesist; it was said that all the components of the longevity treatment had already been there, for instance, and that Vlad and Ursula had simply put them together. Now in his economic work with Marina he was claiming to have done the same kind of thing. And although he had not mentioned the longevity treatment in this discussion, nevertheless it lay there like the table itself, a big cobbled-together achievement, part of everyone’s lives. Art looked around and thought he could see people thinking, well, he did it once in biology and it worked; could economics be more difficult?

Against this unspoken thought, this unthought feeling, Antar’s objections did not seem like much. Metanational capitalism’s track record at this point did little to support it; in the last century it had precipitated a massive war, chewed up the Earth, and torn its societies apart. Why should they not try something new, given that record?

Someone from Hiranyagarbha stood and made an objection from the opposite direction, noting that they seemed to be abandoning the gift economy by which the Mars underground had lived.

Vlad shook his head impatiently. ‘I believe in the underground economy, I assure you, but it has always been a mixed economy. Pure gift exchange co-existed with a monetary exchange, in which neoclassical market rationality, that is to say the profit mechanism, was bracketed and contained by society to direct it to serve higher values, such as justice and freedom. Economic rationality is simply not the highest value. It is a tool to calculate costs and benefits, only one part of a large equation concerning human welfare. The larger equation is called a mixed economy, and that is what we are constructing here. We are proposing a complex system, with public and private spheres of economic activity. It may be that we ask people to give, throughout their lives, about a year of their work to the public good, as in Switzerland’s national service. That labour pool, plus taxes on private co-ops for use of the land and its resources, will enable us to guarantee the so-called social rights we have been discussing – housing, health care, food, education – things that should not be at the mercy of market rationality. Because la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!’

This was especially important to Vlad, Art could see. Which made sense – for in the metanational order, health most certainly had been for sale, not only medical care and food and housing, but pre-eminently the longevity treatment itself, which so far had been going only to those who could afford it. Vlad’s greatest invention, in other words, had become the property of the privileged, the ultimate class distinction – long life or early death – a physicalization of class that almost resembled divergent species. No wonder he was angry; no wonder he had turned his efforts to devising an economic system that would transform the longevity treatment from a catastrophic possession to a blessing available to all.

‘So nothing will be left to the market,’ Antar said.

‘No no no,’ Vlad said, waving at Antar more irritably than ever. ‘The market will always exist. It is the mechanism by which things and services are exchanged. Competition to provide the best product at the best price, this is inevitable and healthy. But on Mars it will be directed by society in a more active way. There will be not-for-profit status to vital life support matters, and then the freest part of the market will be directed away from the basics of existence toward nonessentials, where venture enterprises can be undertaken by worker-owned co-ops, who will be free to try what they like. When the basics are secured and when the workers own their own businesses, why not? It is the process of creation we are talking about.’

Jackie, looking annoyed at Vlad’s dismissals of Antar, and perhaps intending to divert the old man, or trip him up, said, ‘What about the ecological aspects of this economy that you used to emphasize?’

They are fundamental,’ Vlad said. ‘Point three of Dorsa Brevia states that the land, air and water of Mars belong to no one, that we are the stewards of it for all the future generations. This stewardship will be everyone’s responsibility, but in case of conflicts we propose strong environmental courts, perhaps as part of the constitutional court, which will estimate the real and complete environmental costs of economic activities, and help to co-ordinate plans that impact the environment.’

‘But this is simply a planned economy!’ Antar cried.

‘Economies are plans. Capitalism planned just as much as this, and metanationalism tried to plan everything. No, an economy is a plan.’

Antar, frustrated and angry, said, ‘It’s simply socialism returned.’

Vlad shrugged. ‘Mars is a new totality. Names from earlier totalities are deceptive. They become little more than theological terms. There are elements one could call socialist in this system, of course. How else remove injustice from economy? But private enterprises will be owned by their workers rather than being nationalized, and this is not socialism, at least not socialism as it was usually attempted on Earth. And all the co-ops are businesses – small democracies devoted to some work or other, all needing capital. There will be a market, there will be capital. But in our system workers will hire capital rather than the other way around. It’s more democratic that way, more just. Understand me – we have tried to evaluate each feature of this economy by how well it aids us to reach the goals of more justice and more freedom. And justice and freedom do not contradict each other as much as has been claimed, because freedom in an unjust system is no freedom at all. They both emerge together. And so it is not so impossible, really. It is only a matter of enacting a better system, by combining elements that have been tested and shown to work. This is the moment for that. We have been preparing for this opportunity for seventy years. And now that the chance has come, I see no reason to back off just because someone is afraid of some old words. If you have any specific suggestions for improvements, we’ll be happy to hear them.’

He stared long and hard at Antar. But Antar did not speak; he had no specific suggestions.

The room was filled with a charged silence. It was the first and only time in the congress that one of the issei had stood up and trounced one of the nisei in public debate. Most of the issei liked to take a more subtle line. But now one of the ancient radicals had become angry and risen up to smite one of the neoconservative young power-mongers – who now looked as if they were advocating a new version of an old hierarchy, for purposes of their own. A thought which was conveyed very well indeed by Vlad’s long look across the table at Antar, full of disgust at his reactionary selfishness, his cowardice in the face of change. Vlad sat down; Antar was dismissed.

But still they argued. Conflict, metaconflict, details, fundamentals; everything was on the table, including a magnesium kitchen sink that someone had placed on one segment of the table of tables, some three weeks into the process.

And really the delegates in the warehouse were only the tip of the iceberg, the most visible part of a gigantic two-world debate. Live transmission of every minute of the conference was available everywhere on Mars and in most places on Earth, and although the actual realtime tape had a certain documentary tediousness to it, Mangalavid concocted a daily highlights film that was shown during the timeslip every night, and sent to Earth for very wide distribution. It became ‘the greatest show on Earth’ as one American programme rather oddly dubbed it. ‘Maybe people are tired of the same old crap on TV,’ Art said to Nadia one night as they watched a brief, weirdly distorted account of the day’s negotiations on American TV.

‘Or in the world.’

‘Yeah, true. They want something else to think about.’

‘Or else they’re thinking about what they might do,’ Nadia suggested. ‘So that we’re a small-scale model. Easier to understand.’

‘Maybe so.’

In any case the two worlds watched, and the congress became, along with everything else that it was, a daily soap opera – a soap opera which however held an extra attraction for its viewers, somehow, as if in some strange way it held the very key to their lives. And perhaps as a result, thousands of spectators did more than watch – comments and suggestions were pouring in, and though it seemed unlikely to most people on Pavonis that something mailed in would contain a startling truth they hadn’t thought of, still all messages were read by groups of volunteers in Sheffield and South Fossa, who passed some proposals ‘up to the table’. Some people even advocated including all these suggestions in the final constitution; they objected to a ‘statist legal document’, they wanted it to be a larger thing, a collaborative philosophical or even spiritual statement, expressing their values, goals, dreams, reflections. ‘That’s not a constitution,’ Nadia objected, ‘that’s a culture. We’re not the damn library here.’ But included or not, long communiques continued to come in, from the tents and canyons and the drowned coastlines of Earth, signed by individuals, committees, entire town populations.

Discussions in the warehouse were just as wide-ranging as in the mail. A Chinese delegate approached Art and spoke in Mandarin to him, and when he paused for a while, his AI began to speak, in a lovely Scottish accent. ‘To tell the truth I’ve begun to doubt that you’ve sufficiently consulted Adam Smith’s important book Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.’

‘You may be right,’ Art said, and referred the man to Charlotte.

Many people in the warehouse were speaking languages other than English, and relying on translation AIs to communicate with the rest. At any given moment there were conversations in a dozen different languages, and AI translators were heavily used. Art still found them a little distracting. He wished it were possible to know all these languages, even though the latest generations of AI translators were really pretty good: voices well-modulated, vocabularies large and accurate, grammar excellent, phrasing almost free of the errors that had made earlier translation programs such a great party game. The new ones had become so good that it seemed possible that the English-language dominance that had created an almost monoglot Martian culture might begin to recede. The issei had of course brought all languages with them, but English had been their lingua franca; the nisei had therefore used English to communicate among themselves, while their ‘primary’ languages were used only to speak to their parents; and so, for a while, English had become the natives’ native tongue. But now with the new AIs, and a continuing stream of new immigrants speaking the full array of Terran languages, it looked as if things might broaden back out again, as new nisei stayed with their primary languages and used AIs as their lingua franca instead of English.

This linguistic matter illustrated to Art a complexity in the native population that he hadn’t noticed before. Some natives were yonsei, fourth generation or younger, and very definitely children of Mars; but other natives the very same age were the nisei children of recent issei immigrants, tending to have closer ties with the Terran cultures they had come from, with all the conservatism that implied. So that there were new native ‘conservatives’ and old settler-family native ‘radicals’, one might say. And this split only occasionally correlated with ethnicity or nationality, when these still mattered to them at all. One night Art was talking with a couple of them, one a global government advocate, the other an anarchist backing all local autonomy proposals, and he asked them about their origins. The globalises father was half Japanese, a quarter Irish, and a quarter Tanzanian; her mother had a Greek mother and a father with parents Colombian and Australian. The anarchist had a Nigerian father and a mother who was from Hawaii, and thus had a mixed ancestry of Filipino, Japanese, Polynesian and Portuguese. Art stared at them: if one were to think in terms of ethnic voting blocks, how would one categorize these people? One couldn’t. They were Martian natives. Nisei, sansei, yonsei – whatever generation, they had been formed in large part by their Martian experience – areo-formed, just as Hiroko had always foretold. Many had married within their own national or ethnic background, but many more had not. And no matter what their ancestry, their political opinions tended to reflect not that background (just what would the Graeco-Colombian-Australian position be? Art wondered), but their own experience. This itself had been quite varied: some had grown up in the underground, others had been born in the UN-controlled big cities, and only come to an awareness of the underground later in life, or even at the moment of the revolution itself. These differences tended to affect them much more than where their Terran ancestors had happened to live.

Art nodded as the natives explained these things to him, in the long kava-buzzed parties running deep into the night. People at these parties were in increasingly high spirits, as the congress was, they felt, going well. They did not take the debates among the issei very seriously; they were confident that their core beliefs would prevail. Mars would be independent, it would be run by Martians, what Earth wanted did not matter; beyond that, it was detail. Thus they went about their work in the committees without much attention paid to the philosophical arguments around the table of tables. ‘The old dogs keep growling,’ said one message on the big message board; this seemed to express a general native opinion. And the work in the committees went on.

The big message board was a pretty good indicator of the mood of the congress. Art read it the way he read fortune cookies, and indeed one day there was one message that said, ‘You like Chinese food.’ Usually the messages were more political than that. Often they were things said in the previous days of the conference: ‘No tent is an island’. ‘If you can’t afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.’ ‘Keep your distance, don’t change speed, don’t run into anything.’ ‘La salute non si paga.’ Then there were things that had not been said: ‘Do unto others.’ ‘The Reds have Green Roots.’ ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ ‘No Kings No Presidents.’ ‘Big Man Hates Politics.’ ‘However: We Are The Little Red People.’

So Art was no longer surprised when he was approached by people who spoke in Arabic or Hindi or some language he did not recognize, then looked him in the eye while their AI spoke in English with an accent from the BBC or middle America or the New Delhi civil service, expressing some kind of unpredictable political sentiment. It was encouraging, really – not the translation AIs, which were just another kind of distancing, less extreme than teleparticipation but still not quite ‘talking face to face’ – but the political melange, the impossibility of block-voting, or of even thinking in the normal constituencies.

It was a strange congregation, really. But it went on, and eventually everyone got used to it; it took on that always-already quality that extended events often gain over their duration. But once, very late at night, after a long bizarre translated conversation in which the AI on the wrist of the young woman he was talking to spoke in rhymed couplets (and he never knew what language she was speaking to start with), Art wandered back through the warehouse toward his office suite, around the table of tables, where work was still going on even though it was after the timeslip, and he stopped to say hi to one group; and then, momentum lost, slumped back against a side wall, half watching, half drowsing, his kavajava buzz nearly overwhelmed by exhaustion. And the strangeness came back, all at once. It was a kind of hypnogogic vision. There were shadows in the corners, innumerable flickering shadows; and eyes in the shadows. Shapes, like insubstantial bodies: all the dead, it suddenly seemed, and all the unborn, all there in the warehouse with them, to witness this moment. As if history were a tapestry, and the congress the loom upon which everything was coming together, the present moment with its miraculous thereness, its potential right in their own atoms, their own voices. Looking back at the past, able to see it all, a single, long, braided tapestry of events; looking forward at the future, able to see none of it, though presumably it branched out in an explosion of threads of potentiality, and could become anything: they were two different kinds of unreachable immensity. And all of them travelling together, from the one into the other, through that great loom the present, the now. Now was their chance, for all of them together in this present – the ghosts could watch, from before and after, but this was the moment when what wisdom they could muster had to be woven together, to be passed on to all the future generations.

They could do anything. That, however, was part of what made it difficult to bring the congress to a close. Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single worldline of history. The future becoming the past: there was something disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality which was the action of time itself. The potential was so delicious – the way they could have, potentially, all the best parts of all good governments of all time, combined magically into some superb, as yet unseen synthesis – or throw all that aside, and finally strike a new path to the heart of just government … To go from that to the mundane problematic of the constitution as written was an inevitable letdown, and instinctively people put it off.

On the other hand, it would certainly be a good thing if their diplomatic team were to arrive on Earth with a completed document to present to the UN and the people of Earth. Really, there was no avoiding it; they needed to finish; not just to present to Earth the united front of an established government, but also to start living their post-crisis life, whatever it might be.

Nadia felt this strongly, and so she began to exert herself. ‘Time to drop the keystone into the arch,’ she said to Art one morning. And from then on she was indefatigable, meeting all the delegations and committees, insisting that they finish whatever they were working on, insisting they get it on the table for a final vote on inclusion. This inexorable insistence of hers revealed something that had not been clear before, which was that most of the issues had been resolved to the satisfaction of most of the delegations. They had concocted something workable, most agreed, or at least worth trying, with amendment procedures prominent in the structure so that they could alter aspects of the system as they went along. The young natives in particular seemed happy – proud of their work, and pleased that they had managed to keep an emphasis on local semi-autonomy, institutionalizing the way most of them had lived under the Transitional Authority.

Thus the many checks against majoritarian rule did not bother them, even though they themselves were the current majority. In order not to look defeated by this development, Jackie and her circle had to pretend they had never argued for a strong presidency and central government in the first place; indeed they claimed that an executive council, elected by the legislature in the Swiss manner, had been their idea all along. A lot of that kind of thing was going on, and Art was happy to agree with all such claims: ‘Yes, I remember, we were wondering what to do about that the night when we stayed up to see the sunrise, it was a good thought you had.’

Good ideas everywhere. And they began to spiral down toward closure.

The global government as they had designed it was to be a confederation, led by an executive council of seven members, elected by a two-housed legislature. One legislative branch, the duma, was composed of a large group of representatives drafted from the populace; the other, the senate, a smaller group elected one from each town or village group larger than five hundred people. The legislature was all in all fairly weak; it elected the executive council and helped select justices of the courts, and left to the towns most legislative duties. The judicial branch was more powerful; it included not only criminal courts, but also a kind of double supreme court, one half a constitutional court, and the other half an environmental court, with members to both appointed, elected and drawn by lottery. The environmental court would rule on disputes concerning terraforming and other environmental changes, while the constitutional court would rule on the constitutionality of all other issues, including challenged town laws. One arm of the environmental court would be a land commission, charged with overseeing the stewardship of the land, which was to belong to all Martians together, in keeping with point three of the Dorsa Brevia agreement; there would not be private property as such, but there would be various tenure rights established in leasing contracts, and the land commission was to work these matters out. A corresponding economic commission would function under the constitutional court, and would be partly composed of representatives from guild co-operatives which would be established for the various professions and industries. This commission was to oversee the establishment of a version of the underground’s eco-economics, including both not-for-profit enterprises concentrating on the public sphere, and taxed for-profit enterprises which had legal size limits, and were by law employee-owned.

This expansion of the judiciary satisfied what desire they had for a strong global government, without giving an executive body much power; it was also a response to the heroic role played by Earth’s World Court in the previous century, when almost every other Terran institution had been bought or otherwise collapsed under metanational pressures; only the World Court had held firm, issuing ruling after ruling on behalf of the disenfranchised and the land, in a mostly-ignored rearguard and indeed symbolic action against the metanats’ depredations; a moral force, which if it had had more teeth, might have done more good. But from the Martian underground they had seen the battle fought, and now they remembered.

Thus the Martian global government. The constitution then also included a long list of human rights, including social rights; guidelines for the land commission and the economics commission; an Australian ballot election system for the elective offices; a system for amendments; and so on. Lastly, to the main text of the constitution they appended the huge collection of materials that had accumulated in the process, calling it Working Notes and Commentary. This was to be used to help the courts interpret the main document, and included everything the delegations had said at the table of tables, or written on the warehouse screens, or received in the mail.

So most of the sticky issues had been resolved, or at least swept under the rug; the biggest outstanding dispute was the Red objection. Art went into action here, orchestrating several late concessions to the Reds, including many early appointments to the environmental courts; these concessions were later termed the ‘Grand Gesture’. In return Irishka, speaking for all the Reds still involved in the political process, agreed that the cable would stay, that UNTA would have a presence in Sheffield, that Terrans would still be able to immigrate, subject to restrictions; and lastly, that terraforming would continue, in slow non-disruptive forms, until the atmospheric pressure at six kilometres above the datum was 350 millibars, this figure to be reviewed every five years. And so the Red impasse was broken, or at least finessed.

Coyote shook his head at the way things had developed. ‘After every revolution there is an interregnum, in which communities run themselves and all is well, and then the new regime comes in and screws things up. I think what you should do now is go out to the tents and canyons, and ask them very humbly how they have been running things these past two months, and then throw this fancy constitution away and say, continue.’

‘But that’s what the constitution does say,’ Art joked.

Coyote would not kid about this. ‘You must be very scrupulous not to gather power in to the centre just because you can do it. Power corrupts, that’s the basic law of politics. Maybe the only law.’

As for UNTA, it was harder to tell what they thought, because opinions back on Earth were divided, with a loud faction calling for the retaking of Mars by force, everyone on Pavonis to be jailed or hanged. Most Terrans were more accommodating, and all of them were still distracted by the ongoing crisis at home. And at the moment, they didn’t matter as much as the Reds; that was the space the revolution had given the Martians. Now they were about to fill it.

Every night of the final week, Art went to bed incoherent with cavils and kava, and though exhausted he would wake fairly often during the night, and roll under the force of some seemingly lucid thought that in the morning would be gone, or revealed as lunatic. Nadia slept just as poorly on the couch next to his, or in her chair. Sometimes they would fall asleep talking over some point or other, and wake up dressed but entangled, holding onto each other like children in a thunderstorm. The warmth of another body was a comfort like nothing else. And once in the dim predawn ultraviolet light they both woke up, and talked for hours in the cold silence of the building, in a little cocoon of warmth and companionship. Another mind to talk to. From colleagues to friends; from there to lovers, maybe; or something like lovers; Nadia did not seem inclined to romanticism of any land. But Art was in love, no doubt about it, and there twinkled in Nadia’s flecked eyes a new fondness for him, he thought. So that at the end of the long final days of the congress, they lay on their couches and talked, and she would knead his shoulders, or he hers, and then they would fall comatose, pounded by exhaustion. There was more pressure to ushering in this document than either one of them wanted to admit, except in these moments, huddling together against the cold big world. A new love: Art, despite Nadia’s unsentimentality, found no other way to put it. He was happy.

And he was amused, but not surprised, when they got up one morning and she said, ‘Let’s put it to a vote.’

So Art talked to the Swiss and the Dorsa Brevia scholars, and the Swiss proposed to the congress that they vote on the version of the constitution currently on the table, voting point by point as they had promised in the beginning. Immediately there was a spasm of vote-trading that made Terran stock exchanges look subtle and slow. Meanwhile the Swiss set up a voting sequence, and over the course of three days they ran through it, allowing one vote to each group on each numbered paragraph of the draft constitution. All eighty-nine paragraphs passed, and the massive collection of ‘explanatory material’ was officially appended to the main text.

After that it was time to put it to the people of Mars for approval. So on Ls 158,1 October 11th, M-year 52 (on Earth, February 27th, 2128), the general populace of Mars, including everyone over five M-years old, voted by wrist on the resulting document. Over ninety-five per cent of the population voted, and the constitution passed seventy-eight per cent to twenty-two per cent, garnering just over nine million votes. They had a government.

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