Green Mars

PART 10 Phase Change

They were pelican surfing when apprentices jumping up and down on the beach alerted them that something was wrong. They flew back in to the beach and stuck their landings on the wet sand, and got the news. An hour later they were up to the airport, and soon after that taking off in a little Skunkworks space plane called the Gollum. They headed south, and when they reached 50,000 feet they were somewhere over Panama, and the pilot tilted it up and kicked in the rockets, and they were pressed back in their big g chairs for a few minutes. The three passengers were in cockpit seats behind the pilot and copilot, and out their windows they could see the exterior skin of the plane, which looked like pewter, begin to glow, and then quickly turn a vivid glowing yellow with a touch of bronze to it, brighter and brighter until it looked as if they were Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, sitting together in the fiery furnace and coming to no harm.

When the skin lost some of its glow, and the pilot leveled them off, they were about eighty miles above the Earth, and looking down on the Amazon, and the beautiful spinal curve of the Andes. As they flew south one of the passengers, a geologist, told the other two more about the situation.

“The West Antarctic ice sheet was resting on bedrock that is below sea level. It’s continental land, though, not ocean bottom, and under West Antarctica it’s a kind of basin and range zone, very geothermally active.”

“West Antarctica?” Fort asked, squinting.

“That’s the smaller half, with the peninsula sticking up toward South America, and the Ross ice shelf. The west ice sheet is between the mountains of the peninsula and the Transantarctic Mountains, in the middle of the continent. Here, look, I brought a globe.” He pulled from his pocket an inflatable globe, a child’s toy, and blew it up and passed it around the cockpit.

“So, the western ice sheet, there, was resting on bedrock below sea level. But the land down there is warm, and there are some under-ice volcanoes down there, and so the ice on the bottom gets melted a bit. This water mixes with sediments from the volcanoes, and forms a substance called till. It has a consistency kind of like toothpaste. Where the ice is riding over this till it moves faster than usual, so within the west ice sheet there were ice streams, like fast glaciers with their banks made of slower ice. Ice Stream B ran two meters a day, for instance, while the ice around it moved two meters a year. And B was fifty kilometers across, and a kilometer deep. So that was one hell of a river, running off with about half a dozen other ice streams into the Ross ice shelf.” He indicated these invisible streams with a fingertip.

“Now, where the ice streams and the ice sheet in general came off the bedrock, and started floating in the Ross Sea — that was called the grounding line.”

“Ah,” said one of Fort’s friends. “Global warming?”

The geologist shook his head. “Our global warming has had very little effect on all this. It’s raised temperatures and sea levels a little bit, but if that was all that was happening it wouldn’t make much difference here. The problem is we’re still in the interglacial warming that began at the end of the last Ice Age, and that warming sends what we call a thermal pulse down through the polar ice sheets. That pulse has been moving down for eight thousand years. And the grounding line of the west ice sheet has been moving inland for eight thousand years. And now one of the under-ice volcanoes down there is erupting. A major eruption. About three months old now. The grounding line had already started to retreat at an accelerated rate some years ago, and it was very close to the volcano that’s erupted. It looks like the eruption has brought the grounding line right to the volcano, and now ocean water is running between the ice sheet and the bedrock, right into an active eruption. And so the ice sheet is breaking up. Lifting up, sliding out into the Ross Sea, and being carried away by currents.”

His listeners stared at the little inflatable globe. By this time they were over Patagonia. The geologist answered their questions, pointing out features on the globe as he did. This kind of thing had happened before, he told them, and more than once. West Antarctica had been ocean, dry land, or ice sheet, many times in the millions of years since tectonic movement had deposited that continent in that position. And there appeared to be several unstable points in the long-term temperature changes — “instability triggers,” he called them, causing massive changes in a matter of years. “This climatological stuff is practically instantaneous as far as geologists are concerned. Like, there’s good evidence in the Greenland ice sheet that one time we went from glacial to interglacial in three years.” The geologist shook his head.

“And these ice sheet breakups?” Fort asked.

“Well, we think they might go typically in a couple hundred years, which is still very fast, mind you. A trigger event. But this time the volcano eruption makes it much worse. Hey look, there’s the Banana Belt.”

He pointed down, and across Drake Strait they saw a narrow icy mountainous peninsula, pointing in the same direction as the coccyx of Tierra del Fuego.

The pilot banked to the right, then more gently to the left, beginning a wide lazy turn. Below them as they stared down was the familiar image of Antarctica as seen in satellite photos, but everything was now brilliantly colored and articulated: the cobalt blue of the ocean, the daisy chain of cyclonic cloud systems spinning away to the north, the textured sheen of the sun on the water, the great gleaming mass of the ice, and the flotillas of tiny icebergs, so white in the blue.

But the familiar Q shape of the continent was now strangely mottled in the area behind the comma of the Antarctic peninsula, with gaping blue-black cracks in the white. And the Ross Sea was even more fractured, by long ocean-blue fjords, and a radial pattern of turquoise-blue cracks; and offshore from the Ross Sea, floating up toward the South Pacific, were some tabular icebergs that were like pieces of the continent itself, sailing away. The biggest one looked to be about the same size as New Zealand’s South Island, or even bigger.

After they had pointed out the biggest tabular bergs to each other, and the various features of the broken and reduced western ice sheet (the geologist indicated where he thought the volcano under the ice was, but it looked no different from the rest of the sheet), they simply sat in their seats and watched.

“That’s the Ronne ice shelf, there,” the geologist said after a while, “and the Weddell Sea. Yeah, there’s some slippage down into it too…. Up there’s where McMurdo used to be, on the far side of the Ross ice shelf. Ice was pushed across the bay and ran up over the settlement.”

The pilot started a second lap around the continent.

Fort said, “Now say again what effect this will have?”

“Well, theoretical models have world sea levels rising about six meters.”

“Six meters!”

“Well, it will take a few years for the full rise, but it’s definitely started. This catastrophic break will raise sea levels about two or three meters, in a matter of weeks. What’s left of the sheet will be afloat in a matter of months, or a few years at most, and that will add another three meters.”

“How could it raise the whole ocean that much?”

“It’s a lot of ice.”

“It can’t be that much ice!”

“Yes it can. That’s most of the fresh water in the world, right down there under us. Just be thankful the East Antarctic ice sheet is nice and stable. If it were to slide off, sea levels would rise sixty meters.”

“Six meters is plenty,” Fort said.

They finished another lap. The pilot said, “We should be getting back.”

“That’s it for every beach in the world,” Fort said, pulling his face back from the window. Then: “I guess we’d better go get our stuff.”

When the Second Martian revolution began, Nadia was in the upper canyon of Shalbatana Vallis, north of Marineris. In a sense one could say that she started it.

She had left South Fossa temporarily to oversee the Shalbatana closure, which was similar to those over Nirgal Vallis and the east Hellas valleys: a long tent roof over a temperate ecology, with a stream running down the canyon floor, in this case supplied by pumping from the Lewis aquifer, 170 kilometers to the south. Shalbatana was a long series of lazy S’s, so that the valley floor looked very picturesque, but the construction of the roof had been complicated.

Nevertheless Nadia had directed the project with only one small part of her attention, the rest being focused on the cascading developments on Earth. She was in daily communication with her group in South Fossa, and with Art and Nirgal in Burroughs, and they kept her informed of all the latest news. She was particularly interested in the activities of the World Court, which was trying to establish itself as an arbitrator in the growing conflict of the Su-barashii metanats and the Group of Eleven against Praxis, Switzerland, and the developing China-India alliance — trying to function, as Art had put it, “as a sort of world court.” That effort had looked doomed when the fundamentalist riots began and the metanats prepared to defend themselves; and Nadia had concluded unhappily that things on Earth were about to spiral down into chaos again.

But all these crises were immediately cast into insignificance when Sax called to tell her of the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet. She had taken his call at her desk in one of the construction trailers, and now she stared at his little face on the screen. “What do you mean, collapsed?”

“It’s lifted off the bedrock. There’s a volcano erupting. It’s being broken up by ocean currents.”

The video image he was sending cut to Punta Arena, a Chilean harbor town with its docks gone and its streets awash; then it cut again to Port Elizabeth in Azania, where the situation was much the same.

“How fast is it?” Nadia said. “Is it a tidal wave?”

“No. More like a very high tide. That will never go away.”

“So enough time to evacuate,” Nadia said, “but not enough time to build anything. And you say six meters!”

“But only over the next few … no one is sure how long. I’ve seen estimates that as much as a quarter of the Terran population will be — affected.”

“I believe it. Oh, Sax …”

A worldwide stampede to higher ground. Nadia stared at the screen, feeling stunned as the scale of the catastrophe became clearer to her. Coastal cities would be awash. Six meters! She found it very hard to imagine that any possible ice mass could be so large as to raise the sea level of all Earth’s oceans by even as much as one meter — but six! It was shocking proof, if one needed it, that the Earth was not so big after all. Or else that the West Antarctic ice sheet was huge. Well, it had covered about a third of a continent, and was, the reports said, some three kilometers thick. That was a lot of ice. Sax was saying something about the East Antarctic ice sheet, which apparently was not threatened. She shook her head to clear it of this nattering, concentrated on the news. Bangladesh would have to be entirely evacuated; that was three hundred million people, not to mention the other coastal cities of India, like Calcutta, Madras, Bombay. Then London, Copenhagen, Istanbul, Amsterdam, New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Miami, Rio, Buenos Aires, Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore, Hong Kong, Manila, Djakarta, Tokyo … and those were only the big ones. A lot of people lived on the coast, in a world already severely stressed by overpopulation and declining resources. And now all kinds of basic necessities were being drowned by salt water.

“Sax,” she said, “we should be helping them. Not just…” . “There is not that much we can do. And we can do that best if we’re free. First one, then the other.”

“You promise?”

“Yes,” he said, looking surprised. “I mean — I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s what I’m asking.” She thought it over. “You’ve got everything ready at your end?”

“Yes. We want to start with missile strikes against all surveillance and weapons satellites.”

“What about Kasei Vallis?”

“I’m dealing with it.”

“When do you want to start?”

“How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow!”

“I have to deal with Kasei very soon. Conditions are good right now.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Let’s try to launch tomorrow. No sense wasting time.”

“My God,” Nadia said, thinking hard. “We’re about to go behind the sun?”

“Yes.”

This position vis-a-vis Earth was mostly a symbolic matter these days, as communications were assured by a great number of asteroid relays; but it did mean that it would take months for even the fastest shuttles to get from Earth to Mars.

Nadia took a deep breath, let it out. She said, “Let’s go, then.”

“I was hoping you would say that. I’ll call them in Burroughs and give them the word.”

“We’ll meet in Underbill?” This was their current rendezvous point in case of emergency; Sax was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater where a lot of his missile silos were located, so both of them could get to Underbill in a day.

“Yes,” he said. “Tomorrow.” And he was gone.

And so she had started a revolution.

She found a news program running the satellite photo of Antarctic, and watched it in a kind of daze. Little voices on the screen chattered at speed, one claiming that the disaster was an act of ecotage perpetrated by ecoteurs from Praxis, who supposedly had drilled holes in the ice sheet and set hydrogen bombs down on the Antarctic bedrock. “Still at it!” she cried, disgusted. No other news shows made this assertion, or refuted it — it was just part of the chaos, no doubt, swept away by all the other accounts of the flood. But the metanatricide was still on. And they were part of it.

All existence immediately reduced itself to that, in a way sharply reminiscent of ‘61. She felt her stomach knotting as of old, tightening past any usual levels of tension, into an iron walnut at the center of her being, painful and constricting. She had been taking medicine recently to prevent ulcers, but it was woefully inadequate against this kind of assault. Come on, she told herself. Be calm. This is the moment. You’ve expected it, you’ve worked on it. You’ve laid the groundwork for it. Now came the chaos. At the heart of any phase change there was a zone of cascading recombinant chaos. But there were methods to read it, to deal with it.

She crossed the little mobile habitat, and glanced briefly down at the idyllic beauty of the canyon floor of Shalbatana, with its pebble-pink stream and the new trees, including strings of cotton-wood on the banks and islands. It was possible, if things went drastically wrong, that no one would ever inhabit Shalbatana Vallis, that it would remain an empty bubble world until mudstorms caved the roof in, or something in the mesocosmic ecology went awry. Well —

She shrugged and woke her crew, and told them to get ready to leave for Underbill. She told them why, and as they were all part of the resistance in one way or another, they cheered.

It was just after dawn, on what was looking to be a warm spring day, the kind that had allowed them to work in loose walkers and hoods and facemasks, with only the insulated hard boots to remind Nadia of the bulky clothing of the early years. Friday, Ls 101, 2 July 2, M-year 52, Terran date (she checked her wristpad) October 12, 2127. Somewhere near the hundredth anniversary of their arrival, though it was a date no one seemed to be celebrating. A hundred years! It was a bizarre thought.

Another July revolution, then, and another October revolution too. A decade past the bicentennial of the Bolshevik revolution, she seemed to remember. Which was another strange thought. Well, but they too had tried. All the revolutionaries, all through history. Mostly desperate peasants, fighting for their children’s lives. As in her Russia. So many in that bitter twentieth century, risking all to make a better life, and even so it had led to disaster. It was frightening — as if history were a series of human wave assaults on misery, failing time after time.

But the Russian in her, the cerebellum Siberian, decided to take the October date as a good auspice. Or a reminder of what not to do, if nothing else — along with ‘61. She could, in her Siberian mind, dedicate this time to all of them: to the heroic suffering of the Soviet catastrophe, to all her friends dead in ‘61, to Arkady and Alex and Sasha and Roald and Janet and Evgenia and Samantha, all of whom still haunted her dreams and her attenuated insomniac memories, spinning like electrons around the iron walnut inside her, warning her not to screw it up, to get it right this time, to redeem the meanings of their lives and their deaths. She remembered someone saying to her, “Next time you have a revolution you’d better try some other way.”

And now they were. But there were Marsfirst guerrilla units under Kasei’s command, out of contact with the headquarters in Burroughs, as well as a thousand other factors coming to Dear, most of them completely out of her control. Cascading recombinant chaos. So how different was it going to be?

She got her crew into rovers and over to the little piste station, some kilometers to the north of them. From there they rode in a freight train, on a mobile piste laid for the Shalbatana job, on to the main Sheffield-Burroughs line. Both those cities were metanat strongholds, and Nadia worried that they would take pains to secure the piste linking them. In that sense Underbill was strategically important, as occupying it would cut the piste. But for that very reason she wanted to get away from Underbill, and off the piste system entirely. She wanted to get into the air, as she had in ‘61 — all the instincts learned in those few months were trying to take over again, as if sixty-six years had not passed. And those instincts told her to hide.

As they glided southwest over the desert, shooting the gap between Ophir and Juventae chasmas, she kept her wristpad linked to Sax’s headquarters in Da Vinci Crater. Sax’s team of technicians were trying to imitate his dry style, but it was obvious that they were just as excited as her young construction crew. About five of them got on the wrist at once to tell her that they had set off a barrage of the surface-to-space missiles which Sax had arranged to have placed in hidden equatorial silos over the past decade, and this barrage had gone off like a fireworks display, and had knocked out all of the orbiting metanat weapons platforms that they knew of, and many of their communications satellites as well. “We got eighty percent of them in the first wave! — We sent up our own communications satellites! — Now we’re dealing with them on a case-by-case basis—”

Nadia interrupted. “Are your satellites working?”

“We think they’re fine! We can only tell for sure after a full test, and everyone’s kind of busy right now.”

“Let’s try one out now. And some of you make that a priority, you understand? We need a redundant system, a very redundant system.”

She clicked off and tapped out one of the frequency and encryption codes Sax had given her. A few seconds later she was talking to Zeyk, who was in Odessa, helping to coordinate activities in the Hellas Basin. Everything there was going according to plan so far, he said; of course they were only a few hours into it, but it looked like- Michel and Maya’s organizing there had paid off, because all the cell members in Odessa had poured into the streets and told people what was happening, sparking a spontaneous mass work stoppage and demonstration. They were in the process of closing down the train station, and occupying the corniche and most other public spaces, in a strike that looked like it would soon be a takeover. The Transitional Authority personnel in the city were retreating to the train station or the physical plant, as Zeyk had hoped they would. “When most of them are inside we’re going to override the plant’s AI, and then it’ll become a jail holding them. We’ve got control of the backup life-support systems for the town, so there’s very little they can do, except maybe blow themselves up, but we don’t think they’ll do that. A lot of the UNTA people here are Syrians under Niazi, and I’m talking to Rashid while we try to disable the physical plant from the outside, just to make sure no one in there can decide to become a martyr.”

“I don’t think there will be too many martyrs to the metana-tionals,” Nadia said.

“I hope not, but you never can tell. So far so good here, though.

And elsewhere around Hellas it’s been even easier — the security forces were minimal, and most of the population are natives or radicalized emigrants, and they’ve simply been surrounding security and daring them to do anything violent. It has resulted either in a standoff, or else in the security forces being disarmed. Dao and Harmakhis-Reull have both declared themselves free canyons, and invited anyone who wants to take refuge there if they need it.”

“Good!”

Zeyk heard the surprise in her voice, and warned, “I don’t think it will be as easy in Burroughs and Sheffield. And we need to shut down the elevator, so they don’t start shooting at us from Clarke.”

“At least Clarke is stuck over Tharsis.”

“True. But it sure would be nice to seize that thing, and not have the elevator come crashing down again.”

“I know. I heard the Reds have been working with Sax on a plan for seizure.”

“Allah preserve us. I must be off, Nadia. Tell Sax that the programs for the plant worked perfectly. And listen, we should come up and join you in the north, I think. If we can secure Hellas and Elysium quickly, it will help our chances with Burroughs and Sheffield.”

So Hellas was going as planned. Arid just as important, or more, they were still in communication with each other. This was critical; among all the nightmare images of ‘61, scenes illuminated in her memory by lightning bolts of fear or pain, few were worse than the feeling of sheer helplessness that had struck her when their communication system had crashed. After that nothing they did had mattered, they had been like insects with their antennae ripped off, stumbling around ineffectually. So in the last few years Nadia had repeatedly insisted to Sax that he come up with a plan for hardening their communications; and he had built, and now put in orbit, a whole fleet of very small communications satellites, stealthed and hardened as much as possible. So far they were functioning as planned. And the iron walnut within her, while not gone, was at least not pulling in so hard at her ribs. Calm, she told herself. Thisness. This is the moment and the only moment. Concentrate on it.

Their mobile piste reached the big equatorial line, rerouted the year before to avoid the Chryse ice, and they shunted onto the piste for local trains, and headed west. Their train was only three cars long, and Nadia’s whole crew, some thirty people, were all gathered in the first car to watch the incoming reports over the car’s screen. These were official news reports from Mangalavid in South Fossa, and they were confused and inconsistent, combining regular weather reports and the like with brief accounts of strikes in many cities. Nadia kept her wristpad in contact with either Da Vinci or the Free Mars safe house in Burroughs, and as they slid on she watched both the car screen and her wrist, taking in simultaneous bursts of information as if listening to polyphonic music, finding she could track the two sources at once without any trouble, and was hungry for more. Praxis was sending up continuous reports on the Terran situation, which was confused, but not incoherent or opaque as it had been in ‘61; for one thing Praxis was keeping them informed, and for another, much of the current activity on Earth was devoted to moving the coastal populations out of the reach of the floods, which so far were like very high tides, as Sax had said they would be. The metanatricide was still being played out in the form of surgical strikes and decapitation coups, commando raids and counterraids on various corporate compounds and headquarters, combined with legal actions and PR of all sorts — including a number of suits and countersuits finally introduced to the World Court, which Nadia considered encouraging. But these strategic raids and maneuvers were much reduced in the face of the global flood. And even at their worst (video of exploding compounds, airplane crash sites, stretches of road craterized by the bombing of passing limousines) they were still infinitely better than any kind of escalating war, which in biological form could kill millions. As became clear, unfortunately, with a shocking report from Indonesia that came over the car’s screen — a radical liberation group from East Timor, modeled on Peru’s Shining Path, had poisoned the island of Java with an as yet unidentified plague, so that along with the travails of the flooding there, they were losing hundreds of thousands to disease. On a continent such a plague could become a terminal disaster, and there was no guarantee it wouldn’t happen still. But meanwhile, with that one awful exception, the war down there, if that was what one called the chaos of the metanatricide, was proceeding as a fight at the top. A style similar to what they were attempting on Mars, in fact. This was comforting in a way, although if the metanats became adept at the style, they could presumably wage it on Mars as well — if not in this first moment of surprise, then later when they had reorganized. And there was an ominous item in the flow of reports from Praxis Geneva, indicating they might be responding already: a fast shuttle with a large force of “security experts” had left Earth orbit for Mars three months ago, the report said, and was expected to reach the Martian system “in a few days.” The news was being released now to encourage security forces beleaguered by rioting and terrorism, according to the UN press release.

Nadia’s concentration on the screens was broken by the appearance of one of the big round-the-world trains on the piste beside them. One second they were gliding smoothly over the bumpy plateau of Ophir Planum, and the next a big fifty-car express was whooshing by them. But it didn’t slow down, and there was no way of telling who, if anyone, sat behind its darkened .windows. Then it was past them, and soon after that over the horizon ahead, and gone.

The news shows continued at their manic pace, the reporters obviously astonished by the developments of the day. Riots in Sheffield, work stoppages in South Fossa and Hephaestus — the accounts overlapped each other in such rapid succession that Nadia found it hard to believe they were real.

When they came into Underbill Nadia’s feeling of unreality persisted, for the sleepy semiabandoned old settlement was now abuzz with activity, as in M-year 1. Resistance sympathizers had been pouring in all day from small stations around Ganges Catena and Hebes Chasma, and the north wall of Ophir Chasma. The local Bog-danovists had apparently organized them into a march on the little unit of UNTA security personnel at the train station. This had led to a standoff just outside the station itself, under the tent that covered the old arcade and the original quadrant of barrel vaults, now looking very small and quaint.

So when Nadia’s train pulled in, there was a loud argument going on between a man with a bullhorn surrounded by about twenty bodyguards, and the unruly crowd facing them. Nadia got off the train as soon as it stopped, and went over to the edge of the group hemming in the stationmaster and his troops. She commandeered a bullhorn from a surprised-looking young woman and began shouting through it. “Stationmaster! Stationmaster! Station-master!” She repeated this in English and Russian, until everyone had gone quiet to find out who she was. Her construction team had filtered out through the crowd, and when she saw that they were positioned, she walked right up to the cluster of men and women in their flak jackets. The stationmaster appeared to be a Mars old-timer, his face weathered and scarred across the forehead. His young team wore the Transitional Authority insignia, and looked scared. Nadia let the bullhorn fall to her side and said, “I’m Nadia Cherneshevsky. I built this town. And now we’re taking control of it. Who do you work for?”

“The United Nations Transitional Authority,” the stationmaster said firmly, staring at her as if she had stepped out of the grave.

“But what unit? Which metanational?”

“We’re a Mahjari unit.”

“Mahjari is working with China now, and China with Praxis, and Praxis with us. We’re on the same side, and you don’t know it yet. And no matter what you think about that, we’ve got you outgunned here.” She shouted out to the crowd, “Everyone armed raise their hand!”

Everyone in the, crowd raised their hand, and all of her crew had stun guns or nail guns or soldering-beam guns in hand.

“We don’t want bloodshed,” Nadia said to the ever-tighter knot of bodyguards before her. “We don’t even want to take you prisoner. There’s our train right there; you can take it, and go to Sheffield and join the rest of your team. There you’ll find out the new status of things. It’s that or else we’ll all leave the station here, and blow it up. We’re taking over one way or another, and it would be stupid for anyone to get killed when this revolt is already a done deal. So take the train. I’d advise going to Sheffield, where you can get a ride out on the elevator if you want. Or if you want to work for a free Mars, you can join us right now.”

She stared calmly at the man, feeling more relaxed than she had all day. Action was such a relief. The man ducked his head to confer with his team, and they talked in whispers for most of five minutes.

The man looked at her again. “We’ll take your train.”

And so Underbill was the first town freed.

That night Nadia went out to the trailer park, which was near the new tent coping wall. The two habitats that had not been turned into labs were still outfitted with the original living quarters equipment, and after inspecting them, and then going back out and walking around the barrel vaults, and the Alchemists’ Quarter, she finally returned to the one she had lived in at the very start, and lay down on one of the floor mattresses, feeling exhausted.

It was strange indeed to lie by herself among all the ghosts, trying to feel again the presence of that distant time in her. Too strange; despite her exhaustion she could not sleep, and near dawn she had a hazy vision, of worrying about uncrating goods from freight rockets, and programming robot bricklayers, and taking a call from Arkady on Phobos. She even slept a while in this state, dozing uneasily, until a tingling in her ghost finger woke her up.

And then, rising with a groan, it was just as hard to imagine that she was waking up to a world in turmoil, with millions of people waiting to see what the day would bring. Looking around at the tight confines of her first home on Mars, it suddenly seemed to her that the walls were moving — beating very lightly — a kind of standing wave of double vision, as if she were standing in the low morning light looking through a temporal stereopticdn, which revealed all four dimensions at once with a pulsating, hallucinatory light.

They breakfasted in the barrel vaults, in the large hall where Ann and Sax had once argued the merits of terraforming. Sax had won that argument, but Ann was out there fighting it still, as if it had not been decided long since.

Nadia focused on the present, on her AI screen and the flood of news pouring through it this Saturday morning: the top of the screen given over to Maya’s safe house in Burroughs, the bottom to Praxis reports from Earth. Maya was performing heroically as usual, vibrant with apprehension, hectoring everyone in sight to conform to her vision of how things should happen, haggard and yet buzzing with her internal spin. As Nadia listened to her describe the latest developments she chewed breakfast methodically, scarcely noticing Underbill’s delicious bread. It. was afternoon already in Burroughs, and the day had been busy. Every town on Mars was in turmoil. On Earth all the coastal areas- were now flooded, and the mass dislocations were causing chaos inland. The new UN had condemned the rioters on Mars as heartless opportunists who were taking advantage of a time of unprecedented suffering to advance their own selfish cause. “True enough,” Nadia said to Sax as he walked in the door, fresh from Da Vinci Crater. “They’ll hold that against us later, I bet.”

“Not if we help them out.”

“Hmm.” She offered him bread, regarding him closely. Despite his changed features he was looking more like Sax every day, standing there impassively, blinking as he looked around the old brick chamber. It seemed as though revolution was the last thing on his mind. She said, “Are you ready to fly to Elysium?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

“Good. Let me go get my-bag.”

While she was throwing her clothes and AI into her old black backpack, her wrist beeped and there was Kasei, his long gray hair wild around his deeply lined face, which was the strangest mix of John and Hiroko — John’s mouth, at the moment stretched into a wide grin; Hiroko’s Oriental eyes, now slitted with delight. “Hello, Kasei,” Nadia said, unable to conceal her surprise. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you on my wrist before.”

“Special circumstances,” he said, unabashed. She was used to thinking of him as a dour man, but the outbreak of the revolution was obviously a great tonic; she understood suddenly by his look that he had been waiting for this all his life. “Look, Coyote and I and a bunch of Reds are up here in Chasma Borealis, and we’ve secured the reactor and the dam; everyone working here has been cooperative—”

“Encouraging!” someone beside him yelled.

“Yes, there’s been a lot of support up here, except for a security team of about a hundred people who are holed up in the reactor. They’re threatening to melt it down unless we give them safe passage to Burroughs.”

“So?” Nadia said.

“So?” Kasei repeated, and laughed. “So Coyote says we should ask you what to do.”

Nadia snorted. “Why do I find that hard to believe.”

“Hey, no one here believes it either! But that’s what Coyote said, and we like to indulge the old bastard when we can.”

“So, well, give them safe passage to Burroughs. That’s a no-brainer if I’ve ever seen one. It won’t matter if Burroughs has an extra hundred cops, and the fewer reactor meltdowns the better, we’re still wading around in the radiation from last time.”

Sax came into the room while Kasei was thinking it over.

“Okay!” Kasei said. “If you say so! Hey talk to you later, I have to go, ka.”

Nadia stared at her blank wrist screen, scowling.

Sax said, “What was that about?”

“You’ve got me,” Nadia said, and described the conversation while trying to call Coyote. She got no answer.

Sax said, “Well, you’re the coordinator.”

“Shit.” Nadia pulled her backpack over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

They flew in a new 5IB, very small and very fast. They took a great circle route, which headed northwest over the Vastitas ice sea, and avoided the metanat strongholds of Ascraeus, and Echus Overlook. Very soon after takeoff they could see the ice filling Chryse to the north, the shattered dirty bergs dotted with pink snow algae and amethyst melt ponds. The okr transponder road to Chasma Borealis was of course long gone, that whole system of bringing water south forgotten, a technical footnote for the history books. Looking down at the ice chaos Nadia suddenly remembered what the land had looked like on that first trip, the endless hills and hollows, the funnel-like alases, the great black barchan dunes, the incredible laminated terrain in the last sands before the polar cap … all gone now, overwhelmed by ice. And the polar cap itself was a mess, nothing but a collection of great melt zones and ice streams, slush rivers, ice-covered liquid lakes — every manner of slurry, and all of it crashing downslope off the high round plateau that the polar cap rested on, down into the world-wrapping northern sea.

Landing was therefore out of the question for much of their flight. Nadia watched the instruments nervously, all too aware of the many things that could go wrong in a new machine during a crisis, when maintenance was down and human error up.

Then billows of white and black smoke appeared on the horizon to the southwest, pouring east in what was clearly a high wind. “What’s that?” Nadia asked, moving to the left side of the plane to look.

“Kasei Vallis,” Sax said from the pilot’s seat.

“What’s happened to it?”

“It’s burning.”

Nadia stared at him. “What do you mean?”

“Heavy vegetation there in the valley. And along the foot of the Great Escarpment. Resinated trees and shrubs, for the most part. Also fireseed trees — you know. Species that require fire to propagate. Engineered at Biotique. Thorny resin manzanita, blackthorn, giant sequoia, some others.”

“How do you know this?”

“I planted them.”

“And now you’ve set them on fire?”

Sax nodded. He glanced down at the smoke.

“But Sax, isn’t the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere really high now?”

“Forty percent.”

She stared at him some more, suddenly suspicious. “You jacked that up too, didn’t you! Jesus, Sax — you might have set the whole world on fire!”

She stared down at the bottom of the column of smoke. There in the big trough of Kasei Vallis was a line of flame, the leading edge of the fire, burning brilliant white rather than yellow — it looked like molten magnesium. “Nothing will put that out!” she cried. “You’ve set the world on fire!”

“The ice,” Sax said. “There’s nothing downwind but the ice covering Chryse. It should only burn a few thousand square kilometers.”

Nadia stared at him, amazed and appalled. Sax was still glancing down at the fire, but most of the time he watched the plane’s instruments, his face set in a curious expression: reptilian, stony — utterly inhuman.

The metanat security compounds in the curve of Kasei Vallis came over the horizon. The tents were all burning furiously, like torches of pitch, the craters on the inner bank like beach firepits, spurting white flame into the air. Clearly there was a strong wind pouring down Echus Chasma and funneling through Kasei Vallis, fanning the flames. A firestorm. And Sax stared down at it unblinking, his jaw muscles bunched under the skin.

“Fly north,” Nadia ordered him. “Get clear of that.”

He banked the plane, and she shook her head. Thousands of square kilometers, burned — all that vegetation, so painstakingly introduced — global oxygen levels raised by a significant percentage… She regarded the strange creature sitting beside her warily.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

“I didn’t want you to stop it.”

As simple as that.

“So I have that power?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Meaning I’m kept ignorant of things?”

“Only of this,” Sax said. His jaw muscles were bunching and relaxing, in a rhythm that reminded her suddenly of Frank Chal-mers. “The prisoners were all moved out into asteroid mining. This was the training site for all their secret police. The ones who would never give up. The torturers.” He turned that lizard gaze on her. “We’re better off without them.” And he returned to his piloting.

Nadia was still looking back at the fierce white line of the firestorm when the plane’s radio beeped her code. This time it was Art, cross-eyed with worry. “I need your help,” he said. “Ann’s people have retaken Sabishii, and a lot of the Sabishiians have come up out of the maze to reoccupy it, and the Reds in control there are telling them to go away.”

“What?”

“I know, well, I don’t think Ann knows about this yet, and she isn’t answering my calls. There are Reds out there that make her look like a Boonean, I swear. But I reached Ivana and Raul, and got them to stop the Reds in Sabishii till they heard from you. That’s the best I could do.”

“Why me?”

“I think Ann told them to listen to you.”

“Shit.”

“Well, who else is going to do it? Maya’s made too many enemies holding things together the last few years.”

“I thought you were the big diplomat here.”

“I am! But what I got was everyone agreeing to defer to your judgment. That was the best I could do. Sorry, Nadia. I’ll help you anyway you want me to.”

“You’d damn well better, after setting me up like this!”

He grinned. “It’s not my fault everyone trusts you.”

Nadia clicked off and tried the various Red radio channels. At first she couldn’t find Ann. But while she was running through their channels she heard enough messages to realize that there were young Red radicals whom Ann would certainly condemn, or so she hoped — people who, with the revolt still in the balance, were busy blowing up platforms in Vastitas, slashing tents, breaking pistes, threatening to end their cooperation with the other rebels unless they were joined in their ecotage and all their demands were met, etc., etc.

Finally Ann answered Nadia’s call. She looked like an avenging Fury, righteous and slightly mad. “Look,” Nadia said to her without preamble, “an independent Mars is the best chance you’ll ever have to get what you want. You try holding the revolution hostage to your concerns and people will remember, I’m warning you! You can argue all you want once we’ve gotten the situation under control, but until then it’s just blackmail as far as I’m concerned. It’s a stab in the back. You get those Reds in Sabishii to turn the city back over to its residents.”

Ann said angrily, “What makes you think I can tell them what to do?”

“Who else if not you?”

“What makes you think I disagree with what they’re doing?”

“My impression that you are a sane person, that’s what!”

“I don’t presume to order people about.”

“Reason with them if you can’t order them! Tell them stronger revolts than ours have failed because of this kind of stupidity. Tell them to get a grip.”

Ann cut the connection without a reply.

“Shit,” Nadia said.

Her AI continued to pour out news. The UNTA expeditionary force was coming back up from the southern highlands, and appeared to be on its way to Hellas, or Sabishii. Sheffield was still in the control of Subarashii. Burroughs was an open situation, with security forces seemingly in control; but refugees were pouring into the city from Syrtis and elsewhere, and there was a general strike going on as well. The vids made it look like most of the populace was spending the day*out on the boulevards and in the parks, demonstrating against the Transitional Authority, or merely trying to watch what was going on.

“We’ll have to do something about Burroughs,” Sax said.

“I know.”

They flew southward again, past the bump of Hecates Tholus on the northern end of the Elysium massif, to the South Fossa spaceport. Their flight had taken twelve hours, but they had gone west through nine time zones, and crossed the date line at 180° longitude, so it was midday Sunday when their airport bus drove to the rim of South Fossa, and through the roof lock.

South Fossa and the other Elysium towns, Hephaestus and Elysium Fossa, had all come out for Free Mars in a big way. They made a kind of geographical unit; a southern arm of the Vastitas ice now ran between the Elysium massif and the Great Escarpment, and though the ice had already been spanned by pistes on pontoon bridges, Elysium was in the process of becoming an island continent. In all three of its big towns crowds had poured into the streets, and occupied the city offices and the physical plants. Without the threat of attacks from orbit to back them up, the few Transitional Authority police in, the towns had either changed into civilian clothes and melted into the crowds, or else gotten on the train to Burroughs. Elysium was uncontestedly part of Free Mars.

Down at the Mangalavid offices Nadia and Sax found that a large armed group of rebels had taken over the station, and were now busy churning out twenty-four and a half hours a day of video reports on all four channels, all sympathetic to the revolt, with long interviews from people in all the independent towns and stations. The timeslip was going to be devoted to a montage of the previous day’s events.

Some outlying mining stations in Elysium’s radial cracks, and in the Phlegra Montes, were purely metanat operations, mostly Amexx and Subarashii. These were staffed largely by new emigrants who had holed up in their camps, and either gone silent or else started to threaten anyone who tried to bother them; some even declared their intention to retake the planet, or hold out until reinforcements from Earth arrived. “Ignore them,” Nadia advised. “Avoid them and ignore them. Jam their communications systems if you can, and leave them alone.”

Reports from elsewhere on Mars were more promising. Senzeni Na was in the hands of people who called themselves Booneans, though they were not associated with Jackie — they were issei, nisei, sansei, and yonsei, who had immediately named their mohole John Boone, and declared Thaumasia a “Dorsa Brevia Peaceful Neutral Place.” Korolyov, now a small mining town only, had revolted almost as violently as in ‘61, and its citizens, many of them descendants of the old prison population, had renamed the town Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, and declared it an undocumented anarchist free zone; the old prison compounds were to be converted into a giant bazaar and communal living space, with a particular welcome made to refugees from Earth. Nicosia was likewise a free city. Cairo was under the control of Amexx security. Odessa and the rest of the Hellas Basin towns were still holding firm for independence, although the circumHellas piste had been cut in some places. The maglev train system was bad that way; the magnetic systems had to be operating for the pistes to function and the trains to move, and these systems were easy to break. For that reason many trains were running empty or were canceled, as people took to rovers or planes to make sure they didn’t get stranded in the outback somewhere, in vehicles that didn’t even have wheels.

Nadia and Sax spent the rest of Sunday monitoring developments and making suggestions, if asked, about problem situations. In general it seemed to Nadia that things were going well. But on Monday, bad news came in from Sabishii. The UNTA expeditionary force had arrived there from the southern highlands, and retaken the surface portion of the city after a bitter all-night fight with the Red guerrillas in control of the city. The Reds and the original Sabishiians had retreated into the mound maze or the outlying shelters, and the prospect of continued bloody fighting in the maze was clear. Art predicted that the security force would be unable to penetrate the maze, and so would be forced to abandon Sabishii, and train or fly up to Burroughs, to consolidate with the forces already there. But there was no way to be sure; and poor Sabishii was sadly battered by the assault, and back in security’s hands.

Monday evening at dusk Nadia went out with Sax to get something to eat. South Fossa’s canyon floor was thick with mature trees, the giant sequoias standing over an understory of pines and junipers and, in the lower stretch of the canyon, aspens and canyon oaks. As they walked down the streamside park, Nadia and Sax were introduced by the Mangalavid people to group after group, most of them natives, all of them unfamiliar faces, but all very happy to meet them, it was clear. It was strange to see so many people obviously, visibly happy; in normal life, Nadia realized, one simply didn’t see it — smiles everywhere, strangers talking to each other … there was more than one way for things to go when a social order disappeared. Anarchy and chaos, definitely all too possible; but also communion.

They ate in an outdoor restaurant by the central stream, and then returned to the Mangalavid offices. Nadia got back in front of her screen, and went to work talking to as many organizing cornmittees as she could reach. She felt like Frank in ‘61, working the phones in frantic overdrive; only now they were in communication with all of Mars, and she had the distinct impression that while she was not by any means in control, she at least had a good sense of what was going on. And that was gold, that was. The iron walnut in her stomach began to shift to something more like wood.

After a couple of hours, she began to fall asleep in the seconds between one call and the next; it was the middle of the night back in Underbill and Shalbatana, and she hadn’t slept much since the call from Sax about Antarctica. That meant four or five days without sleep — no, wait — she figured it out — three days. Though it already felt like two weeks.

She had just lain down on a couch when there was an outcry, and everyone ran into the hall, then out onto the stone-flagged plaza surrounding the Mangalavid offices. Nadia stumbled blearily after Sax, who grabbed her by the arm and helped her keep her balance.

Apparently there was a hole in the roof tent. People pointed, but Nadia couldn’t make it out. “This is where we’re better off,” Sax said with a satisfied little purse of the mouth. “The pressure under the roof is only a hundred and fifty millibars higher than the pressure outside.”

“So roofs don’t pop like pricked balloons,” Nadia said, remembering with a shudder some of the domed craters of ‘61.

“And even though some outside air is getting in, it’s mostly oxygen and nitrogen. Still too much CO₂, but not so much that we’re all poisoned instantly.”

“But if the hole were bigger,” Nadia said.

“True.”

She shook her head. “We need to secure the whole planet, to really be safe.”

“True.”

Nadia went back inside, yawning. She sat at her screen again, and began watching the four Mangalavid channels, switching among them rapidly. Most of the big cities were either openly for independence or in various kinds of stalemate, with security in control of the physical plants but nothing happening, and much of the population in the streets, waiting to see what would happen next. There were a number of company towns and camps that were still supporting their metanats, but in the case of Bradbury Point and Huo Hsing Vallis, neighboring towns up on the Great Escarpment, their parent metanats Amexx and Mahjari had been fighting each other on Earth. What effect that would have on these northern towns wasn’t clear, but Nadia was sure it did not help them to sort out their situation.

There were several important towns still in the grasp of Subar-ashii and Amexx, and these were serving as magnets for isolated metanat and UNTA security units. Burroughs was obviously chief among these, but it was true also of Cairo, Lasswitz, Sudbury, and Sheffield. In the south, the sanctuaries that had not been abandoned or destroyed by the expeditionary force were coming out of hiding, and Vishniac Bogdanov was building a surface tent over the old robot vehicle parking complex next to its mohole. So the south would no doubt return to its status as a resistance stronghold, for what that was worth; Nadia didn’t think it was worth much. And the northern polar cap was in such environmental disarray that it almost didn’t matter who held it — with most of its ice draining down into Vastitas, but the polar plateau covered by new snow every winter, it was the most inhospitable region on Mars, and there were almost no permanent settlements left up there.

So the contested zone was basically the temperate and equatorial latitudes, the band around the planet bordered by the Vastitas ice to the north, and the two great basins to the south. And orbital space, of course; but Sax’s assault on metanat orbital objects had apparently been a success, and his removal of Deimos from the vicinity was now looking like a happy stroke indeed. The elevator, however, was still in metanat hands. And reinforcements from Earth were due any time. And Sax’s team in Da Vinci had apparently used up most of their weaponry in the initial attack.

As for the soletta and the annular mirror, they were so big and fragile that they were impossible to defend; if someone wanted to wreck them, they probably could. But Nadia did not see the reason for it. If it happened, she would immediately suspect Reds on their own side of doing it. And if they did — well, everyone could get by without that extra light, as they had before. She would have to ask Sax what he thought about that. And talk to Ann about it, see what her position was. Or maybe it was better not to put ideas in her head. She would have to see how it went. Now what else …

She fell asleep with her head on the screen. When she woke again she was on the couch, ravenous, and Sax was reading her screen. “It’s looking bad in Sabishii,” he said when he saw her struggling up. She went to the bathroom, and when she came back she looked over his shoulder and read as he talked. “Security couldn’t deal with the maze. So they’ve left for Burroughs. But look.” He had two images on-screen — on top, one of Sabishii, burning as ferociously as Kasei Vallis had; on bottom, troops flooding into the train station in Burroughs, wearing light body armor and carrying automatic weapons, their fists punching the air. Burroughs was filled with groups of these security forces, it seemed, and they had taken over Branch Mesa and Double Decker Butte for their residential quarters. So along with the UNTA troops in the city, there were now security teams from both Subarashii and Mahjari — in fact all the’big metanats were represented, which caused Nadia to wonder about what was really going on between them on Earth — whether they hadn’t come to some sort of agreement or ad hoc alliance, as a result of the crisis. She called up Art in Burroughs, to ask him what he thought.

“Maybe these Martian units are so cut off that they’re making their own peace,” he said. “They might be completely on their own.”

“But if we’re still in contact with Praxis …”

“Yeah, but we surprised them. They weren’t aware of the extent of sympathy for the resistance, and so we got the drop on them. Maya’s strategy of lying low paid off in that sense. No, these teams could very well be on their own right now. In which case we could consider Mars to be independent already, and in the midst of a civil war over who has control here. I mean, if those people in Burroughs call us up and say okay, Mars is a world, it’s big enough for more than one kind of government, you have yours, and we have Burroughs, don’t try to take ours away from us — what are we going to say?”

“I don’t think anyone in metanat security is thinking that big,” Nadia said. “It’s only been three days since things fell apart on them.” She pointed to the TV screen. “See, look, there’s Derek Hastings, head of the Transitional Authority. He was head of Mission Control in Houston when we flew out, and he’s dangerous — smart, and very stubborn. He’ll just hold on until those reinforcements land.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

“I don’t know.”

“Can we just leave Burroughs alone?”

“I don’t think so. We’d be much better off if we came out from behind the sun with a completed takeover. If there are beleaguered Terran troops, holding out heroically in Burroughs, they’re almost sure to come out and save them. Call it a rescue mission and then go for the whole planet.”

“It won’t be easy to take Burroughs, with all those troops in it.”

“I know.”

Sax had been asleep on another couch across the room, and now he opened one eye. “The Reds are talking about flooding it.”

“What?”

“It’s below the level of the Vastitas ice. And there’s water under the ice. Without the dike—”

“No,” Nadia said. “There’s two hundred thousand people in Burroughs, and only a few thousand security troops. What are the people supposed to do? You can’t evacuate that many people. It’s crazy. It’s sixty-one all over again.” The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. “What can they be thinking?”

“Maybe it’s just a threat,” Art said over the screen.

“Threats don’t work unless the people you’re threatening believe you’ll carry them out.”

“Maybe they will believe it.”

Nadia shook her head. “Hasting’s not that stupid. Hell, he could evacuate his troops by way of the spaceport, and let the population drown! And then we become monsters, and Earth would be more certain than ever to come after us! No!”

She got up and went looking for some breakfast; then discovered, looking at the row of pastries in the kitchen, that her appetite was gone. She took a cup of coffee and went back to the office, watching her hands shake.

In 2061 Arkady had been faced with a splinter group, which had sent a small asteroid on a collision course with the Earth. It was meant to be a threat only. But the asteroid had been blown apart, in the biggest human-created explosion in history. And after that the war on Mars had suddenly become deadly in a way that it hadn’t been before. And Arkady had been helpless to stop it.

And it could happen again.

She walked back into the office. “We have to go to Burroughs,” she said to Sax.

Revolution suspends habit as well as law. But just as nature abhors a vacuum, people abhor anarchy.

So habits made their first incursions into the new terrain, like bacteria into rock, followed by procedures, protocols, a whole fell-field of social discourse, on its way to the climax forest of law… Nadia saw that people (some people) were indeed coming to her to resolve arguments, deferring to her judgment. She might not have been in control, but she was as close to control as they had: the universal solvent, as Art called her, or General Nadia, as Maya said nastily over the wrist. Which only made Nadia shudder, as Maya knew it would. Nadia preferred something she had heard Sax say over the wrist to his faithful gang of techs, all young Saxes in the making: “Nadia is the designated arbitrator, talk to her about it.” Thus the power of names; arbitrator rather than general. In charge of negotiating what Art was calling the “phase change.” She had heard him use the term in the midst of a long interview on Mangalavid, with that deadpan expression of his that made it very hard to tell if he was joking or not: “Oh I don’t think it’s really a revolution we’re seeing, no. It’s a perfectly natural next step here, so it’s more a kind of evolutionary or developmental thing, or what in physics they call a phase change.”

His subsequent comments indicated to Nadia that he did not in fact know what a phase change was. But she did, and she found the concept intriguing. Vaporization of Terran authority, condensation of local power, the thaw finally come … however you wanted to think about it. Melting occurred when the thermal energy of particles was great enough to overcome the intracrystalline forces that held them in position. So if you considered the metanat order as the crystalline structure… But then it made a huge difference whether the forces holding it together were interionic or intermolecular; sodium chloride, interionic, melted at 801°C; methane, intermolecular, at –183°C. What kind of forces, then? And how high the temperature?

At this point the analogy itself melted. But names were powerful in the human mind, no doubt about it. Phase change, integrated pest management, selective disemployment; she preferred them all to the old deadly notion revolution, and she was glad they were all in circulation, on Marigalavid and on the streets.

But there were some five thousand heavily armed security troops in Burroughs and Sheffield, she reminded herself, who were still thinking of themselves as police facing armed rioters. And that would have to be dealt with by more than semantics.

For the most part, however, things were going better than she had hoped. It was a matter of demographics, in a way; it appeared that almost every single person who had been born on Mars was now in the streets, or occupying city offices, train stations, spaceports — all of them, to judge by the Mangalavid interviews, completely (and unrealistically, Nadia thought) intolerant of the idea that powers on another planet should control them in any way whatsoever. That was nearly half the current Martian population, right there. And a good percentage of the old-timers were on their side too, as well as some of the new emigrants. “Call them immigrants,” Art advised over the phone. “Or newcomers. Call them settlers or colonialists, depending on whether they’re with us or not. That’s something Nirgal has been doing, and I think it helps people to think about things.”

On Earth the situation was less clear. The Subarashii metanats were still struggling with the southern metanats, but in the context of the great flood they had become a bitter sideshow. It was hard to tell what Terrans in general thought of the conflict on Mars.

Whatever they thought, a fast shuttle was about to arrive, with reinforcements for security. So resistance groups from all over mobilized to converge on Burroughs. Art did what he could to help this effort from inside Burroughs, locating all the people who had independently thought of coming (it was obvious, after all), telling them their idea was good, and siccing them on people opposed to the plan. He was, Nadia thought, a subtle diplomat — big, mild, unpretentious, unassuming, sympathetic, “undiplomatic” — head lowered as he conferred with people, giving them the impression they were the ones driving the process. Indefatigable, really. And very clever. Soon he had a great number of groups coming, including the Reds and the Marsfirst guerrillas, who still appeared to be thinking of their approach as a kind of assault, or siege. Nadia felt acutely that while the Reds and Marsfirsters she knew — Ivana, Gene, Raul, Kasei — were keeping in touch with her, and agreeing to the use of her as an arbitrator, there were more radical Red and Marsfirst units out there for whom she was irrelevant, or even an obstruction1. This made her angry, because she was sure that if Ann was fully supporting her, the more radical elements would come around. She complained bitterly about this to Art, after seeing a Red communique arranging the western half of the “convergence” on Burroughs, and Art went to work and got Ann to answer a call, then gave her over in a link to Nadia.

And there she was again, like one of the furies of the French Revolution, as bleak and grim as ever. Their last exchange, over Sabishii, lay heavy between them; the issue had become moot when UNTA retook Sabishii and burned it down, but Ann was obviously still angry, which Nadia found irritating.

Brittle greetings over, their conversation degenerated almost instantly into argument. Ann clearly saw the revolt as a chance to wreck all terraforming efforts and to remove as many cities and people as possible from the planet, by direct assault if necessary. Frightened by this apocalyptic vision, Nadia argued with her bitterly, then furiously. But Ann had gone off into a world of her own. “I’d be just as happy if Burroughs did get wrecked,” she declared coldly.

Nadia gritted her teeth. “If you wreck Burroughs you wreck everything. Where are the people inside supposed to go? You’ll be no better than a murderer, a mass murderer. Simon would be ashamed.”

Ann scowled. “Power corrupts, I see. Put Sax on, will you? I’m tired of this hysteria.”

Nadia switched the call to Sax and walked away. It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power. Well, it could be that she had been too quick to anger, too harsh. But she was frightened of that dark place inside Ann, the part that might do anything; and fear corrupted more than power. Combine the two…

Hopefully she had shocked Ann severely enough to squeeze that dark place back into its corner. Bad psychology, as Michel pointed out gently, when Nadia called him in Burroughs to talk about it. A strategy resulting from fear. But she couldn’t help it, she was afraid. Revolution meant shattering one structure and creating another one, but shattering was easier than creating, and so the two parts of the act were not necessarily fated to be equally successful. In that sense, building a revolution was like building an arch; until both columns were there, and the keystone in place, practically any disruption could bring the whole thing crashing down.

So on Wednesday evening, five days after Nadia’s call from Sax, about a hundred people left for Burroughs in planes, as the pistes were judged too vulnerable to sabotage. They flew overnight to a rocky landing strip next to a large Bogdanovist refuge in the wall of Du Martheray Crater, which was on the Great Escarpment southeast of Burroughs. They landed at dawn, with the sun rising through mist like a blob of mercury, lighting distant ragged white hills to the north, on the low plain of Isidis: another new ice sea, whose progress south had been stopped only by the arcing line of the dike, curving across the land like a long low earthen dam — which was just what it was.

To get a better view Nadia went up to the top floor of the Du Martheray refuge, where an observation window, disguised as a horizontal crack just under the rim, gave a view down the Great Escarpment to the new dike and the ice pressing against it. For a long time she stared down at the sight, sipping coffee mixed with a dose of kava. To the north was the ice sea, with its clustered seracs and long pressure ridges, and the flat white sheets of giant frozen-topped melt lakes. Directly below her lay the first low hills of the Great Escarpment, dotted with spiky expanses of Acheron cacti, sprawling over the rock like coral reefs. Staircased meadows of black-green tundra moss followed the courses of small frozen streams dropping down the Escarpment; the streams in the distance looked like long algae diatoms, tucked into creases in the redrock.

And then in the middle distance, dividing desert from ice, ran the new dike, like a raw brown scar, suturing two separate realities together.

Nadia spent a long time studying it through binoculars. Its southern end was a regolith mound, running up the apron of Crater Wg and ending right at Wg’s rim, which was about half a kilometer above the datum, well above the expected sea level. The dike ran northwest from Wg, and from her prospect high on the Escarpment Nadia could see about forty kilometers of it before it disappeared over the horizon, just to the west of Crater Xh. Xh was surrounded by ice almost to its rim, so that its r6und interior was like an odd red sinkhole. Everywhere else the ice had pressed right up against the dike, for as far as Nadia could see. The desert side of the dike appeared to be some two hundred meters high, although it was difficult to judge, as there was a broad trench underneath the dike. On the other side, the ice bulked quite high, halfway up or more.

The dike was about three hundred meters wide at the top. That much displaced regolith — Nadia whistled respectfully — represented several years of work, by a very large team of robot draglines and canal-diggers. But loose regolith! It seemed to her that huge as the dike was on any human scale, it was still not much to contain an ocean of ice. And ice was the easy part — when it became liquid, the waves and currents would tear regolith away like dirt. And the ice was already melting; immense melt pods were said to lie everywhere underneath the dirty white surface, including directly against the dike, seeping into it.

“Aien’t they’re going to have to replace that whole mound with concrete?” she said to Sax, who had joined her, and was looking through his own binoculars at the sight.

“Face it,” he said. Nadia prepared herself for bad news, but he continued by saying, “Face the dike with a diamond coating. That would last fairly long. Perhaps a few million years.”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. It was probably true. There would be seepage from below, perhaps. But in any case, whatever the particulars, they would have to maintain the system in perpetuity, and with no room for error, as Burroughs was just 20 kilometers south of the dike, and some 150 meters lower than it. A strange place to end up. Nadia trained her binoculars in the direction of the city, but it lay just over her horizon, about 70 kilometers to the northwest. Of course dikes could be effective; Holland’s dikes had held for centuries, protecting millions of people and hundreds of square kilometers, right up until the recent flood — and even now those great dikes were holding, and would be broached first by flanking floods through Germany and Belgium. Certainly dikes could be effective. But it was a strange fate nevertheless.

Nadia pointed her binoculars along the ragged rock of the Great Escarpment. What looked like flowers in the distance were actually massive lumps of coral cactus. A stream looked like a staircase made of lily pads. The rough redrock slope made for a very stark, surreal, lovely landscape… Nadia was pierced by an unexpected paroxysm of fear, that something might go wrong and she might suddenly be killed, prevented from witnessing any more of this world and its evolution. It could happen, a missile might burst out of the violet sky at any moment — this refuge was target practice, if some frightened battery commander out at the Burroughs spaceport learned of its presence and decided to deal with the problem preemptively. They could be dead within minutes of such a decision.

But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always. She dismissed the thought, and went downstairs with Sax.

She wanted to go into Burroughs and see things, to be on the scene and judge for herself: walk around and observe the citizens of the town, see what they were doing and saying. Late on Thursday she said to Sax, “Let’s go in and have a look.”

But it seemed to be impossible. “Security is heavy at all the gates,” Maya told her over the wrist. “And the trains coming in are checked at the stations very closely. Same with the subway to the spaceport. The city is closed. In effect we’re hostages.”

“We can see what’s happening on-screen,” Sax pointed out. “It doesn’t matter.”

Unhappily Nadia agreed. Shikata ga nai, apparently. But she didn’t like the situation, which seemed to her to be rapidly approaching a stalemate, at least locally. And she was intensely curious about conditions in Burroughs. “Tell me what it’s like,” she asked Maya over their phone link.

“Well, they’ve got control of the infrastructure,” Maya said. “Physical plant, gates, and so on. But there aren’t enough of them to force people to stay indoors, or go to work of course, or anything else. So they don’t seem to know what to do next.”

Nadia could understand that, as she too felt at a loss. More security forces were coming into the city every hour, on trains from tent towns they had given up on. These new arrivals joined their fellow troops, and stayed near the physical plant and the city offices, getting around in heavily armed groups, unmolested. They were housed in residential quarters in Branch Mesa, Double Decker Butte, and Black Syrtis Mesa, and their leaders were meeting more or less continuously at the UNTA headquarters in Table Mountain. But the leaders were issuing no orders.

So things were in an uneasy suspension. The Biotique and Praxis offices in Hunt Mesa were still serving as an information center for all of them, disseminating news from Earth and the rest of the Mars, spreading it through the city on bulletin boards and computer postings. These media, along with Mangalavid and other private channels, meant that everyone was well informed concerning the latest developments. On the great boulevards, and in the parks, some big crowds congregated from time to time, but more often people were scattered in scores of small groups, milling around in a kind of active paralysis, something between a general strike and a hostage crisis. Everyone was waiting to see what would happen next. People seemed in good spirits, many shops and restaurants were still open, and video interviews taped in them were friendly.

Watching them while jamming down a meal, Nadia felt an aching desire to be in there, to talk to people herself. Around ten that night, realizing she was hours from sleep, she called Maya again, and asked her if she would don vidcam glasses, and go on a walk for her around the city. Maya, just as antsy as Nadia if not more so, was happy to oblige.

Soon Maya was out of the safe house, wearing vidspecs and transmitting images of what she looked at to Nadia, who sat apprehensively in a chair before a screen, in the Du Martheray refuge common room. Sax and several others ended up looking overNa-dia’s shoulders, and together they watched the bouncing image Maya got with her vidcam, and listened to her running commentary.

She walked swiftly down Great Escarpment Boulevard, toward the central valley. Once down among the cart vendors in the upper end of Canal Park, she slowed her pace, and looked around slowly to give Nadia a panning shot of the scene. People were out and about everywhere, talking in groups, enjoying a kind of festival atmosphere. Two women next to Maya struck up an animated conversation about Sheffield. A group of newcomers came right up to Maya and asked her what was going to happen next, apparently confident that she would know, “Simply because I am so old!” Maya noted with disgust when they had left. It almost made Nadia smile. But then some young people recognized Maya as herself, and came over to greet her happily. Nadia watched this encounter from Maya’s point of view, noting how starstruck the people seemed. So this is what the world looked like to Maya! No wonder she thought she was so special, with people looking at her like that, as if she were a dangerous goddess, just stepped out of a myth…

It was disturbing in more senses than one. It seemed to Nadia that her old companion was in danger of being arrested by security, and she said as much over the wrist. But the view on-screen waggled from side to side as Maya shook her head. “See how there aren’t any cops in sight?” Maya said. “Security is all concentrated around the gates and the train stations, and I stay away from them. Besides, why should they bother to arrest me? In effect they have this whole city arrested.”

She tracked an armored vehicle as it drove down the grassy boulevard and passed without slowing down, as if to illustrate her point. “That’s so everyone can see the guns,” Maya said darkly.

She walked down to Canal Park, then turned around and went up the path toward Table Mountain. It was cold in the city that night; lights reflecting off the canal showed that the water in it was icing over. But if security had hoped to discourage crowds, it hadn’t worked; the park was crowded, and becoming more crowded all the time. People were clumped around gazebos, or cafes, or big orange heating coils; and everywhere Maya looked more people were coming down into the park. Some listened to musicians, or people speaking with the help of little shoulder amplifiers; others watched the news on their wrists, or on lectern screens. “Rally at midnight!” someone cried. “Rally in the timeslip!”

“I haven’t heard anything about this,” Maya said apprehensively. “This must be Jackie’s doing.”

She looked around so fast that the view on Nadia’s screen was dizzying. People everywhere. Sax went to another screen and called the safe house in Hunt Mesa. Art answered there, but other than him, the safe house was nearly empty. Jackie had indeed called for a mass demonstration in the timeslip, and word had gone out over all the city media. Nirgal was out there with her.

Nadia told Maya about this, and Maya cursed viciously. “It’s much too volatile for this kind of thing! Goddamn her.”

But there was nothing they could do about it now. Thousands of people were pouring down the boulevards into Canal Park and Princess Park, and when Maya looked around, tiny figures could be seen on the rims of the mesas, and crowding the walktube bridges that spanned Canal Park. “The speakers are going to be up in Princess Park,” Art said from Sax’s screen.

Nadia said to Maya: “You should get up there, Maya, and fast. You might be able to help keep the situation under control.”

Maya took off, and as she made her way through the crowd, Nadia kept talking to her, giving her suggestions for what she should say if she got a chance to speak. The words tumbled out of her, and when she paused for thought, Art passed along ideas of his own, until Maya said, “But wait, wait, is any of this true?”

“Don’t worry if it’s true,” Nadia said.

“Don’t worry if it’s true!” Maya shouted into her wristpad. “Don’t worry if what I say to a hundred thousand people, what I say to everyone on two worlds, is true or not?”

“We’ll make it true,” Nadia said. “Just give it a try.”

Maya began to run. Others were walking in the same direction as she was, up through Canal Park, toward the high ground between Ellis Butte and Table Mountain, and her camera gave them bobbing images of the backs of heads and the occasional excited face, turned to look at her as she shouted for clearance. Great roars and cheers were rippling through the crowd ahead, which became denser and denser, until Maya had to slow down, and then to shove and twist through gaps between groups. Most of these people were young, and much taller than Maya, and Nadia went to Sax’s screen to watch the Managalavid cameras’ images, which were cutting back and forth between a camera on the speakers’ platform, set on the rim of an old pingo over Princess Park, and a camera up in one of the walktube bridges. Both angles showed that the crowd was getting immense — maybe eighty thousand people, Sax guessed, his nose a centimeter from the screen, as if he were counting them individually. Art managed to link up to Maya along with Nadia, and he and Nadia continued to talk to her as she fought her way forward through the crowd.

Antar had finished a short incendiary speech in Arabic while Maya was making her final push through the crowd, and Jackie was now up on the speakers’ platform before a bank of microphones, making a speech that was amplified through big speakers on the pingo, and then reamplified by radio to auxiliary speakers placed all over Princess Park, and also to shoulder speakers, and lecterns, and wristpads, until her voice was everywhere — and yet, as every phrase echoed a bit off Table Mountain and Ellis Butte, and was welcomed by cheers, she could still only be heard part of the time. “… Will not allow Mars to be used as a replacement world … an executive ruling class who are primarily responsible for the destruction of Terra … rats trying to leave a sinking ship … make the same mess of things on Mars if we let them! … not going to happen! Because this is now a free Mars! Free Mars! Free Mars!”

And she punched a finger at the sky and the crowd roared the words out, louder and louder with each repetition, falling quickly into a rhythm that allowed them to shout together — “Free Mars! Free Mars! Free Mars! Free Mars!”

While the huge and still growing crowd was chanting this, Nir-gal made his way up the pingo and onto the platform, and when people saw him, many of them began shouting “Nir-gal ,” either in time with “Free Mars” or in the pauses between, so that it became “Free Mars (Nir-gal) Free Mars (Nir-gal),” in an enormous choral counterpoint.

When he reached the microphone, Nirgal waved a hand for quiet. The chanting, however, did not stop, but changed over entirely to “Nir-gal, Nir-gal, Nir-gal, Nir-gal, ” with an enthusiasm that was palpable, vibrating in the sound of that great collective voice, as if every single person out there was one of his friends, and enormously pleased at his appearance — and, Nadia thought, he had been traveling for so much of his life that this might not be all that far from the truth.

The chanting slowly diminished, until the crowd noise was a general buzz, quite loud, above which Nirgal’s amplified greeting could be heard pretty well. As he spoke, Maya continued to make her way through the crowd toward the pingo, and as people stilled, it became easier for her. Then when Nirgal began to speak, she stopped as well and just watched him, sometimes remembering to move forward during the cheers and applause that ended many sentences.

His speaking style was low-key, calm, friendly, slow. It was easier to hear him. “For those of us born on Mars,” he said, “this is our home.”

He had to pause for most of a minute as the crowd cheered. They were mostly natives, Nadia saw again; Maya was shorter than almost everyone out there.

“Our bodies are made of atoms that until recently were part of the regolith,” Nirgal went on. “We are Martian through and through. We are living pieces of Mars. We are human beings who have made a permanent, biological commitment to this planet. It is our home. And we can never go back.” More cheers at this very well-known slogan.

“Now, as for those of us who were born on Earth — well, there are all different kinds, aren’t there. When people move to a new place, some intend to stay and make it their new home, and we call those settlers. Others come to work for a while and then go back where they came from, and those we call visitors, or colonialists.

“Now natives and settlers are natural allies. After all, natives are no more than the children of earlier settlers. This is home to all of us together. As for visitors — there is room on Mars for them too. When we say that Mars is free, we are not saying Terrans can no longer come here. Not at all! We are all children of Earth, one way or another. It is our mother world, and we are happy to help it in every way we can.”

The noise diminished, the crowd seeming somewhat surprised by this assertion.

“But the obvious fact,” Nirgal went on, “is that what happens here on Mars should not be decided by colonialists, or by anyone back on Earth.” Cheers began, drowning out some of what he said. “ — A simple statement of our desire for self-determination … our natural right… the driving force of human history. We are not a colony, and we won’t be treated as one. There is no such thing as a colony anymore. We are a free Mars.”

More cheers, louder than ever, flowing into more chanting of “Free Mars! Free Mars!”

Nirgal interrupted the chanting. “What we intend to do now, as free Martians, is to welcome every Terran who wants to come to us. Whether to live here for a time and then go back, or else to settle here permanently. And we intend also to do everything we can to help Earth in its current environmental crisis. We have some expertise with flooding” (cheers) “and we can help. But this help, from now on, will no longer come mediated by metanationals, exacting their profits from the exchange. It will come as a free gift. It will benefit the people of Earth more than anything that could be extracted from us as a colony. This is true in the strict literal sense of the amount of resources and work that will be transferred from Mars to Earth. And so we hope and trust that everyone on both worlds will welcome the emergence of a free Mars.”

And he stepped back and waved a hand, and the cheering and chanting erupted again. Nirgal stood on the platform, smiling and waving, looking pleased, but somewhat at a loss concerning what to do next.

All through his speech Maya had continued to inch forward during the cheering, and now Nadia could see by her vidcam image that she was at the platform’s edge, standing in the first row of people. Her arms blocked the image again and again, and Nirgal caught sight of the waving, and looked at her.

When he saw who she was, he smiled and came right over, and helped boost her onto the platform. He led her over to the microphones, and Nadia caught a final image of a surprised and displeased Jackie Bopne before Maya whipped off her vidcam spectacles. The image on Nadia’s screen swung wildly, and ended up showing the planks of the platform. Nadia cursed and hurried over to Sax’s screen, her heart in her throat.

Sax still had the Mangalavid image, now taken from the camera on the walktube arching from Ellis Butte to Table Mountain. From this angle they could see the sea of people surrounding the pingo, and filling the city’s central valley far down into Canal Park; it had to be most of the people in Burroughs, surely. On the makeshift stage Jackie appeared to be shouting into Nirgal’s ear. Nirgal did not respond to her, and in the middle of her exhortation he went up to the mikes. Maya looked small and old next to Jackie, but she was drawn up like an eagle, and when Nirgal said into the mikes, “We have Maya Toitovna,” the cheers were huge.

Maya made chopping motions as she walked forward, and said into the mikes, “Quiet! Quiet! Thank you! Thank you. Be quiet! We have some serious announcements to make here as well.”

“Jesus, Maya,” Nadia said, clutching the back of Sax’s chair.

“Mars is now independent, yes. Quiet! But as Nirgal just said, this does not mean we exist in isolation from Earth. This is impossible. We are claiming sovereignty according to international law, and we appeal to the World Court to confirm this legal status immediately. We have signed preliminary treaties affirming this independence, and establishing diplomatic relations, with Switzerland, India, and China. We have also initiated a nonexclusive economic partnership with the organization Praxis. This, like all arrangements we will make, will be not-for-profit, and designed to maximally benefit both worlds. All these treaties taken together begin the creation of our formal, legal, semiautonomous relationship with the various legal bodies of Earth. We fully expect immediate confirmation and ratification of all these agreements, by the World Court, the United Nations, and all other relevant bodies.”

Cheers followed this announcement, and though they were not as loud as they had been for Nirgal, Maya allowed them to go on. When they had died down a bit, she continued.

“As for the situation here on Mars, our intentions are to meet here in Burroughs immediately, and use the Dorsa Brevia Declaration as the starting point for the establishment of a free Martian government.”

Cheers again, much more enthusiastic. “Yes yes,” Maya said impatiently, trying to cut them off again. “Quiet! Listen! Before any of that, we must address the problem of opposition. As you know, we are meeting here in front of the headquarters of the United Nations Transitional Authority security forces, who are this very moment listening along with the rest of us, there inside Table Mountain.” She pointed. “Unless they have come out to join us.” Cheers, shouting, chanting. “… I want to say to them now that we mean them no harm. It is the Transitional Authority’s job, now, to see that the transition has taken on a new form. And to Order its security forces to stop trying to control us. You cannot control us!” Mad cheers. “… mean you no harm. And we assure you that you have free access to the spaceport, where there are planes that can take all of you to Sheffield, and from there up to Clarke, if you do not care to join us in this new endeavor. This is not a siege or a blockade. This is, simply enough—”

And she stopped, and put out both hands: and the crowd told her.

Over the sound of the chanting Nadia tried to get through to Maya, still up on the stage, but it was obviously impossible for her to hear. Finally, however, Maya looked down at her wristpad. The image trembled; her arm was shaking.

“That was great, Maya! I am so proud of you!”

“Yes, well, anyone can make up stories!”

Art said loudly, “See if you can get them to disperse!”

“Right,” Maya said.

“Talk to Nirgal,” Nadia said. “Get him and Jackie to do it. Tell them to make sure there isn’t any rush on Table Mountain, or anything like. Let them do it.”

“Ha,” Maya exclaimed. “Yes. We will let Jackie do it, won’t we.”

After that her wristpad’s little camera image swung everywhere, and the noise was too great for the linked observers to make anything out. The Mangalavid cameras showed a big clump of people onstage conferring.

Nadia went over and sat down on a chair, feeling as drained as if she had had to make the speech herself. “She was great,” she said. “She remembered everything we told her. Now we just have to make it real.”

“Just saying it makes it real,” Art said. “Hell, everyone on both worlds saw that. Praxis will be on it already. And Switzerland will surely back us. No, we’ll make it work.”

Sax said, “Transitional Authority might not agree. Here’s a message in from Zeyk. Red commandos have come down from Syrtis. They’ve taken over the western end of the dike. They’re moving east along it. They’re not that far from the spaceport.”

“That’s just what we want to avoid!” Nadia cried. “What do they think they’re doing!”

Sax shrugged.

“Security isn’t going to like that at all,” Art said.

“We should talk to them directly,” Nadia said, thinking it over. “I used to talk to Hastings when he was Mission Control. I don’t remember much about him, but I don’t think he was any kind of screaming crazy person.”

“Couldn’t hurt to find out what he’s thinking,” Art said.

So she went to a quiet room, and got on a screen, and made a call to UNTA headquarters in Table Mountain, and identified herself. Though it was now about two in the morning, she got through to Hastings in about five minutes.

She recognized him immediately, though she would have said she had long since forgotten his face. A short thin-faced harried technocrat, with a bit of a temper. When he saw her on his screen he grimaced. “You people again. We sent the wrong hundred, I’ve always said that.”

“No doubt.”

Nadia studied his face, trying to imagine what kind of man could have headed Mission Control in one century and the Transitional Authority in the next. He had been irritated with them frequently when they were on the Ares, haranguing them for every little deviation from the regulations, and getting truly furious when they temporarily stopped sending back video, late in the trip. A rules and regs bureaucrat, the kind of man Arkady had despised. But a man you could reason with.

Or so it seemed to her at first. She argued with him for ten or fifteen minutes, telling him that the demonstration he had just witnessed outside in the park was part of what had happened everywhere on Mars — that the whole planet had turned against them — that they were free to go to the spaceport and leave.

“We’re not going to leave,” Hastings said.

His UNTA forces controlled the physical plant, he told her, and therefore the city was his. The Reds might take over the dike, but there was no chance they would broach it, because there were two hundred thousand people in the city, who were in effect hostages. Expert reinforcements were due to arrive with the next continuous shuttle, which was going to make its orbital insertion in the next twenty-four hours. So the speeches meant nothing. Posturing only.

He was calm as he told Nadia this — if he hadn’t been so disgusted, Nadia might even have called him complacent. It seemed more than likely that he had orders from home, telling him to sit tight in Burroughs and wait for the reinforcements. No doubt the UNTA division in Sheffield had been told the same. And with Burroughs and Sheffield still in their hands, and reinforcements due any minute, it was not surprising they thought they had the upper hand. One might even say they were justified. “When people come to their senses,” Hasting said to her sternly, “we’ll be in control here again. The only thing that really matters now is the Antarctic flood, anyway. It’s crucial to support the Earth in its time of need.”

Nadia gave up. Hastings was clearly a stubborn man, and besides, he had a point. Several points. So she ended the conference as politely as she could, asking to get back to him later, in what she hoped was Art’s diplomatic style. Then she went back out to the others.

As the night went on, they continued to monitor reports coming in from Burroughs and elsewhere. Too much was happening to allow Nadia to feel comfortable going to bed, and apparently Sax and Steve and Marian and the other Bogdanovists in Du Martheray felt similarly. So they sat slumped in their chairs, sandy-eyed and aching as the hours passed and the images on the screen flickered. Clearly some of the Reds were detaching from the main resistance coalition, following some sort of agenda of their own, escalating their campaign of sabotage and direct assault all over the planet, taking small stations by force and then, as often as not, putting the occupants in cars, and blowing the stations up. Another “Red army” also successfully stormed the physical plant in Cairo, killing many of the security guards inside, and getting the rest to surrender.

This victory had encouraged them, but elsewhere the results were not so good; it appeared from some scattered survivors’ calls that a Red attack on the occupied physical plant in Lasswitz had destroyed it, and massively broached the tent, so that those who had not managed to get into secure buildings, or out into cars, had died. “What are they doing?” Nadia cried. But no one answered her. These groups were not returning her calls. And neither was Ann.

“I wish they would at least discuss their plans with the rest of us,” Nadia said fearfully. “We can’t let things spiral out of control, it’s too dangerous …”

Sax was pursing his lips, looking uneasy. They went to the commons to get some breakfast, and then some rest. Nadia had to force herself to eat. It was exactly a week since Sax’s first call, and she couldn’t recall anything she had eaten in that week. Indeed, on reflection she found she was ravenous. She began to shovel down scrambled eggs.

When they were almost done eating Sax leaned over and said, “You mentioned discussing plans.”

“What,” Nadia said, her fork stalled halfway to her face.

“Well, this incoming shuttle, with the security task force on board?”

“What about it?” After the flight over Kasei Vallis, she did not trust Sax to be rational; the fork in her hand began to tremble visibly.

He said, “Well, I have a plan. My group in Da Vinci thought of it, actually.”

Nadia tried to steady the fork. “Tell me.”

* * *

The rest of that day was a blur to Nadia, as she abandoned any attempt to rest, and tried to reach Red groups, and worked with Art drafting messages to Earth, and told Maya and Nirgal and the rest in Burroughs about Sax’s latest. It seemed that the pace of events, already accelerated, had caught gears with something spinning madly, and had now accelerated out of anyone’s control, leaving no time to eat or sleep or go to the bathroom. But all those things had to be done, and so she staggered down to the women’s room and took a long shower, then ate a spartan lunch of bread and cheese, and then stretched out on a couch and caught some sleep; but it was the kind of restless shallow sleep in which her mind continued to tick over, thinking fuzzy distorted thoughts about the events of the day, incorporating the voices there in the room with her. Nirgal and Jackie were not getting along; was this a problem for the rest of them?

Then she was up again, as exhausted as before. The people in the room were still talking about Jackie and Nirgal. Nadia went off to the bathroom, and then hunted for coffee.

Zeyk and Nazik and a large Arab contingent had arrived at Du Martheray while she was sleeping, and now Zeyk stuck his head into the kitchen: “Sax says the shuttle is about to arrive.”

Du Martheray was only six degrees north of the equator, and so they were well situated to see this particular aerobrakmg, which was going to happen just after sunset. The weather cooperated, and the sky was cloudless and very clear. The sun dropped, the eastern sky darkened, and the arch of colors above Syrtis to the west was a spectrum array, shading through yellow, orange, a narrow pale streak of green, teal blue, and indigo. Then the sun disappeared over the black hills, and the sky colors deepened and turned transparent, as if the dome of the sky had suddenly grown a hundred times larger.

And in the midst of this color, between the two evening stars, a third white star burst into being and shot up the sky, leaving a short straight contrail. This was the usual dramatic appearance that aerobraking continuous shuttles made as they burned into the upper atmosphere, almost as visible by day as by night. It on\y took about a minute for them to cross the sky from one horizon to the other, slow brilliant shooting stars.

But this time, when it was still high in the west, it got fainter and fainter, until it was no more than a faint star. And was gone.

Du Martheray’s observation room was crowded, and many exclaimed at this unprecedented sight, even though they had been warned. When it was completely gone Zeyk asked Sax to explain it for those of them who had not heard the full story. The orbital insertion window for aerobraking shuttles was narrow, Sax told them, just as it had been for the Arcs back in the beginning. There was very little room for error. So Sax’s technical group in Da Vinci Crater had equipped a rocket with a payload of metal bits — like a keg of scrap iron, he said — and they had shot it off a few hours before. The payload had exploded in the approaching shuttle’s MOI path just a few minutes before its arrival, casting the metal fragments in a band that was wide horizontally but harrow vertically. Orbital insertions were completely computer-controlled, of course, and so when the shuttle’s radar had identified the patch of debris, the AI navigating the shuttle had had very few options. Diving below the debris would have put the shuttle through thicker atmosphere, very likely burning it up; going through the debris would risk holing the heat shield, likewise burning it up. Shikata go. nai, then; given the risk levels programmed into it, the AI had had to abort the aerobraking run by flying above the debris, thus skipping back out of the atmosphere. Which meant the shuttle was still moving outward in the solar system at very near its top speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour.

“Do they have any way to slow down except aerobraking?” Zeyk asked Sax.

“Not really. That’s why they aerobrake.”

“So the shuttle is doomed?”

“Not necessarily. They can use another planet as a gravity handle to swing around, and come back here, or go back to Earth.”

“So they’re on their way to Jupiter?”

“Well, Jupiter is on the other side of the solar system right now.”

Zeyk was grinning. “They’re on their way to Saturn?”

“They may be able to pass very close to several asteroids sequentially,” Sax was saying, “and redirect their crash — their course.”

Zeyk laughed, and though Sax went on about course correction strategies, too many other people were talking for anyone to be able to hear him.

So they no longer had to worry about security reinforcements from Earth, at least not immediately. But Nadia thought that this fact might make the UNTA police in Burroughs feel trapped, and thus more dangerous to them. And at the same time, the Reds were continuing to move north of the city, which no doubt added to security’s trapped feeling. On the same night as the shuttle’s flyby, groups of Reds in armored cars completed their takeover of the dike. That meant they were fairly close to the Burroughs spaceport, which was located just ten kilometers northwest of the city.

Maya appeared on-screen, looking no different than she had before her great speech. “If the Reds take the spaceport,” she said to Nadia, “security will be trapped in Burroughs.”

“I know. That’s just what we don’t want. Especially now.”

“I know. Can’t you keep those people under control?”

“They’re not consulting me anymore.”

“I thought you were the great leader here.”

“I thought it was you,” Nadia snapped back.

Maya laughed, harsh and humorless.

Another report came in from Praxis, a package of Terran news programs that had been relayed off Vesta. Most of it was the latest information on the flood, and the disasters in Indonesia and in many other coastal areas, but there was some political news as well, including some instances of nationalization of metanat holdings by the militaries of some client countries in the Southern Club, which the Praxis analysts thought might indicate the beginnings of a revolt by governments against metanats. As for the mass demonstration in Burroughs, it had made the news in many countries, and was certainly a topic in government offices and boardrooms around the world. Switzerland had confirmed that it was establishing diplomatic relations with a Martian government “to be designated later,” as Art said with a grin. Praxis had done the same. The World Court had announced that it would consider the suit brought by the Dorsa Brevia Peaceful Neutral Coalition against UNTA — a suit dubbed “Mars vs. Terra” by the Terran media — as soon as possible. And the continuous shuttle had reported its missed insertion; apparently it planned to turn around in the asteroids. But Nadia found it extremely encouraging that none of these events were being treated as first-headline news on Earth, where the chaos caused by the flooding was still paramount in everyone’s attention. There were millions of refugees everywhere, and many of them in immediate need…

But this was why they had launched the revolt when they had. On Mars, the independence movements had most of the cities under their control. Sheffield was still a metanational stronghold, but Peter Clayborne was up there, in command of all the insurgents on Pavonis, coordinating their activities in a way that they had not been able to match around Burroughs. Partly this was because many of the most radical elements of the resistance had avoided Tharsis, and partly because the situation in Sheffield was extremely difficult, with little room for maneuvering. The insurgents now controlled Arsia and Ascraeus, and the little scientific station in Crater Zp on Olympus Mons; and they even had control of most of Sheffield town. But the elevator socket, and the whole quarter of the city surrounding it, were firmly in the hands of the security police, and they were heavily armed. So Peter had his hands full on Tharsis, and would not be able to help them around Burroughs. Nadia talked to him briefly, describing the situation in Burroughs and begging him to call Ann and ask her to get the Reds to show some restraint. He promised to do what he could, but did not seem confident that he had his mother’s ear.

After that Nadia tried another call to Ann, but did not get through. Then she tried to reach Hastings, and he took her call, but it was not a productive exchange. Hastings was no longer anything like the complacent disgusted figure she had talked to the night before. “This occupation of the dike!” he exclaimed angrily. “What are they trying to prove? Do you think I believe that they’ll cut the dike when there’s two hundred thousand people in this city, most of them on your side? It’s absurd! But you listen to me, there are people in this organization who don’t like the danger it puts the population in! I tell you, I can’t be responsible for what’ happens if those people don’t get the hell off that dike — off Isidis Planitia entirely! You get them off there!”

And he cut the connection before Nadia could even reply, distracted by someone off-screen who had come in during the middle of his tirade. A frightened man, Nadia thought, feeling the iron walnut tugging inward again. A man who no longer felt in control of the situation. An accurate assessment, no doubt. But she had not liked that last look on his face. She even tried to call back, but . no one in Table Mountain would answer anymore.

A couple of hours later Sax woke her up in her chair, and she found out what Hastings had been so worried about. “The UNTA unit that burned Sabishii went out in armored cars and tried to — to take the dike away from the Reds,” Sax told her, looking grave.

“Apparently there’s been a fight over the section of the dike nearest the city. And we’ve just heard from some Red units up there that the dike has been broached.”

“What?”

“Blown up. They had drilled holes and set charges to use as a — as a threat. And in the fighting they ended up setting them off. That’s what they said.”

“Oh my God.” Her drowsiness was gone in a flash, blown away in her own internal explosion, a great blast of adrenaline racing all through her. “Have you got any confirmation?”

“We can see a dustcloud blocking the stars. A big one.”

“Oh my God.” She went to the nearest screen, her heart thudding in her chest. It was three A.M. “Is there a chance ice will choke the gap, and serve as a dam?”

Sax squinted. “I don’t think so. Depends on how big the gap is.”

“Can we set counterexplosions and close the gap?”

“I don’t think so. Look, here’s video sent from some Reds south of the break on the dike.” He pointed at a screen, which displayed an IR image with black to the left and blackish green to the right, and a forest-green spill across the middle. “That’s the blast zone there in the middle, wanner than the regolith. The explosion appears to have been set next to a pod of liquid water. Or else there was an explosion set to liquefy the ice behind the break. Anyway, that’s a lot of water coming through. And that will widen the break. No, we’ve got a problem.”

“Sax,” she exclaimed, and held on to his shoulder as she stared at the screen. “The people in Burroughs, what are they supposed to do? God damn it, what could Ann be thinking!”

“It might not have been Ann.”

“Ann or any of the Reds!”

“They were attacked. It could have been an accident. Or someone on the dike must have thought they were going to get forced away from the explosives. In which case it was a use-it-or-lose-it situation.” He shook his head. “Those are always bad.”

“Damn them.” Nadia shook her head hard, trying to clear it. “We have to do something!” She thought frantically. “Are the mesa tops high enough to stay above the flood?”

“For a while. But Burroughs is at about the lowest point in that little depression. That’s why it was sited there. Because the sides of the bowl gave it long horizons. No. The mesa tops will get covered too. I can’t be sure how long it will take, because I’m not sure of the flow rate. But let’s see, the volume to be filled is about …” He tapped away madly, but his eyes were blank, and suddenly Nadia saw that there was another part of his mind doing the calculation faster than the AI, a gestalt envisioning of the situation, staring at infinity, shaking his head back and forth like a blind man. “It could be pretty fast,” he whispered before he was done typing. “If the melt pod is big enough.”

“We have to assume it is.”

He nodded.

They sat there beside each other, staring at Sax’s AI.

Sax said hesitantly, “When I was working in Da Vinci, I tried to think out the possible scenarios. The shapes of things to come. You know? And I worried that something like this might happen. Broken cities. Tents, I thought it would be. Or fires.”

“Yes?” Nadia said, looking at him.

“I thought of an experiment — a plan.”

“Tell me,” Nadia said evenly.

But Sax was reading what looked like a weather update, which had just appeared over the figures scrolling on his screen. Nadia patiently waited him out, and when he looked up from his AI again, she said, “Well?”

“There’s a high-pressure cell, coming down Syrtis from Xanthe. It should be here today. Tomorrow. On Isidis Planitia the air pressure will be about three hundred and forty millibars, with roughly forty-five percent nitrogen, forty percent oxygen, and fifteen percent carbon diox—”

“Sax, I don’t care about the weather!”

“It’s breathable,” he said. He eyed her with that reptile expression of his, like a lizard or a dragon, or some cold posthuman creature, fit to inhabit the vacuum. “Almost breathable. If you filter the CO₂. And we can do that. We manufactured face-masks in Da Vinci. They’re made from a zirconium alloy lattice. It’s simple. CO₂ molecules are bigger than oxygen or nitrogen molecules, so we made a molecular sieve filter. It’s an active filter too, in that there’s a piezoelectric layer, and the charge generated when the material bends during inhalation and exhalation — powers an active transfer of oxygen through the filter.”

“What about dust?” Nadia said.

“It’s a set of filters, graded by size. First it stops dust, then fines, then CO₂.” He looked up at Nadia. “I just thought people might need to get out of a city. So we made half a million of them. Strap the masks on. The edges are sticky polymer, they stick to skin. Then breathe the open air. Very simple.”

“So we evacuate Burroughs.”

“I don’t see any alternative. We can’t get that many people out by train or air fast enough. But we can walk.”

“But walk to where?”

“To Libya Station.”

“Sax, it’s about seventy k from Burroughs to Libya Station, isn’t it?”

“Seventy-three kilometers.”

“That’s a hell of a long way to walk!”

“I think most people could manage it if they had to,” he said. “And those who can’t could be picked up by rovers or dirigibles. Then as people get to Libya Station, they can leave by train. Or dirigible. And the station will hold maybe twenty thousand at a time. If you jam them in.”

Nadia thought about it, looking down at Sax’s expressionless face. “Where are these masks?”

“They’re back at Da Vinci. But they’re already stowed in fast planes, and we could get them here in a couple hours.”

“Are you sure they work?”

Sax nodded. “We tried them. And I brought a few along. I can show you.” He got up and went to his old black bag, opened it, pulled out a stack of white facemasks. He gave Nadia one. It was a mouth-and-nose mask, and looked very much like a conventional dust mask used in construction, only thicker, and with a rim that was sticky to the touch.

Nadia inspected it, put it over her head, tightened the thin strap. She could breathe through it as easily as through a dust mask. No sensation of obstruction at all. The seal seemed good.

“I want to try it outside,” she said.

First Sax sent word to Da Vinci to fly the masks over, and then they went down to the refuge lock. Word of the plan and the trial had gotten around, and all the masks Sax had brought were quickly spoken for. Going out along with Nadia and Sax were about ten other people, including Zeyk, and Nazik, and Spencer Jackson, who had arrived at Du Martheray about an hour before.

They all wore the current styles of surface walker, which were jumpsuits made of layered insulated fabrics, including heating filaments, but without any of the old constrictive material that had been needed in the early low-pressure years. “Try leaving your walker heaters off,” Nadia told the others. “That way we can see what the cold feels like if you’re wearing city clothes.”

They put the masks over their faces, and went into the garage lock. The air in it got very cold very fast. And then the outer door opened.

They walked out onto the surface.

It was cold. The shock of it hit Nadia in the forehead, and the eyes. It was hard not to gasp a little. Going from 500 millibars to 340 would no doubt account-for that. Her eyes were running, her nose as well. She breathed out, breathed in. Her lungs ached with the cold. Her eyes were right out in the wind — that was the sensation that most struck her, the exposure of her eyes. She shivered as the cold penetrated her walker’s fabrics, and the inside of her chest. The chill had a Siberian edge to it, she thought. 260°K, — 13° Centigrade — not that bad, really. She just wasn’t used to it. Her hands and feet had gotten chilled many a time on Mars, but it had been years and years — over a century in fact! — since her head and lungs had felt the cold like this.

The others were talking loudly to each other, their voices sounding funny in the open air. No helmet intercoms! Her walker’s neckring, where the helmet ought to have rested, was extremely cold on her collarbones and the back of her neck. The ancient broken black rock of the Great Escarpment was covered with a thin night frost. She had peripheral vision such as she never had in a helmet — wind — tears running down her cheeks from the cold. She felt no particular emotion. She was surprised by how things looked unobstructed by a faceplate or any other window; they had a sharp-edged hallucinatory clarity, even in starlight. The sky in the east was a rich predawn Prussian blue, with high cirrus clouds already catching the light, like pink mares’ tails. The ragged corrugations of the Great Escarpment were gray-on-black in the starlight, lined with black shadows. The wind in her eyes!

People were talking without intercoms, their voices thin and disembodied, their mouths hidden by the masks. There was no mechanical hum, buzz, hiss, or whoosh; after over a century of such noise, the windy silence of the outdoors was strange, a kind of aural hollowness. Nazik looked like she was wearing a Bedouin veil.

“It’s cold,” she said to Nadia. “My ears are burning. I can feel the wind on my eyes. On my face.”

“How long will the niters last?” Nadia said to Sax, speaking loudly to be sure she was heard.

“A hundred hours.”

“Too bad people have to breath out through them.” That would add a lot more CO₂ to the filter.

“Yes. But I couldn’t see a simple way around it.”

They were standing on the surface of Mars, bareheaded. Breathing the air with the aid of nothing more than a filter mask. The air was thin, Nadia judged, but she did not feel lightheaded. The high percentage of oxygen was making up for the low atmospheric pressure. It was the partial pressure of oxygen that counted, and so with the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere so high…

Zeyk said, “Is this is the first time anyone’s done this?”

“No,” Sax said. “We did it a lot in Da Vinci.”

“It feels good! It’s not as cold as I thought it would be!”

“And if you walk hard,” Sax said, “you’ll warm up.”

They walked around a bit, careful of their footing in the dark. It was quite cold, no matter what Zeyk said. “We should go back in,” Nadia said.

“You should stay out and see the dawn,” Sax said. “It’s nice without helmets.”

Nadia, surprised to hear such a sentiment coming from him, said, “We can see other dawns. Right now we have a lot to talk about. Besides, it’s cold.”

“It feels good,” Sax said. “Look, there’s Kerguelen cabbage. And sandwort.” He kneeled, brushed a hairy leaf aside to show them a hidden white flower, barely visible in, the predawn light.

Nadia stared at him.

“Come on in,” she said.

So they went back.

They took their masks off inside the lock, and then they were back in the refuge’s changing room, rubbing their eyes and blowing into their gloved hands. “It wasn’t so cold!” “The air tasted sweet!”

Nadia pulled off her gloves and felt her nose. The flesh was chilled, but it was not the white cold of incipient frostbite. She looked at Sax, whose eyes were gleaming with a wild expression, very unlike him — a strange and somehow moving sight. They all looked excited for that matter, stuffed to the edge of laughter with a peculiar exhilaration, edged by the dangerous” situation down the slope in Burroughs. “I’ve been trying to get the oxygen levels up for years,” Sax was saying to Nazik and Spencer and Steve.

Spencer said, “I thought that was to get your fire in Kasei Vallis to burn hard.”

“Oh no. As far as fire goes, once you’ve got a certain amount of oxygen, it’s more a matter of aridity and what materials there are to burn. No, this was to get the partial pressure of oxygen up, so that people and animals could breathe it. If only the carbon dioxide were reduced.”

“So have you made animal masks?”

They laughed and went up to the refuge commons, and Zeyk set about making coffee while they talked over the walk, and touched each other on the cheek to compare coldnesses.

“What about getting people out of the city?” Nadia said to Sax suddenly. “What if security keeps the gates closed?”

“Cut the tent,” he said. “We should anyway, to get people out faster. But I don’t think they’ll keep the gates closed.”

“They’re going out to the spaceport,” someone shouted from the comm room. “The security forces are taking the subway out to the spaceport. They’re abandoning ship, the bastards. And Michel says the train station — South Station has been wrecked!”

This caused a clamor. Through it Nadia said to Sax, “Let’s tell Hunt Mesa the plan, and get down there and meet the masks.”

Sax nodded.

Between Mangalavid and the wristpads they were able to make a very rapid dispersal of the plan to the population of Burroughs, while driving down in a big caravan from Du Martheray to a low line of hillocks just southwest of the city. Soon after their arrival, the two planes bringing the CO₂ masks from Da Vinci swooped down over Syrtis, and landed on a swept area of the plains just outside the western apron, of the tent wall. On the other side of the city observers on top of Double Decker Butte had already reported sighting the flood, coming in from a bit north of east: dark brown ice-flecked water, pouring down the low crease that inside the city wall was occupied by Canal Park. And the news about South Station had proved true; the piste equipment had been wrecked, by an explosion in the linear induction generator. No one knew for sure who had done it, but it was done, the trains immobilized.

So as Zeyk’s Arabs drove the boxes of masks to West, Southwest, and South gates, there were huge crowds already congregating inside each of them, everyone dressed either in walkers with heating filaments, or in the heaviest clothes they had — none too heavy for the job at hand, Nadia judged as she went in Southwest Gate, and passed out facemasks from boxes. These days many people in Burroughs went out on the surface so seldom that they rented walkers to do so. But there were not enough walkers to dress everyone, and they had to go with people’s interior coats, which were fairly lightweight, and usually deficient in headgear. The message about the evacuation had been sent out with a warning to dress for 255°K, however, and so most people were layered in several garments, appearing thick-limbed and thick-torsoed.

Each gate lock could pass five hundred people every five minutes — they were big locks — but with thousands of people waiting inside, and the crowds growing as Saturday morning wore on, it was not anywhere near fast enough. The masks had been distributed through the crowds, and it seemed certain to Nadia that at this point everyone had one. It was unlikely that anyone in the city was unaware of the emergency. And so she went around to Zeyk, and Sax, and Maya and Michel, and all the other people she knew that she saw, saying, “We should cut the tent wall and just walk out. I’m going to cut the tent wall now.” And no one disagreed.

Finally Nirgal showed up, gliding through the crowd like Mercury on an urgent errand, smiling hugely and greeting acquaintance after acquaintance, people who wanted to hug him or shake his hand or just touch him. “I’m going to cut the tent wall now,” Nadia told him. “Everyone has masks, and we need to get out of here faster than the gates will let us.”

“Good idea,” he said. “Let mejust announce what’s happening.”

And he jumped three meters into the ajr, grabbing a coping on the gate’s concrete arch and hauling himself up so that he was balanced on it, both feet on the same three-centimeter strip. He turned on a small shoulder loudspeaker he was wearing, and said, “Attention, please! — We’re going to start cutting the tent wall, right above the coping — there should be a breeze outward, not very strong — after that, people nearest the wall out first, of course — there will be no need to hurry at that point — we’ll cut extensively, and everyone should be out of the city in the following half hour. Be ready for the cold — it will be very invigorating. Please get your masks on, and check your seal, and the seal of the people around you.”

He looked down at Nadia, who had gotten a little laser welder out of her black backpack, and now showed it to Nirgalrholding it overhead so that much of the crowd could see it.

“Is everyone ready?” Nirgal asked over his loudspeaker. Everyone visible in the crowd had a white mask over their lower faces. “You look like bandits,” Nirgal told them, and laughed. “Okay!” he said, looking down at Nadia.

And she cut the tent.

Sensible survival behavior is almost as contagious as panic, and the evacuation was quick and orderly. Nadia cut about two hundred meters of tenting, right above the concrete coping, and the higher air pressure inside caused an outflowing wind that held the transparent layers of the tent fabric up and out from the coping, so that people could climb over the waist-high wall without having to deal with it. Others cut the tent near West and South gates, and in about the time it takes to empty a big stadium, the population of Burroughs was out of the city, and into the cold fresh air of an Isidis morning: pressure 350 millibars, temperature 261K°, or –12° Celsius.

Zeyk’s Arabs stayed in their rovers and served as escorts, rolling back and forth and guiding people up to the line of hillocks a few kilometers to the southwest of the city, called the Moeris Hills. Floodwater reached the eastern side of the city as the last part of the crowd made it onto this line of low bumps in the plain, and Red observers, ranging wide in rovers of their own, reported that the flood was now running north and south around the foot of the city wall, in a surge that at this point was less than a meter deep.

So it had been a very, very close thing; close enough to make Nadia shudder. She stood on the top of one of the Moeris hillocks, looking about trying to gauge the situation. People had done their best, but were insufficiently dressed, she thought; not everyone had insulated boots, and very few people had much in the way of headgear. The Arabs were leaning out of their rovers to show people how to wrap scarves or towels or extra jackets over their heads in improvised burnoose hoods, and that would have to do. But it was cold out, very cold despite the sun and the lack of wind, and the citizens of Burroughs who did not work on the surface were looking shocked. Although some were in better shape than others; Nadia could spot Russian newcomers by their warm hats, brought from home; she greeted these people in Russian, and almost always they grinned — “This is nothing,” they shouted, “this is good ice-skating weather, da?” “Keep moving,” Nadia said to them and to everyone else. “Keep moving.” It was supposed to warm up in the afternoon, perhaps up to freezing.

Inside the doomed city the mesas stood stark and dramatic in the morning light, like a titanic museum of cathedrals, the banks of windows inlaid in them like jewels, the foliage on the mesa tops little green gardens capping the redrock. The city’s population stood on the plain, masked like bandits or hay fever victims, bundled thickly in clothes, some in slim heated walkers, a few carrying helmets for use later if needed; the whole pilgrimage standing and looking back at the city: people on the surface of Mars, their-faces exposed to the frigid thin air, standing hands in their pockets, above them high cirrus clouds like metal shavings plastered against the -dark pink sky. The strangeness of the sight was both exhilarating and terrifying, and Nadia walked up and down the line of knobs talking with Zeyk, Sax, Nirgal, Jackie, Art. She even sent another message to Ann, hoping that Ann was receiving them, even though she never answered: “Make sure the security troops have no trouble at the spaceport,” she said, unable to keep the anger out of her voice. “Keep out of their way.”

About ten minutes later her wrist beeped. “I know,” Ann’s voice said curtly. And that was all.

Now that they were out of the city, Maya was feeling buoyant. “Let’s start walking,” she cried. “It’s a long way to Libya Station, and half the day is almost gone already!”

“True,” Nadia said. And many people had already started, heading over to the piste that ran out of Burroughs South Station, and following it south, up the slope of the Great Escarpment.

So they walked away from the city. Nadia often stopped to encourage people, and so quite often she was looking back at Burroughs, at the rooftops and gardens under the transparent bubble of the tent, in the midday sunlight — down into that green meso-cosm that for so long had been the capital of their world. Now rusty black ice-flecked water had run almost all the way around the city wall, and a thick flow of dirty icebergs was coming down from the low crease to the northeast, pouring toward the city in a broadening torrent, filling the air with a roar that raised the hair on the back of her neck, a Marineris rumbling…

The land they walked over was dotted by scattered low plants, mostly tundra moss and alpine flowers, with occasional stands of ice cactus like spiky black fire hydrants. Midges and flies, disturbed by the strange invasion, whirred around in the air overhead. It was noticeably warmer than it had been in the morning, the temperatures rising fast; it felt a little above zero. “Two seventy-two!” Nirgal cried when Nadia asked him in passing. He was passing by every few minutes, running up and down the crowd from one end of the line to the other and back again. Nadia checked her wrist: 272°K. The wind was very slight, and from the southwest. The weather reports indicated the high-pressure zone would stay over Isidis for another day at least.

People were walking in small knots, in the process of finding other small knots, so that friends and work groups and acquaintances were greeting each other as they moved along, surprised often by familiar voices under masks, familiar eyes between mask and hood or hat. A diffuse frost cloud rose from the crowd, a mass exhalation, burning off quickly in the sun. Rovers from the Red army had driven up from both sides of the city, hurrying to get away from the flood; now they moved along slowly, their outriders passing out flasks of hot drinks. Nadia glared at them, mouthing silent curses inside the privacy of her mask, but one of the Reds saw the curse in her eyes, and said to her irritably, “It wasn’t us broke the dike, you know, it was the Marsfirst guerrillas. It was Kasei!”

And he drove on.

A convention was being established whereby ravines to the east of the piste were being used as latrines. They were getting far enough upslope that people often stopped to look back down into the strangely empty city, with its new moat of dark rusty ice-choked water. Groups of natives were chanting bits of the aer-ophany as they walked, and hearing it, Nadia’s heart squeezed inside her; she muttered, “Come back out, damn you, Hiroko, please — come back out today.”

She spotted Art, and walked over to his side. He was making a running commentary over the wrist, apparently sending it to a news consortium on Earth. “Oh yes,” he said in a quick aside when Nadia asked him about it. “We’re live. Real good vid too, I’m sure. And they can relate to the flood scenario.”

No doubt. The city with its mesas, surrounded now by black ice-choked water, which was steaming faintly, its surface turbulent, its edges bubbling madly with carbonation, as waves surged down from the north, the noise like waves in a high storm… The air temperature was now just above freezing, and the surging water was staying liquid even when it pooled and went still, even when it was covered with floating brash ice. Nadia had never seen anything that brought home to her more strongly the fact that they had transformed the atmosphere — not the plants, nor the bluing of the sky color, nor even their ability to expose their eyes, and breathe through thin masks. The sight of water freezing during the Marineris deluge — going from black to white in twenty seconds or less — had marked her more deeply than she knew. Now they had open water. The low broad crease holding Burroughs looked like a gargantuan Bay of Fundy, with the tide racing up it.

People were exclaiming, their voices filling the thin air like bird-song, over the low continuo of the flood. Nadia didn’t know why; then she saw — there was movement at the spaceport.

The spaceport was located on a broad plateau to the northwest of the city, and at their height on the slope, the population of Burroughs could stand there and watch while the great doors of the spaceport’s largest hangar opened, and five giant space planes rolled out one after another: an ominous, somehow military sight. The planes taxied up to the spaceport’s main terminal, and jetways extended and latched on to their sides. Again nothing happened, and the refugees walked up toward the first real hills of the Great Escarpment for the better part of an hour, until, despite their increase in elevation, the spaceport runways and the lower halves of the hangars were under the watery horizon. The sun was well in the west now.

Attention turned to the city itself, as the water broached the tent wall on the east side of Burroughs, and ran in over the coping by Southwest Gate, where they had cut the tent. Soon thereafter it was flooding Princess Park and Canal Park and the Niederdorf, dividing the city in two and then slowly rising up the side boulevards, covering the roofs in the lower part of town.

In the midst of this spectacle one of the big jets appeared in the sky over the plateau, looking much too slow to fly, as big planes low to the ground always do. It had taken off southward, so for the spectators on the ground it grew larger and larger without ever seeming to gain speed, until the low rumble of its eight engines reached them, and it plowed overhead with the slow impossible awkwardness of a bumblebee. As it lumbered off to the west the next one appeared over the spaceport, and headed past the water-floored city and over them, off to the west. And so it went for all five planes, each one looking as unaerodynamic as the last, until the last one had trolled past them and disappeared over the western horizon.

Now they began to walk in earnest. The fastest walkers took off, making no attempt to stay back with the slower ones; it was important to begin to train people away from Libya Station as soon as possible, and this was understood by all. Trains were on their way to Libya from all over, but Libya Station was small and had only a few sidings, so the choreography of the evacuation was going to be complex.

It was now five in the afternoon, the sun low over the rise of Syrtis, the temperature plummeting past zero, on its way far down. As the faster walkers, mostly natives and the latest immigrants, pressed on ahead, the crowd became a long column. The people in rovers reported that it was several kilometers long now, and getting longer all the time. These rovers drove up and down the line, picking people up and sometimes letting others out. All available walkers and helmets were being used. Coyote had appeared on the scene, driving up from the direction of the dike, and seeing his boulder car, Nadia instantly suspected he was behind the broaching of the dike; but after greeting her cheerily over the wrist, and asking how things were going, he drove back toward the city. “Get South Fossa to send a dirigible over the city,” he suggested, “in case anyone was left behind, and is up on the mesa tops. There must be some people in there who slept through the day, and when they wake up they are in for one very big surprise.”

He laughed wildly, but it was a good point, and Art made the call.

Nadia walked along at the back of the column with Maya and Sax and Art, listening to reports as they came in. She got the rovers to drive on the dead piste, to avoid kicking dust into the air. She tried to ignore the fact that she was tired already. It was mostly lack of sleep, rather than muscular exhaustion. But it was going to be a long night. And not only for her. Many people on Mars were entirely city dwellers now, and unused to walking very far at a time. She herself seldom did, though she was often on her feet around construction sites, and did not have a desk job like many of these people. Luckily they were following a piste, and could even walk on its smooth surface if they cared to, between the suspension rails on the edges and the reaction rail running down the middle. Most preferred to stay on the concrete or gravel roads running alongside the piste, however.

Unfortunately, walking out of Isidis Planitia in any direction but north meant walking uphill. Libya Station was about seven hundred meters higher than Burroughs, not an inconsiderable height; but the grade was almost continuous over the seventy kilometers, and there were no steep sections anywhere along the way. “It will help keep us warm,” Sax muttered when Nadia mentioned it.

It got later and later, until their shadows were cast far to the east, as if they were giants. Behind them the drowning city, lightless and empty, black-floored, disappeared over their horizon mesa by mesa, until finally Double Decker Butte and Moeris Mesa were submerged by the skysill. The dusky burnt umbers of Isidis took on more and more color, and the sky darkened and darkened, until the fat sun lay burning on the western horizon, and they walked slowly through a ruddy world, strung out like a ragtag army in retreat.

Nadia checked Mangalavid from time to time, and found the news from the rest of the planet mostly comforting. All the major cities but Sheffield had been secured by the independence movement. Sabishii’s mound maze had provided refuge for the survivors of the fire, and though the fire was not yet put out everywhere, the maze meant they would be okay. Nadia talked to Nanao and Etsu for a while as she walked. The little wrist image of Nanao revealed his exhaustion, and she said something about how bad she felt — Sabishii burned, Burroughs drowned — the two greatest cities on Mars, destroyed. “No no,” Nanao said. “We rebuild. Sabishii is in our mind.”

They were sending their few unburned trains to Libya Station, as were many other cities. The nearest were also sending planes and dirigibles. The dirigibles would be able to come to their aid during the night’s march, which was useful. Especially important would be any water they could bring with them, as dehydration in the cold and hyperarid night was going to be severe. Nadia’s throat was already parched, and she happily took a cupful of warm water from a passing rover handing them out. She lifted her mask and drank swiftly, trying not to breathe as she did. “Last call!” the woman passing out the cups called cheerily. “We’ll run out after the next hundred people.”

Another kind of call came in from South Fossa. They had heard from several mining camps around Elysium, whose occupants had declared themselves independent of both the metanationals and the Free Mars movement, and were warning everyone to stay away. .Some stations occupied by Reds were doing much the same. Nadia snorted. “Tell them fine,” she said to the people in South Fossa. “Send them a copy of the Dorsa Brevia Declaration, and tell them to study it for a while. If they’ll agree to uphold the human rights section, I don’t see why we should bother with them.”

The sun set as they walked. The long twilight slowly ran its course.

While there was still a dark purple twilight suffusing the hazy air, a boulder car drove up from the east and stopped just ahead of Nadia’s group, and figures got out and walked over to them, wearing white masks and hoods. By silhouette alone Nadia recognized, all of a sudden, the one in the lead: it was Ann, tall and spare, walking right up to her, picking her out of the rabble at the tail end of the column without hesitation, despite the lack of light. The way the First Hundred knew each other…

Nadia stopped, stared up at her old friend. Ann was blinking at the sudden cold.

“We didn’t do it,” Ann said brusquely. “The Armscor unit came out in armored cars, and there was a real fight. Kasei was afraid that if they retook the dike they would try to retake everything, everywhere. He was probably right.”

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. A lot of people on the dike were killed. And a lot had to escape the flood by going up onto Syrtis.”

She stood there before them, grim, unapologetic — Nadia marveled that one could read so much from a silhouette, a black cutout against the stars. Set of the shoulders, perhaps. Tilt of the head.

“Come on then,” Nadia said. There was nothing else she could think to say, at this point. Going out onto the dike in the first place, setting the explosive charges … but there was no point, now. “Let’s keep walking.”

The light leaked away from the land, out of the air, out of the sky. They hiked under the stars, through air as cold as Siberia. Nadia could have gone faster, but she wanted to stay at the back with the slowest group, to do what she could to help. People were giving piggyback rides to some of the smaller children among them, but the fact was there weren’t very many children at the end of the column; the smallest ones were already in rovers, and the older ones were up front with the faster walkers. There hadn’t been that many children in Burroughs to begin with.

Rover headlight beams cut through the dust they were throwing into the air, and seeing it Nadia wondered if the CO₂ filters would get clogged by fines. She mentioned this aloud, and Ann said, “If you hold the mask to your face and blow out hard, it helps. You can also hold your breath and take it off, and blow compressed air through it, if you have a compressor.”

Sax nodded.

“You know these masks?” Nadia said to Ann.

Ann nodded. “I’ve spent many hours using ones like them.”

“Okay, good.” Nadia experimented with hers, holding the fabric right against her mouth and blowing put hard. Quickly she felt short of breath. “We still should Tfy^walking on the piste and the roads, and cutting down on the dust. And tell the rovers to go slow.”

They walked on. Over the next couple of hours they fell into a kind of rhythm. No one passed them, no one fell back. It got colder and colder. Rover headlights partially illuminated the thousands of people ahead of them, all the way up the long gradual slope to the high southern horizon, which was perhaps twelve or fifteen kilometers ahead of them, it was hard to tell in the dark. The column ran all the way to the horizon: a bobbing, fencing collection of headlight beams, flashlight beams, the red glow of taillights … a strange sight. Occasionally there was a buzz overhead, as dirigibles from South Fossa arrived, floating like gaudy UFOs with all their running lights on, their engines humming as they wafted down to drop off loads of food and water for the cars to retrieve, and pick up groups from the back of the column. Then they hummed up into the air and away, until they were no more than colorful constellations, disappearing over the horizon to the east.

During the timeslip a crowd of exuberant young natives tried to sing, but it was too cold and dry, and they did not persist for long. Nadia liked the idea, and in her mind she sang some of her old favorites many times: “Hello Central Give Me’ Dr. Jazz,” “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Over and over and over.

The longer the night went on, the better her mood became; it was beginning to seem like the plan was going to work. They were not passing hundreds of prostrate people^although the word from the cars was that a fair number of the young natives appeared to have blown it and gone out too fast, and were now requiring assistance. Everyone had gone from 500 millibars to 340, which was the equivalent of going from 4,000 meters altitude on Earth to 6,500 meters, not an inconsiderable jump even with the higher percentage of oxygen in the Martian air to mitigate the effects; thus people were coming down with altitude sickness. Altitude sickness tended to strike the young a bit more than the old anyway, and many of the natives had taken off very enthusiastically. So some were paying for it now, with headaches and nausea felling quite a few. But the cars reported success so far taking in the ones on the edge of vomiting, and escorting the rest. And the rear of the column was keeping a steady pace.

So Nadia trudged on, sometimes hand in hand with Maya or Art, sometimes in her own world, her mind wandering in the biting cold, remembering odd shards of the past. She remembered some of the other dangerous cold walks she had taken over the surface of this world of hers: out in the great storm with John at Rabe Crater … searching for the transponder with Arkady … following Frank down into Noctis Labyrinthus, on the night they escaped from the assault on Cairo… On that night too she had fallen into an odd bleak cheerfulness — response to a freeing from responsibility, perhaps, to becoming no more than a foot soldier, following someone else’s lead. Sixty-one had been such a disaster. This revolution too could devolve into chaos — indeed it had. No one in control. But there were still voices coming in over her wrist, from everywhere. And no one was going to strafe them from space. The most intransigent elements of the Transitional Authority had probably been killed outright, in Kasei Vallis — an aspect of Art’s “integrated pest management” that was no joke. And the rest of UNTA was being overwhelmed by sheer numbers. They were incapable, as anyone would be, of controlling a whole planet of dissidents. Or too intimidated to try.

So they had managed to do it differently this time. Or else conditions on Earth had simply changed, and all the various phenomena of Martian history were only distorted reflections of those changes. Quite possible. A troubling thought, when considering the future. But that was for later. They would face all that when they came to it. Now they only had to worry about getting to Libya Station. The sheer physicality of the problem, and of the solution to the problem, pleased her immensely. Finally something she could get her hands on. Walk. Breathe the frigid air. Try’ to warm her lungs from the rest of her, from the heart — something like Nirgal’s uncanny heat redistribution, if only she could!

It began to seem like she could actually catch little bursts of sleep while still walking. She worried it was CO₂ poisoning, but continued to blink out from time to time. Her throat was very sore. The tail end of the column was slowing down, and rovers were now driving back to it and picking up all the people who were exhausted, and driving them up the slope to Libya Station, where they would drop them off, and return for another load. A lot more people were beginning to suffer altitude sickness, and the Reds were telling victims over the wrist how to pull off their masks and vomit, and then get the masks back on before breathing again. A difficult unpleasant operation at best, and many people were suffering CO₂ poisoning as well as altitude sickness. Still, they were closing on their destination. The wrist images from Libya Station looked like the inside of a Tokyo subway station at rush hour, but trains were arriving and departing on a regular basis, so it looked like there was going to be room for the later arrivals.

A rover rolled up beside them, and asked them if they wanted a lift. Maya said, “Get out of here! What’s the matter, can’t you see? Go help those people u’p there, come on, stop wasting our time!”

The driver took off quickly to avoid more castigation. Maya said. hoarsely, “To hell with that. I’m a hundred and forty-three years old, and I’ll be damned if I don’t walk the whole way. Let’s pick up the pace a little.”

They kept the same pace. They kept at the back of the column, watching the parade of lights bobbing in the haze ahead of them. Nadia’s eyes had hurt for several hours, but now they were getting really painful, the numbness of the cold no longer a help, apparently; they were very, very dry, and sandy in their sockets. It stung to blink. Goggles with the masks would have been a good idea.

She stumbled over an unseen rock, and a memory shot into her from her youth: one time she and some coworkers had had their truck break down, in the southern Urals in winter. They had had to walk from the outskirts of the abandoned Chelyabinsk-65 to Chelyabinsk-40, over fifty frozen kilometers of devastated Stalinist industrial wasteland — black abandoned factories, broken smokestacks, downed fences, gutted trucks … all in the snowy frigid winter night, under low clouds. Like something out of a dream it had been, even at the time. She told Maya and Art and Sax about it, her voice hoarse. Her throat hurt, but not as badly as her eyes. They had gotten so used to intercoms, it was funny to have to talk through the air separating them. But she wanted to talk. “I don’t know how I ever could have forgotten that night. But I haven’t thought of it in the longest time. I’d forgotten it. It must have happened, what, a hundred and twenty years ago.”

“This is another one you’ll remember,” Maya said.

They shared brief stories about the coldest they had ever been. The two Russian women could list ten incidents colder than the very coldest experiences Sax or Art could come up with. “How about the hottest?” Art said. “I can win that one. One time I was in a log-cutting contest, in the chainsaw division, and that just conies down to who has the most powerful saw, so I replaced my saw’s engine with one off a Harley-Davidson, and cut the log in under ten seconds. But motorcycle engines are air-cooled, you know, and did my hands get hot!”

They laughed. “Doesn’t count,” Maya declared. “It wasn’t your whole body.”

Fewer stars were visible than before. At first Nadia put it down to the fines in the air, or the trouble with her sanded eyes. But then she looked at her wristpad, and saw it was almost five A.M. Dawn soon. And Libya Station was only a few kilometers away. It was 256° Kelvin.

They came in at sunrise. People were passing around cups of hot tea that smelled like ambrosia. The station was too crowded to enter, and there were several thousand people waiting outside. But the evacuation had been proceeding smoothly for several hours, organized and run by Vlad and Ursula and a whole crowd of Bog-danovists. Trains were still coming in on all three pistes, from east south and west, and loading up and leaving soon thereafter. And dirigibles were floating in over the horizon. The population of Burroughs was going to be split up immediately — some taken to Elysium, some to Hellas, and farther south to Hiranyagarbha, and Christianopolis — others to the small towns on the way to Sheffield, including Underbill.

So they waited their turn. In the dawn light they could see that everyone’s eyes were extremely bloodshot, which, along with the dust-caked masks still over their mouths, gave people a wild and bloody look. Clearly goggles were in order for walks out.

Finally Zeyk and Marina escorted the last group into the station. At this point quite a few of the First Hundred had found each other and clustered against one wall, drawn by the magnetism that always pulled them together in a crisis. Now, with the final group in, there were several of them: Maya and Michel, Nadia and Sax and Ann, Vlad, Ursula, Marina, Spencer, Ivana, the Coyote…

Over by the pistes Jackie and Nirgal were directing people into trains, waving their arms like symphony conductors, and steadying those whose legs were giving out at the last minute. The First Hundred walked out to the platform together. Maya ignored Jackie as she walked past her onto a train. Nadia followed Maya on board, and then came the rest of them. They walked down the central aisle, past all the happy two-toned faces^ brown with dust above, clean around the mouth. There were some dirty facemasks on the floor, but most people were holding theirs clutched in their hands.

Screens at the front of each car relayed film that a dirigible was showing of Burroughs, which this morning was a sea of ice-coated water, the ice predominant, although black polynyas were everywhere. Above this new sea stood the nine mesas of the city, now nine cliff-walled islands, not very tall, their top gardens and remaining rows of windows truly strange-looking above the dirty brash ice.

Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred followed Maya through the cars to the last one. Maya turned around and saw them all, filling the final little compartment of the train, and said, “What, is this one going to Underbill?”

“Odessa,” Sax told her.

She smiled.

People were getting up and moving forward, so that the old ones could sit together in the final compartment, and they did not decline the courtesy. They thanked them and sat. Soon after that, the compartments ahead of them were full. The aisles began to fill.

Vlad said something about the captain being the last to leave a sinking ship.

Nadia found the remark depressing. She was truly weary now, she couldn’t remember when she had last slept. She had liked Burroughs, and a huge number of construction hours had been poured into it… She remembered what Nanao had said about Sabishii. Burroughs too was in their minds. Perhaps when the shoreline of the new ocean stabilized, they could build another one, somewhere else.

As for now, Ann was sitting on the other side of the car, and Coyote was coming down the aisle to them, stopping to press his face to the window glass, and give a thumbs-up to Nirgal and Jackie, still outside. Those two got on board the train, several cars ahead of the last one. Michel was laughing at something Maya had said, and Ursula, Marina, Vlad, Spencer — these members of Na-dia’s family were around her and safe, at least for the moment. And as the moment was all they ever had … she felt herself melting into her seat. She would be asleep in minutes, she could feel it in her dry burning eyes. The train began to move.

Sax was inspecting his wristpad, and Nadia said to him drowsily, “What’s happening on Earth?”

“Sea level is still rising. It’s gone up four meters. It looks like the metanationals have stopped fighting, for the time being. The World Court has brokered a cease-fire. Praxis has put all its resources into flood relief. Some of the other metanats look like they might go the same way. The UN General Assembly has convened in Mexico City. India has agreed that it has a treaty with an independent Martian government.”

“That’s a devil’s bargain,” Coyote said from across the compartment. “India and China, they’re too big for us to handle. You wait and see.”

“So the fighting down there has ended?” Nadia said.

“It’s not clear if that’s permanent or not,” Sax said.

Maya snorted. “No way it’s permanent.”

Sax shrugged.

“We need to set up a government,” Maya said. “We have to set it up fast, and present Earth with a united front. The more established we seem, the less likely they’ll be to come hard to root us out.”

“They’ll come,” Coyote said from the window.

“Not if we prove to them that they’ll get everything from us they would have gotten on their own,” May a said, irritated at Coyote. “That will slow them down.”

“They’ll come anyway.”

Sax said, “We will never be out of danger until Earth is calm. Is stabilized.”

“Earth will never be stabilized,” Coyote said.

Sax shrugged.

“It’s we who have to stabilize it!” Maya exclaimed, shaking a finger at Coyote. “For our own sakes!”

“Areoforming Earth,” Michel said with his ironic smile.

“Sure, why not?” Maya said. “If that’s what it takes.”

Michel leaned over and gave Maya a kiss on her dusty cheek.

Coyote was shaking his head. “It’s moving the world without a fulcrum,” he said.

“The fulcrum is in our minds,” Maya said, startling Nadia.

Marina also was watching her wrist, and now she said, “Security still has Clarke, and the cable. Peter says they’ve left all of Sheffield but the Socket. And someone — hey — someone has reported seeing Hiroko in Hiranyagarbha.”

They went silent at this, thinking their own thoughts.

“I got into the UNTA records of that first takeover of Sabishii,” Coyote said after a while, “and there was no mention at all of Hiroko, or any of her group. I don’t think they got them.”

Maya said darkly, “What’s written down has nothing to do with what happened.”

“In Sanskrit,” Marina said, “Hiranyagarbha means ‘The Golden Embryo.’“

Nadia’s heart squeezed. Come out, Hiroko, she thought. Come out, damn you, please, please, damn you, come out. The look on Michel’s face was painful to see. His whole family, disappeared…

“We can’t be sure we’ve got Mars together yet,” Nadia said, to distract him. She caught his eye. “We couldn’t agree in Dorsa Brevia — why should we now?”

“Because we are free,” Michel replied, rallying. “It’s real now. We are free to try. And you only put your full effort into a thing when there is no going back.”

The train slowed to cross the equatorial piste, and they rocked back and forth with it.

“There are Reds blowing up all the pumping stations on Vastitas,” Coyote said. “I don’t think you’re going to get any easy consensus on the terraforming.”

“That’s for sure,” Ann said hoarsely. She cleared her throat. “We want the soletta gone too.”

She glared at Sax, but he only shrugged.

“Ecopoesis,” he said. “We already have a biosphere. It’s all we need. A beautiful world.”

Outside the broken landscape flashed by in the cool morning light. The slopes of Tyrrhena were tinted khaki by the presence of millions of small patches of grass and moss and lichen, tucked between the rocks. They looked out at it silently. Nadia felt stunned, trying to think about all of it, trying to keep it from all mixing together, blurring like the rust-and-khakiflow outside…

She looked at the people around her, and some key inside her turned. Her eyes were still dry and raw, but she was no longer sleepy. The tautness in her stomach eased, for the first time since the revolt had begun. She breathed freely. She looked at the faces of her friends — Ann still angry at her, Maya still angry at Coyote, all of them beat, dirty, as red-eyed as the little red people, their irises like round chips of semiprecious stone, vivid in their bloodshot settings. She heard herself say, “Arkady would be pleased.”

The others looked surprised. She never talked about him, she realized.

“Simon too,” Ann said.

“And Alex.”

“And Sasha.” “And Tatiana—”

“And all our lost ones,” Michel said quickly, before the length of the list grew too great.

“But not Frank,” Maya said. “Frank would be thoroughly pissed off ‘ at something.”

They laughed, and Coyote said, “And we have you to carry on the tradition, eh?” And they laughed some more as she shook an angry finger at him.

“And John?” Michel asked, pulling Maya’s arm down, directing the question at her.

Maya freed her arm, kept shaking a finger at Coyote. “John wouldn’t be crying doom and gloom and kissing off Earth as if we could get by without it! John Boone would be ecstatic at this moment!”

“We should remember that,” Michel said quickly. “We should think what he would do.”

Coyote grinned. “He would be running up and down this train getting high. Being high. It would be a party all the way to Odessa. Music and dance and everything.” They looked at each other.

“Well?” Michel said.

Coyote gestured forward. “It does not sound as if they are actually needing our help.”

“Nevertheless,” Michel said.

And they went forward up the train.