Part Two HJALMAR NEDERLAND 2547 A.D.

MEMORY is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited the Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to feel nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.

It isn’t as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the debris of time, left in a pattern of deposition that I fail to understand. On occasion I will stumble on one of these artifacts — a trolley bell in the street, and I see an Alexandrian’s smile — a whiff of ammonia, and suddenly I am reacquainted with my first daughter’s birth — but the process of deposition, the process of recovery, both are mysteries to me. And each little epiphany reminds me that there are things I have forgotten forever — things that might explain me to myself, which explanation I sorely need — and I clutch at the fragment knowing I might never stumble across it again.

So I have decided to collect these artifacts, with the idea that I had better try to understand them now, while they are still within my reach — working as the archaeologists of old did so often, against rising waters in haste, while the chance yet exists: hurrying to invent a new archaeology of the self.

What we feel most, we remember best.

The Tharsis Bulge — the bulge is five thousand kilometers across and seven kilometers high, and formed early in Mars’s history. The stresses caused by this deformation in the crust were instrumental in the formation of the large volcanoes, the equatorial canyon system, and an extensive system of radial fractures. We came on the site in a hundred field cars, a caravan that lofted a plume of umber dust over the rocky plaiu. The site looked like any other youngish crater: a low rampart we could drive right up, and then a flat-topped symmetrical rim-hill, surrounded by the hummocky slope of the ejecta shield. Few craters look impressive from the outside, and this was not one of the exceptions. But my pulse quickened at the sight of it. It had been a long time coming.

I put on a thermal suit, and ordered those of my students in the car to do the same, as I needed companions for a hike to the rim. Gritting my teeth I walked up to the car containing Satarwal and Petrini, and knocked on their door window. The door popped open with a hiss and there they were, faces poking out like Tweedle-dum and Tweedle- dee: the codirectors of my dig. Blandly I told them I was going up to the rim with a few students to have a look around.

Satarwal, flexing his boss muscle: “Shouldn’t we set camp first?”

“You’ve got more than enough people for that. And someone needs to go up there and confirm that we’re at the right crater.”

Giving excuses: a mistake. “We’re at the right crater,” said Satarwal,

Petrini grinned. “Don’t you think we’re at the right crater, Hjalmar?”

“I’m sure we are. Still it wouldn’t hurt to see, would it. Before the whole camp is set.”

They glanced at each other, paused to make me stew. “Okay,” Satarwal said. “You can go.”

“Thanks,” I said, bland as ever. Petrini shot a look at Satarwal to see how the head of the Planetary Survey would take this sarcasm; but Satarwal hadn’t noticed it. Stupid policeman. With a jerk of the head I led half a dozen students and staff toward the rim. It was midafternoon, and we hiked up the gentle slope with the sun over our shoulders and the quartet of dusk mirrors almost overhead. It felt good to walk off the exchange with Satarwal and Petrini, and I left my group behind. They knew better than to catch up with me when I walked that fast. Those two clowns: I blew frost plumes as solid as cotton balls into the chill highland air at the thought of them. This was my dig. I had worked for twenty years to get the site off the Committee’s proscribed list; and I would have worked a hundred years more and never gotten their permission, too, if a friend hadn’t been put on the Committee. But it pleased him to sanction the dig for the season directly following the end of my stint as chairman of the department. So that the new chairman, Petrini, was made the codirector of the dig along with the Committee watchdog Satarwal; while I, whose work the dig would support or refute, was nearly forbidden to accompany it. I had had to grovel for the better part of a year before they allowed me to join the expedition. And my friend only laughed. “You’re lucky to be going at all, you fearsome radical!”

But here we were. I booted a rock uphill to remind me of the reality of our presence, to clear my mind of all the poison poured into it by the government. We were here. That meant that, no matter what else happened, I had won: a site had been taken off the proscribed list for the first time. And now it loomed before me — ah! — my heart leaped at the thought. I picked up my pace; the only thing that kept me from bounding up the slope was the presence of my students behind me. The ejecta shield became steeper and rougher as I approached the rim; above me blocks stuck into the dirty lavender sky, and they gave me an excuse to bound upward, to clear them. Below me the shouts of my companions sounded like the cheeps of snow finches. Between the broken blocks of compressed basalt were drifts of fine frost — crunchy sand-

And then the slope curved flat and I was on the rim. Topping it was an embankment of tan concrete; I ran to it. Concrete, with a steel coping laid in its top: a dome foundation of the early twenty-second century. So we were at the right crater. From my new vantage I could see around the circumference of the rim, and the embankment grew or shrank to level it off.

Here and there struts stuck out of the embankment over the crater below, for two meters or five or ten, until they twisted down and broke off. The supports for the dome. In several places the embankment was blasted down into the rim; one such disruption was a short distance away from me, and I went to have a look. The concrete in the break had been reduced to something like black sandstone, which crumbled into my glove when rubbed. So they had blown down the dome. I shook my head. Nasty shock for the inhabitants, no doubt.

Hana Ingtal, the least stupid of my students, popped over the rim and interrupted my survey. “Professor Nederland!” she cried, holding out between two gloved fingers a chip of blue plastic.

“What.”

“Look here — it’s a taggart.”

I took the chip from her and inspected it.

“Explosives companies put them in their products so they can determine whose explosives made any particular—”

“I know what taggarts are, Ingtal. Put this back where you found it. You know excavation procedures, don’t you? Move nothing except as part of a methodical exploration, that can be confirmed by others and recorded as authentic data. Especially on this dig. You may have destroyed this piece’s worth as data already!”

Crestfallen, she turned and walked back down the rim. But that is how students learn. “And make sure you put it where you can find it again!” I shouted after her. She was one of those students who progress in leaps, and miss things along the way — practical matters like methodology. No doubt she had developed a complete theory of the city’s end from that single chip of plastic. But she was young. A century or two of defeat would teach her what it took to build a case in Martian history.

I hiked to the inner edge of the rim, and looked down a nearly sheer cliff onto the crater floor.

A lot of sand had been deposited in the last three hundred years, but some of the roofs were still exposed. From my vantage it looked like a village of dirt hummocks, at the bottom of a big dirt bowl. The hummocks stood in faint squares and oblongs, and together they formed a grid of sand-filled depressions, that once had been busy streets, and wide boulevards lined with trees. The pattern extended to the crater wall on all sides, although to the east the sand tended to bury everything.

Trembling slightly, I stepped as close to the cliff’s edge as I dared. Those were the ruins of New Houston, down there. I had been born in that ruined city; my first years had been spent in the confines of this very crater. This had impeded my efforts to get the dig approved, in fact, although I never understood why. My birthplace: so what? No one remembers their childhood. I knew I had been born there in the same way anybody else did — I looked it up. So the unspoken implication that my motives were in some way personal was entirely unfounded, as was tacitly admitted when the dig was approved and I was allowed to join it.

Nevertheless, as I looked down onto the hummock roofs and the solar-panel ridges and the sand-filled streets, I caught myself searching for something in the pattern, or in the etching of vertical ravines into the crater wall, that I might recognize from those first years. But it was just a site. An old city in ruins.

New Houston. During the Unrest of 2248 the city had been taken over by rioters, and held against the police of the Mars Development Committee. (I must have been there?) The police reports said the rebels had blown down the dome, destroyed the city, and killed all the noncombatants; but the samizdat said otherwise. In these ruins I intended to find the truth.

So as I surveyed the crater floor and its faint gridwork, now accentuated by the growing shadows of late afternoon, my pulse quickened, my spirits soared. For as long as I could remember I had wanted to excavate one of the lost Martian cities, and now I was here at last. Now I would be an archaeologist in deed, as well as in name. Visions of the digs I had taught in classes jumbled in my mind — all those cities that had been razed and abandoned by conquerors, Troy, Carthage, Palmyra, Tenochtitlan, all resurrected by scientists and their work; now New Houston would be added to those, to become part of history again. Oh, yes — it was that moment in a dig, before the work has begun, when the site lies undisturbed in its shadows and all things seem possible, when one can imagine the ruins to be those of a city as ancient and huge as Persepolis, with the strata of centuries under the rubble-crazed surface, containing the debris of countless lives that can be deciphered and understood, recouped from the dead past to be known and treasured and made part of us forever. Why, down in those ruins we might find almost anything. Of course it is easy to feel that way above a site on a good prospect, in late afternoon light, alone. Everything looks burnished and charged with meaning, and somehow one’s own.

Down in the tents it was different. That evening I entered the large commons tent where everyone was celebrating our arrival, and felt like an ant dropped in a terrarium of trapdoor spiders. Satarwal and his thugs from Planetary Survey stared at me, and Petrini and his faintly insolent students glanced at me as they stood in rings around tables, poking at maps and arguing like experts, and my students and McNeil’s and Kalinin’s blinked at me as stupidly as sheep. I went in search of the Kleserts and found them in the dining room, and joined them for a silent meal. I didn’t know them well, but they were my age and knew how to leave one alone. It was too bad for me that their work on water stations would take them away, to Nirgal Vallis some kilometers to the southwest of us.

Then it was back to the main room, to the arguing and poking. Petrini’s group was determined to be vehement, yet there was no point to their talk — except to show Satarwal how reliable they were, how fiercely they could go after “the facts” without endangering the official version of New Houston’s history. They were good at that. And Satarwal soaked it up. He enjoyed the meaningless chatter about the Athenian and Parisian models of crater city planning, because it so obviously avoided the central question of the dig. His stubbly blue jowls bounced with pleasure at this spectacle of his power over us, and I could not stand it. I had to leave the room.

Only to run into Petrini in one of the smaller lounges. But Petrini was easier on the nerves than Satarwal. It was like going from the dentist to an ear specialist (I have poor hearing): someone still working on you, but without the drills.

“Well, Hjalmar, how was the view from the rim? The old city still there, eh?”

“Ah — yes. Yes it is.”

“Did you find anything interesting on the rim?”

“Well — the dome foundation, of course. I won’t know until we have studied it more closely.”

“Of course.”

“Nothing extraordinary, though.”

“No. I guess we’d have heard if you had, from your students.”

“Do you think so?”

“Oh, come now, Hjalmar. You know students.”

“Do I?”

“Who better? You’re the pillar of the university, Hjalmar, you’ve been there longer than the buildings.”

“Not really. Besides, only the buildings stay. The students keep changing.” Until you end up teaching members of a different civilization.

Petrini tilted his head back and laughed. “Well,” he said, sobering rapidly and making sure I saw he was now serious: “I’ll have a tough time filling your shoes, I really will.”

“Nonsense. You’ll be the best chairman yet.”

Conversation on automatic pilot. Meanwhile I watched him work on me. Such charm. But Petrini’s problem was his transparency. He was one of those people who made it their life’s project to rise into the halls of power; everything he did was part of his campaign. I knew someone like that myself, so I recognized the type. But Petrini’s purpose was always obvious, and this would impede his progress. The best politicians appear to fall upward accidentally, so that people are inclined to help them on their way.

He slapped me on the arm affectionately. “Thanks for the vote of confidence. Now — I hope you don’t mind me saying this — I know what you will be trying to prove here on this dig. And believe me, I’m sympathetic to it. But the evidence, Hjalmar. The Aimes Report, you know, and Colonel Shay’s account. Those things couldn’t have been falsified.”

“Certainly they could have.” I tilted my head at him curiously. “Those aren’t things, Petrini. The things are here, on the site. The only good evidence is here, because the city can’t lie. We’ll see what we find out.”

“Just be prepared for a letdown.” He put his hand to my arm again. “I tell you this for your own sake.”

“Thanks.”

I considered going back to my tent and reading. My supervisors were intolerable, my colleagues irritating, my students dull. But then Hana Ingtal appeared as if I had called her up by the thought, and asked me to join her for a drink with an enthusiasm that made it difficult for me to refuse. Reluctantly I nodded, and followed her into the dining room’s bar. While she mixed us drinks she chattered about our afternoon on the rim. I watched her, perplexed. We had worked together for over five years, and she still seemed to like me.

I didn’t understand it. Most students so obviously work their professors for advancement, and how can they help it? It is that sort of master-slave situation. I doubt I would ever go near a university if I had it to do again. Twenty years of indenture to some old man or woman who “knows,” all to get into a position where you too can be treated as master by people you barely know. Stupid (although it beat mining).

But Hana appeared to enjoy conversation with me for its own sake. She was undeferential, and watching her I could almost imagine what it would be like to learn the discipline anew. Fifty-two years old, chestnut hair, hazel eyes, nice bones, calm expression: my single graduate students were tripping over each other to be with her, and here she was at a corner table with me, a man who truly did not know how to speak with her. Once I knew what to say to the young (when I was young myself, perhaps) but I’ve lost the art. Life is the history of losses.

So she said, “Is this dig much like the ones you did on Earth?” and I tried to figure out what she meant by it.

“Well. I never actually participated in a dig on Earth — as I thought you knew?” I was almost certain she knew that. “But the site is much like an abandoned Norse settlement on the west coast of Greenland that I visited when I was there,” and I described the terran site using what I could remember of my lecture notes on the place — for my trip to Earth was a blank to me — until I became too aware of the discrepancy between what I described and what we had actually seen that afternoon, and stumbled to a halt, and waited with some trepidation for her to bring up something else to discuss. You see, quiet people know they have a reputation for being close-mouthed. Sometimes the reputation is like a power, for they see their acquaintances think that when they are moved to speak it will be for something special. But that is also a sort of pressure, a pressure that grows as the years pass and the quiet person’s reputation ages. What, after all, is really important enough to say? Not much. And quiet people become overly aware of that, and thus aware that most talk is a code masking vastly more complex meanings — meanings unfathomable to the very people most aware of their existence.

Abruptly I stood. “I’m off to bed now,” I said, and went back to my tent.

“—When we were sure they would honor the truce we met seven of them at the spaceport depot. We told them they were the last city on Mars resisting legal authority, but they did not believe us. I told them their situation was hopeless no matter what was happening elsewhere, and offered them the terms we had offered all the rioters: due process; suspension of the death penalty; and a reasonable dialogue (to be defined later) to be established to air grievances concerning planetary policy. I added that all noncombatants in New Houston were to be released to us immediately. The leader of the group, a bearded man of seventy or eighty years, demanded complete amnesty as a condition of surrender. I said I was unauthorized to grant amnesty, but that it would be considered by the Committee when violence ceased. The rioters discussed the matter in Russian among themselves, and my officers heard the word “Leningrad” repeated. The leader said they would return to the city and put the matter to a vote, and we agreed to meet again in two days. The next morning, however, more than twenty explosions from the crater rim indicated they had brought down the city dome. By the time our forces could enter the city the power plant was destroyed and fires had gone out for lack of oxygen, though the smoke was still thick. This smoke covered rebel snipers, and by the time we could subdue them nearly all the noncombatants in the city had died of asphyxiation. Rescue work continued for three days, and thirty-eight people were found in intact rooms, air locks, individual suits, and the like. All of them claimed noncombatant status; their interviews are appended. When the city was secured it was no longer habitable; damage caused by the rioters was such that it would have been easier to build in a new crater than to reconstruct the city.” So said Police Colonel Ernest Shay, field commander for the Committee police during the Unrest, when he was questioned by the Aimes Commission in 2250. But I had found records of the Royal Dutch police division showing that Shay was in Enkhuisen in December 2248, supervising the war there. Why had he answered the Commission’s questions, and not the officer actually in charge at New Houston? Why had he lied, and said he was there conducting negotiations himself?

I put the bulky printout of the 194th Volume of the Aimes Report down on my nightstand, on top of a thick folder of samizdat, an illegal collection of newsletters, pamphlets, xeroxes and broadsides I had made over many years. In slangy, sarcastic, bitter Russian (the underground language of Mars, the language of resistance, the counter-English) the samizdat, many of them handwritten to avoid police identification of printer or typewriter, told the real story of New Houston. Should I pull out the newsletter carry on with it, by “Yevgeny”? “The Dragon descended, lightning bolted from its mouth, ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ and no air for the fire so that it fled down throats to combust in lungs, fire balloon people wafting up past the dragon chicks falling on stacks of fire…” Or the more prosaic account by “Medvedev”? “24 December 2248 — tenth politzei blitzkrieg — New Houston, Texan sector — estimated two thousand attack troops descended on rocket packs onto open city after dome knocked down at dawn — resistance continued three days — captured rebels executed—” But I knew them all by heart. These ragged narratives told the true story of the Unrest, I had become convinced. Few historians agreed with me; they sided with the Committee’s official view, that the samizdat were written by malcontents, and were nothing but lies, filled with contradictions and obvious inaccuracies. And it was true that they were anonymous, and contained contradictions, they were sourceless, and had no evidence to support them; and some were full of tall tales, the Unrest made myth. But in some ways writers like “Medvedev” made a more coherent account of the Unrest than the Aimes Report did. And if they were nothing but fictions, why had the Committee made it illegal to publish or own them? Why had the Committee begun the process of installing “watermarks” in every Xerox machine, to help them locate the ones used to print samizdat? And why had excavation of over a dozen abandoned cities been forbidden? No. There was something wrong; the Committee had lied, was lying. The true story of the Unrest had yet to be told.

The excavation teams got to street level in the old city at different speeds, depending on their method and what they found. McNeil worked as if he had the rest of his life to finish the next centimeter of the dig, and he had his students record everything so thoroughly that they could have reconstructed their ruins just as they found them. “You never know what questions you may want to ask a hundred years from now,” McNeil declared. The rest of us already had questions, and only used the string grids and toothbrushes when we were near what we were looking for. I set my team to work in the area of the city’s physical-plant, under the eastern wall of the crater. Under several meters of sand we found the big buildings of the plant, partially buried under the avalanched crater wall, so that the walls were broken and the interiors filled with rubble and shattered equipment. Moving away from the plant we found control terminal housing, administrative offices, and supply sheds; then outside a wrought iron fence were service shops, restaurants, and bars, and beyond them were the dormitories and apartments of those who had worked in the plant. All of these structures, especially the physical plant itself, were scorched, melted, knocked over. Sifting through this evidence of destruction took weeks. We took holograms, and made models of what we found, and programmed computer explosions, and even set up little real explosions in the models, to see what form the assault had taken; and all the while I kept one group enlarging the excavation of the surrounding neighborhood, especially to the north of the plant where the damage was most extensive.

Street level against the crater’s east wall was about nine meters below the top of the sand drift, and so we worked at the bottom of a craterling of our own making. Elsewhere teams had dug other holes, and as I walked about the sand surface in the evenings, stopping here or there to scuff an exposed solar panel’s edge, or inspect a patch of lichen, it seemed that I strolled across an old battlefield, a no-man’s land pocked with bomb craters and giant foxholes. Looking into the trenches gave me an odd feeling, as if I stared into graves — archaeology regressing to graverobbing — and might see the dead carrying on with their daily lives. Tall dredges stood insectlike over the rim of each craterling, and tubes extended from them across the crater floor, up and over the rim. It was an eerie place, this dead city. Frost crunched under my boots, my nose and lungs were cold. I hiked back to our own little graben (grave) and looked down at the sand- filled apartments we had recently exposed. They had built eaves on the roofs, here where no rain would ever have fallen. Where were we? What city of the mind?

Down on the shadowy streets figures emerged from a building, carrying the long vacuum tubes that led back to the dredge. Ghost firemen. Bill Strickland looked up and saw me; he shouted something I couldn’t hear. He pointed back into the building, waved me down. My heart gave a skip and I hurried to the ramp, descended. Xhosa, the chief of my staff, ran by, “What have they found?” I said.

“I don’t know, they just said hurry.”

“It’s not likely to run away,” I said, but Xhosa was already down the street. I kept my pace steady to show them I was not excitable. I rounded a bluff in our new sand cliff and found five or six of them in the entrance of a newly exposed building; it appeared to be a hotel with a tavern in the ground floor. I walked past them and entered. Rooms free of sand gaped like caves, and it smelled of clay and paint. I heard voices in an inner room and continued in.

“Has anyone checked this building for its structural integrity?” I said loudly.

Strickland and a few others were in a large room. “Sort of,” he said.

“Fine. The whole building could come down on us.”

Strickland moved aside, so I could see through a door into an adjoining room.

Four bodies lay on the floor, dressed in old spacesuits. Two held light rifles in their gloved hands. One was curled around the leg of a big empty desk. The dead: how still they are, how other. “Get out of here before the place falls down,” I said harshly, shocked at the sight. “Xhosa, give this place a structural check and get holo crews in here. Holos of every room. Look at the tracks you’ve made. Who vacuumed this building?” Strickland and Heidi Mueller stepped forward. “How often did you check the filters?”

“After every room,” Heidi said. Bill looked sullen.

“Find anything?”

“It’s all in the boxes in the front room,” Bill said.

I grimaced. Here McNeil’s maddening slowness might have done some good. Hana Ingtal entered the room, stopped when she saw the bodies through the doorway. Frost plumed from her nostrils and drifted to the floor.

“Hana, go find Petrini and bring him here,” I said. “Tell him I want his help.”

She looked at me as if I had gone mad at last.

“I want him to see it,” I said.

She nodded and left.

“Leave everything alone,” I said. “When Petrini gets here we’ll start work again.” I herded them out of the building. I didn’t want to stay in there with those bodies; they made me uneasy and disoriented, and something more I could not name. Out in the street my students walked down the excavated sand canyon to our little working tent: pale blue and brown figures in a residential street, at the bottom of two steep walls of red sand. I looked out of the shadows to the dark crater rim, and the plum-colored sky. No stars. But once they had been thick — and that pungent smell, of wet dust and street surface fixative-

My father had sewn a flag, stripes and a star, the lone star state, he had said, with a red star that made him laugh.

Dizzily I took a step in the street, looked up at a black second-story window in the apartment across the way — gasped-

My father came home late to find a group of us kids gathered before the big maps in the window of the Leaky Tap. The generals! he cried cheerily. He took my arm to lead me in and — and-

I was at the plant to get the day’s water ration when the dome fell. The dome fell. Great crashing outside and the roar of air rushing up. I ran to struggle into a daysuit, clamped on helmet and turned on oxygen as I had been taught. Excited at my chance to fight I rushed into the street and couldn’t see a thing in the smoke. The ground was vibrating, the smoke cleared and plates of the dome rained down, tumbling in the turbulence. Flashes on the crater rim made my sight swim with red spurts, and through the spurts dorm-sized boulders rolled down the wall onto us. Fear stunned me like a blow to the head, it smashed me into a different world. I ran for home thinking only to hide, tripped over big plates — pieces of the dome — got lost in smoke, looked up and saw red figures falling out of the sky on rocket backpacks. Hundreds of them fell, like drops of blood or meteorites or pieces of the dome come to life. Red beams lanced the smoke, I fell, got up and ran head down for home. A woman lay sprawled in the street. I ran up my steps relieved to see them, but when I pulled open the door I saw I had been fooled — the apartment front had been left whole, but it was like a stage prop now, because behind it an immense tan chunk of the crater wall had crushed the apartment and its contents into a meter-thick pancake of plastic paneling. Door in my hand. I could have pulled the facade down.

Sudden time in a world without time: I found myself sitting in the street. I had broken a sweat; my suit’s thermostat had been overwhelmed. I stood carefully, finishing crossing the street, and climbed the front steps to the apartment door under the black second-story window. Hesitantly I pulled it back. Tan rock. I closed the door, sat on the step.

Vague impression of parents, sisters. They must have been killed. Perhaps not in the apartment itself, but somewhere. Otherwise they would have reunited me with them when the survivors were sorted out. Gingerly I probed my memory: what had happened after I opened the door? Nothing. The blank of the past, as empty as always. The images that had just welled up in me still lived, but they were fragments, bright in the surrounding darkness like mirror suns in a twilight sky — broken out of the past by the smell of a street, the sight of rock behind a door, or bodies in a hallway. Trembling uncontrollably I racked my mind to learn more, I rocked back and forth on the stoop under the force of feeling what it meant to raze a city and murder its inhabitants — my family-

“Professor Nederland?”

I looked up. Petrini; and behind him, among others, Satarwal.

“What.”

He looked confused. “Well, you had us brought over here.”

“Oh. Yes. We’ve found something I need your help with. A resistance center, perhaps.”

He smiled. “You want my help?”

“We need independent confirmation of what we find.”

“Oh!” His smile disappeared. “I see. Well, let’s have a look.” He extended a hand. “Need some help? You look a bit shaken.”

I declined the hand and stood. Gestured at the apartment behind us. “I used to live here.”

“You did?” He was surprised. Behind him his staff members glanced at each other. “You looked it up?”

“I remembered.” I walked through the group to the Leaky Tap.

Inside holes had been taken and the strength of the building checked, and we went to work. Xhosa and Hana and Bill directed the others, and I watched. They took seven bodies out and drove them over to the escalator we had set up to cross the rim. We would have to start a cemetery beyond the main camp when our studies were done. Lamps and heaters were turned on as night fell. I stood outside the door and watched the bodies carted away; my hands would not hold steady. Graverobbers, I thought as the last cart left.

A desk in the back room appeared to have been cleared hastily; all the drawers were empty, but under it was a scrap of paper with its curl frozen into it. On it was scrawled, Susan — start the evacuation at dusk — A. Hana brought the scrap out to show it to me; when I was done examining it I gave it back to her and walked away. Dark and cold in the empty street. The voices behind were like those of workers in a tavern. I sat on my old apartment stoop, turned up my suit’s heat, felt the hot air waft out of my hood vents onto my face. I breathed the cold night air deep into me. So they had broken the dome of New Houston. And how many other cities had died like it?

The others left the tavern in a group, arguing. “Obviously there was a well organized resistance,” Hana said angrily. “This is one of their headquarters! The reason we’ve never found more evidence of them is they were a secret organization, and the police didn’t want to acknowledge their existence—”

“I know,” Petrini said in a soothing voice. “Professor Nederland has argued that view very cogently for many years.” They walked before a light spearing the length of the street and split it four ways. “But still — Hjalmar, you must admit this,” he said to me on my stoop. “You are explaining an absence of data, not the presence of it. And you can’t rely on those samizdat you prize so highly. After all, we have samizdat accounts of green Martian natives joining the riots from their hideaways” — this got a laugh or two from his staff — “and then leading the defeated rioters into their Pellucidarian refuge. But we can’t believe in them just because there is a suspicious lack of other data proving their existence, now can we.”

I suppose he thought he was being funny. “Here’s your evidence,” I said.

Satarwal spoke up. “This is just the nest of some of the rioters who destroyed this city. An isolated cell of killers.”

“I notice they’re the dead ones.”

Satarwal waved a finger at me angrily. “There was no organized resistance! No Washington-Lenin Alliance, as some of your cohorts call it. It is nothing more than a malicious fiction, made up by dissidents to attempt to embarrass the government.”

Wearily I explained to Petrini, “The size of the revolt is itself the largest and most obvious sort of evidence. There is no way a spontaneous revolt could have held off the police for five months. And taken over all these cities.”

“That was due to the Soviet fleet’s defection,” Satarwal answered.

“That was the Lenin half of the Alliance. Here we stand in a Texan city that had to be destroyed, it was so well defended. This is the Washington half.”

“The rioters themselves destroyed the city,” Satarwal insisted. “I have proved this—”

“You work for the Committee,” I said, and stood. My head spun, lights crawled in my vision. I spoke loudly so everyone there would hear me. “The rebels didn’t destroy this city.” Hana stared at me, consternation deforming her face. The rest of them stared as well. “The police troopers did it. I know because I was there.” I waved around me. “I was right here when it happened!”

“You may have been in the city,” Petrini said reassuringly, “but you can’t possibly recall the incident—”

“It wasn’t an incident. It was war — a massacre, do you understand? They blasted the dome and came down on rocket packs and — and killed everybody! When I stood in this street I had an epiphanic recollection — you’ve all had those, you know what they’re like — and I remembered it all. I was young then, but I remember.”

“Ridiculous!” Satarwal cried furiously. “Why should we believe somebody so biased- ”

“Because I was there!” At that moment a student bumped the light, and its beam fell on me. In an intact window across the street I could suddenly see my reflection: short, tubby, licks of electric hair tufting away from a large head, rubbery small-eyed face puffy with vehemence… an old man fizzing with indignation, over something only he cared about. And there were Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi and all the rest, staring at me. What a ludicrous figure I must have cut, crying out my testament as though anyone there would believe it! In disgust I snarled and twisted away, as if when I could not see my reflection, they could not see me.

But I had been there, and I remembered.

Petrini, pleading in his let’s-be-reasonable tone: “A three-hundred-year-old memory, Hjalmar? Again you must agree, it’s not very strong evidence.”

I shrugged, wishing to escape. “When human witness becomes weak evidence we’re in bad trouble. I say it happened. I was here, I saw it. That’s how we make history, by eyewitness accounts. That’s what the samizdat are.”

“Even the green Martian one?” Petrini said gently. “Besides, we are archaeologists.”

I shook my head, stared around at the dark apartments, desperation filling me, flooding me. “We are amnesiacs,” I cried. Helplessly I saw again the rock behind the door, the dome falling. My students watched me tensely, ready for an opportunity to extricate me from my folly; they didn’t believe me any more than Petrini did.

Graben — a depressed crustal block, bounded by faults on its long sides.

Once I said nearly the same thing to the Shrike. We were up in his bedroom on the eightieth floor of the Barnard Tower, and he adjusted the wall-sized window so we could see out. He stood before the glass watching a big Arctic eagle gliding on the stiff wind coursing over Alexandria. From the bed I observed his supple back, the curve of his buttock against the bruised sky and the last flare of the dusk mirrors’ sunset. Below the myriad city lights blinked on. “We’re amnesiacs, Shrike,” I said to him. I call him Shrike (he doesn’t get it); his real name is Alexander Graham Selkirk (his father’s best joke). So I watched him there at his island’s window lighting a pipe, and I said, “We’re amnesiacs, it doesn’t matter what we do. It doesn’t matter what you do, Shrike. You won’t remember it in a century.”

“By that time I doubt I’ll care,” he said, expelling the fruity smoke of his pipe. “Why should I? Besides, there’s always the memory drugs.”

“They don’t work.”

He shrugged. “It depends on how particular you are when you say work. Besides, what can you do? Would you rather be dead?” He puffed energetically. “It’s just the way things are.”

“Sometimes I get so tired of things as they are. Look down there at all those people in the street, Shrike. Can you see them?”

“They look like ants.”

“Very original. And that’s how you think of them, too. The workers, the poor, the miners who make this planet profitable to its owners on Earth — what do you care for them? You live up here like Syrtis grass in its sheath of ice, shielded from the grubby Martian world and all its ants.”

“You’re up here too, aren’t you.”

“Who wouldn’t be if they could? But we’re all bound in the same system. We struggle in our casings and then forget whatever efforts we make.”

“The way you describe it, perhaps it’s better that way.”

“Bah. Have you ever been poor, I mean Martian poor?”

“Yes. I was born in a mine, actually. And grew up in a mining-camp.”

“And do you remember it?”

“Of course not. Can’t say I’d care to.”

“You’d rather stay sheathed in privilege.”

He nodded. “And so would you. Please — don’t protest. How often you’ve said all this. Get comfortable and you start feeling guilty. Is that why you like going off on those awful digs all the time? And now you’re being kept from it? But don’t be cross. You’ll get your dig, I’ll see to that.”

“You haven’t been on the Committee long enough to see to anything,” I said. “You’ve got a century more of running errands first. And the Committee will let me go to New Houston as soon as I’m no longer department chair, and no sooner.”

He smiled sardonically. “But they will let you go. And you’ll know who to thank.”

“Oh yes,” I said, and threw myself back against the big pillows, “I’ll know. But how will I thank you, Shrike? What can poor I, lowly professor at university, give you? You who have—” I waved out at the vast lit map of Alexandria.

He shrugged, a beautiful movement to watch — a movement I tried to imitate in my own affairs. “You do fine. I like your company.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Sometimes I don’t either!” He laughed. “Usually you aren’t this cranky.”

“Ach—” I looked away. “I’m your pet scientist, and we both know it. How many other pets do you keep.”

The silence stretched on. Shrike stepped to the music console, pushed buttons, and the very slowest version of “Django” made its melancholy beginning. When he saw I was watching him again he pointed his pipe at me. “How many other governors do you keep?”

“None!”

He laughed at me, went back to the window. “Perhaps it’s best we forget our pasts. How much could we be saddled with before we buckled under the stupidity of it all?”

“Perhaps we would learn to do better.”

“Perhaps. But I doubt it. Meanwhile, we have no choice. Think of your dig, Hjalmar. When you get to New Houston you’ll be in your element, out in nowhere land up to your elbows in mud and junk, putting together ancient history like a puzzle. What could be nicer?” He laughed again, and again he was laughing at me, but something in it — his pleasure at his own charm — and the sight of him, and the view over the city and Noctis Labyrinthus beyond, and the music, all filled me and forced a turn in my mood. Or something did. Often my moods shift on their own, for no reason I can tell. But frequently Shrike has something to do with it. “Come back to bed?”

Densely Cratered Terrain — the central and southern uplands are as much as a hundred times more cratered than the plains of the north, and are over 3.9 billion years old.

Excavation is slow work. Each dig becomes a little culture of its own, formed partly by the digger’s culture, partly by what they find. McNeil estimated that there were 3,500 buildings on the crater floor, and Kalinin guessed 2,000 of them were still standing, and all of them were filled with the artifacts — and sometimes the occupants — of three hundred years before. We built quite a cemetery out on the ejecta shield. Kalinin’s team came across a mass grave containing four hundred and twenty-eight bodies. Most had been shot or killed in explosions, or asphyxiated. Bodies frozen together like packed fish. Satarwal declared they were victims of the rioters. I only had to walk out on him to make my point, and even Petrini looked disbelieving, in the moment when he knew Satarwal wasn’t watching, in the moment when he knew I was.

I hiked up to the crater rim as I had so often before, for the solitude and the view over the great Martian uplands. Those bodies. Where among them were my parents, my sisters? — But it was stupid to think of it. The real problem was to prove the police had destroyed the city. But what in New Houston would prove it?

I was halfway around the rim before I noticed someone trying to catch up to me. A surprise; since my outburst at the Leaky Tap, my reputation as a madman was enough to keep me undisturbed. When I saw it was Hana I slowed down. “What do you want?” I called out.

She joined me without speaking up, then said, “I’ve identified the taggarts in the explosives that brought down the dome.” Her face glowed under the oxygen flowing from her hood’s edge. She was upset. “They’re American.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“But—” She made her mouth into a side-funnel to suck down more oxygen, and her eyes watered. She wanted praise, reassurance, I didn’t know what. “The Americans?”

“Of course.” I was irritated with her naivete. “Who do you think owns this planet?”

“I know,” she protested. “I mean, they back the Committee. But this—”

“This isn’t anything new. That 1776 thing is just a story. America runs an empire, and we’re part of it. The outermost colony.”

“I’m not so sure it’s that simple—”

“A colony, I say! The Committee works directly for the Americans and the Soviets.”

She sat down on a squarish boulder.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’ve heard me say this before.”

“I know, but…” She held up the taggart, stared at it.

“But now you know it’s true.”

She nodded, and I felt sorry for her. But I was angry at her too. She should have believed me before. Wasn’t that why she studied with me, to learn what I had taken the trouble to abstract from this mess of a world? That is the trouble with teaching; students only really believe what they’ve discovered for themselves. You might as well give them a hammer and magnifying glass and throw them into the field.

She sat there like a train had run over her dog. I took a seat on an impact-tortured boulder next to her. Down on the crater floor they were ending the day’s work. Through the sepia haze it looked like a town under construction: half the houses done, the other sites covered with building material.

I tried to explain to her how it had come about. “It’s the worst of the American and Soviet systems that combined here, I’m afraid.” I hefted a shard of compressed basalt. “They wanted the same things out of us, and by the time they were partners down there it was a long established fact up here. And the worst of both systems were the parts that meshed the easiest. So that’s what rules us, and everything else too.”

“I suppose so.”

“Now it was the best of the American and Soviet ways that combined to fight the Committee in 2248, if you ask me. An attempt to enact ideals that never were realized on Earth. But—” I waved the rock at the scene below. “You see what happened to them. And after that they cracked down harder than ever.”

Hana nodded. “But they’re letting up now, don’t you think? I mean, here we are at New Houston. And Publications Review lets through almost everything submitted.”

“They know we’ll censor ourselves before submitting.”

“But not you, or Nakayama, or Lebedyan. And all of you have been published extensively. And people can move wherever they want, now. When the forms come through.”

“Publications Review doesn’t care about the past. Try an anti-Committee editorial and it would be a different story.” I tossed the rock down at the city. “But they are letting up a bit, you’re right.”

“Maybe the Committee is getting more liberal. New members and all.”

Did she mean Shrike? Her face was carefully averted, as she pretended to look down at the city. Perhaps this was a try at a personal comment.

“I think it’s only that they don’t need to keep the reins so tight anymore. They can afford to ease off, and in fact it makes sense. Keeping the happy consciousness, you know. Everybody’s happy.”

“You’re not.”

“Uhn.” There, she was doing it again! What did she mean by it? “Maybe I remember too much,” I said, to put her off; but then I laughed. “Which is funny, because I hardly remember anything.”

She looked up at me curiously. “But you remember the fall of the city?”

“I did remember, that night down in the street. Now I remember that I remembered. Which isn’t the same, but it’s enough.”

“So you want to prove the police did it, because you were there.”

Time for some distance; this was making me uncomfortable. “There are other revisionists working with me. Or in the same direction. Nakayama and Lebedyan are both older than me — I wonder if they didn’t see the truth too, in some other city…”

But she was looking back toward the escalator. “That’s Bill!” She hadn’t heard me. “I wonder if he’s up here after me.”

“You’re the only one, then,” I said, and was immediately shocked at my rudeness. “He’s after you all right,” I heard myself go on, with an inane giggle.

“I like him,” she said sharply.

“That’s good. That makes it easier for him.” I could scarcely believe what I heard; I was making it worse with every word! I stood. “I mean, sorry, I mean that makes it better for him. I — I think I’ll finish my walk now.”

She nodded, still looking back at Bill.

“Those American taggarts will help,” I said. “Very useful part of our case.”

“I’ll write up the results with Bill and Xhosa,” she said evenly, without looking up.

We fragment these ruins against our shore: items brushed and tagged and numbered, laid in neat rows on the floor of the museum tent, as we each play Sherlock Holmes with the junk of the past. Archaeology.

So we dug and we sifted, we cleaned and we squinted, and day followed day and week followed week, in a house-to-house search of the dead city. Loss of air pressure when the dome fell had caused some well sealed houses to explode like popped balloons. Messy. Occasionally we discovered the bodies of police troopers, hidden so well that their fellow soldiers had not found them; and what could we say of them? Satarwal proclaimed them victims of the riots, and had them buried. It was driving me mad. Perhaps we would never disprove the Aimes Report. Perhaps it would stand as part of Martian history forever. History is made by the winners, after all; and it is always the loser’s fault. Eight hundred thousand people killed? A very serious riot indeed, and a treacherous mutiny on the part of the Soviet fleet. Two hundred volumes will show you how it happened, and if you want to know more, perhaps we will send you to do research in the asteroids. Perhaps you do not want to know more? We understand.

And so history is made, because facts are not things. But things make facts or break them, or so the archaeologist believes. For every great lie of history — if we assume they were all caught, which would be wrong — for the Tudors’ Richard III, for the first Soviet century, the Americans’ Truman, the South African war, the Mercury disaster — for each of these lies there had been a revision based on things.

And I swore there would be a revision here too. Satarwal’s sneer: “We can explain every thing you find.” And his Ministry of Truth stood massively behind him, confident because the real history never got written down. But archaeology is the art of reading what did not get written. And things don’t lie.

“The dome fell and suddenly the rim defense is useless,” I said to Hana and Bill and Heidi, one day as we stood in the ruins of the physical plant. “Thousands are dead and the rest are trapped in shelters, and police troops are falling out of the sky. So what do you do? Where do you go?”

“The physical plant here was their last hold-out, right?” said Bill. I regarded him with a skeptical eye; he was quick with the freewheeling theory, slow to back it. “Over the rim from here is what they called Spear Canyon — maybe they used it for cover, and tried to evacuate. Like that note we found seemed to indicate.”

“They’d be seen going over the rim,” I said. “We need something more likely than that.”

Bill shrugged, turned away. And the more I thought of it, the more sense it made. But I said, “Any better ideas?”

“They could have mingled with the civilians and disappeared,” Hana said. “When the police made their final assault they would find no one there.”

“In which case they would roust the civilians and jail all of them. Although that beats getting killed, I admit. The police reported finding thirty-eight people alive” — including me, I thought — “but they might have lied about that too.”

Heidi said, “Kalinin’s team found a burn zone just south of here that they think marks a rocket’s descent — police supply ship, they’re guessing. But maybe the rebels had a ship ready to take off if necessary. Maybe they blasted right out of here.”

“Awfully dangerous,” Hana said.

“They would be shot right down,” I said. “They wouldn’t do something that stupid.”

So they all stood around and looked cross, as if it were my fault they couldn’t think of anything sensible. Though that Spear Canyon was an idea. “No doubt they were captured, executed and shipped out of here,” I said.

Radial fracture-crustal stresses caused by the Tharsis bulge have resulted in an extensive system of fractures in the terrain around it.

The time came for my visit to the gerontologist, and I got the necessary releases from Satarwal and Burroughs, and took a car to the train depot at Coprates Overlook. I took the train into Alexandria, and went to the clinic early one morning.

It was an all-day exam. I spent the usual hour in Dr. Laird’s waiting room, looking at the same old photographs of the Jovian moons. When I walked into his examining room we greeted each other and he went to work in his businesslike way. He had me strip and put me before the gaze of his machines. I drank liquids and stood in front of a battery of mechanical eyes, then was injected and clamped to a slab to submit to more penetrations. Meanwhile pieces of me — blood, urine, feces, saliva, skin, muscle tissue, bone, etc. — were taken away for tests. Dr. Laird then thumped and prodded me with his fingers; primitive stuff, but he appeared to think it necessary. While the samples were being tested and the pictures developed, he pinched my skin in places and asked me questions.

“How’s the tendonitis in the knee.”

“Bad. I’ve felt it more than ever this year.”

“Hmm. Well, we could strip that tendon clean, you know. But I’m not sure you shouldn’t wait a few years.”

“I’ll wait.”

“How have your moods been?”

Naturally I refused to reply to such an impertinent question. But as he continued to prod and pinch, like a plant geneticist testing the roots and leaves of a new hybrid (will this little shrub live on Mars, Dr. Science?) I thought, why not. When they test the plant they need to know how the flower fares.

“My moods have been up and down.” What was the technical terminology for all this? “Out of my control. I’m depressed. I worry about losing it and falling into a funk. Sometimes I feel one coming so clearly… to counteract it I may work too hard, I don’t know. I’m frustrated—”

The nurse came in with the developed pictures, and interrupted my confession. Dr. Laird didn’t seem to mind. He took the pictures from her and pored over them. Still checking them he said slowly, “Your physiological signs don’t show any indication of reduced affectual function. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

It’s worse than reduction, I wanted to say. It’s absence. Total indifference. Thalamic shutdown, and so no new memories. Emotional death.

“Your heart is a little enlarged. How much time are you spending in a centrifuge?”

“None.”

“That’s not quite enough.” A disapproving look. “Humans weren’t made for this gravity, you know. We can do the whole program for your immune system and your cell division accuracy, and you can still ruin it with negligence. I notice also that your facial skin is severely chapped, and your bone calcium deficient,” and so on — going into his usual litany of my ills. It lasted about ten minutes. Then he began writing out prescriptions and giving me “the whole program” for curing these ills, talking as if to somebody else about a plant with problems, a Hokkaido pine with sick needles, broken bark, twisted limbs, stunted roots. He used up almost an entire prescription pad, and we spent half an hour going through the explanation of the drugs and the instructions for their use. Acetylcholine stimulants, new form of vasopressin-equivalent: these drugs were new to me, so perhaps he had been listening to my confession after all. Perhaps there were signs of a funk he hadn’t told me about. “And that tendonitis — I’m going to have you try this,” and he rattled off a new syllabic witches’ brew for me. “Remember — take care of yourself, and you’ve got an endlessly replicating system, there. Think about that. If you don’t take care, nothing else is going to matter.” A friendly shake of the hand. Good little shrub. “See you next year.”

I put my clothes on and walked into the waiting room. Mimas’s bull’s-eye crater stared at me from its poster like the Cyclops. I looked at the sheaf of prescriptions in my hand.

Things as they are have been destroyed…

I could not stand to be in fleshy hothouse Alexandria that night, and I walked to the station to take the very next train east, back to New Houston. In the station I stopped in the drug store and got my prescriptions filled.

Once we were taut bowstrings, vibrant on the bow of mortality — now the bow has been unstrung, and we lie limp, and the arrow has clattered to the ground.

Graben

But then I left the station and went back into the city, to see Shrike. That night we had dinner in an Indian restaurant in the lower part of the city, where canals alternate with industrial plants and tenement dormitories, and the poor live everywhere, even under the bridges where the icy canals abrade their skin until the sores look like leprosy. Of course they could get a prescription for it, if they could afford it.

“It’s like Soviet history,” I said on one of the canal bridges.

Shrike stopped at the bridge’s peak. Above us between the shabby dormitories the sky was marbled like a jar of marmalade. “What is?”

“We are. Right after the 1917 revolution the Bolsheviks set up the government, and it ruled the country. Then Lenin built up the party until it was his tool. To get into the government you had to be in the party first, so the party lay on top of the government and was the real power system. Then when Stalin took over, he built the security network as his personal power base. It didn’t matter if you were in the party or not — it was the secret police had the power, and Stalin controlled the police. So there was a three-tiered system. Khrushchev’s big reform was to dismantle the secret police, and return the power to the Communist party. So it was back to two tiers.”

“How are we like that?” Shrike said, peering closely at the tenements surrounding us, looking into an open window where a woman washed clothes.

“You can see it as well as I! The first power system on Mars was the individual rule of the corporations here. The Committee was convened first to be no more than an information pool for the corporations and the Soviets. But the Russians and Americans decided to use the Committee to get control of the planet away from the corporations.”

“That would be like Lenin’s use of the party?” Shrike said, his voice mocking me with faked interest.

“Right.”

“It’s not a very close analogy, is it.”

“Close enough. And the third step was when the Committee took over all planetary policy — took over the legislative, executive, and judicial powers. At that point Chairman Sarionovich — Kremlin-trained, remember — set up his own five-year plans, overstressing the Martian economy and of course the people, to prove to the two superpowers that we could make them money if he was given a free hand. And they gave him a free hand, and he increased the size and power of the police enormously to accomplish his goals. And so we got the Unrest.”

“And now?” Shrike asked, humoring me. “Are we like Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Kerens?”

“Brezhnev was nongovenment. Confusion and corruption, even when he was healthy. And Andropov and Chernenko were still in the push and pull with the Americans. I’d say you’re most like Kerens.”

Shrike contemplated me with a big O of mockery rounding his lips. “Why, Hjalmar! What a compliment! That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in months, are you sure you spoke correctly?”

“Ach,” I said. “Quit being an ass and listen.”

“I know. I’m not taking your history lesson seriously. But to tell the truth I find the analogy stretched. Don’t you find historical analogies a bit… artificial? And you’re distracting me from my walk.”

“So you look around when you walk in this district! I should think you would turn away, to keep your conscience clean.”

“My righteous professor,” Shrike said with a wide grin. “My holy professor who shuns all the privileges of his class, and devotes every moment of his life to ending social injustice—”

“Shut up—”

“Who can’t imagine any other way of working for change than moaning and groaning from the top of his ivory tower, and digging about in the dirt.” By the width of his grin I saw I had angered him, and that surprised me.

“So I’ve hit a sore spot,” I said.

“No! You’ve hit unfairly, as usual. You bitch at me every time we meet, as if it’s impossible for me to be in pursuit of anything but personal power. And then you take advantage of my work every day of your life. So ungrateful.” He grinned again. “Perhaps I am tired of you, Hjalmar. Perhaps I am tired of working for your good and being nagged about it too. Perhaps you should not have bothered me this evening at all.”

But even in the dusk he could see the fear on my face, and after a moment’s scrutiny he laughed. “Come back to my place, Hjalmar, and teach me some more ancient history. And leave the righteousness in the canal. You’re doing no better than any of the rest of us.”

And later that night, in bed, I woke from a doze and said, “Can you get rid of Satarwal for me? He’s dangerous, I think.”

“How so?” He was half asleep,

“He hates me. It’s gone beyond obstructing my efforts, he wants to destroy them — he’ll do anything. He’s plotting with Petrini against me.”

“We’ll see. Maybe I’ve put him out there to keep you on your toes, eh, Hjalmar? To keep you sharp?” And he fell asleep.

Olympus Mons — he tallest volcano in the solar system; its peak is 27 kilometers above the datum, and its volume is one hundred times that of the largest terran volcano, Mauna Loa.

One day I ordered my team over the crater rim and into the rift once called Spear Canyon, to do a survey. Bill Strickland gave me an aggrieved look, as if because he had once mentioned the canyon I was obliged to acknowledge him every time the matter came up. Irritably I sent him packing, to complete the gathering of equipment; for this Hana gave me a piercing glare.

New Houston was set in a “splosh crater,” meaning the ejecta shield is made of lobes of what was fluidized material directly after the impact. The shield is thus an even surface, except for a narrow rift created by two lobes of fluid being split by some prominence that was later buried by the falling ballistic ejecta of the rim. This rift or canyon broadens to split the shield’s low outer rampart, so it opens up directly onto the surrounding plain. Altogether it seemed to me a promising avenue of escape for any party trying to slip away from the crater unobtrusively.

I led my team down the outside of the rim, switchbacking from ledge to ledge down the broken slope. The drop was about one in two, but the use of ledges as ramps made it an easy walk, down pitted rock sheets that lapped over each other like insulating tiles. Behind me the others remarked at the cold; it was a windy day, and most of them wore masks and goggles. But I enjoyed the chill of the harsh wind on me (Dr. Laird would be angry). The sky was the color of old paper; it made a fine dome to hike under.

We explored the length of the canyon, through the break in the rampart and onto the boulder-covered plain. In several places we found remnants of a road that had been cut into the south slope of the canyon. Landslides covered the majority of this road, but near the upper end of the canyon a good stretch of it was clear. The entire team stood on this trace and looked back up at the rim. “It must have switchbacked to the top,” Bill said.

“Or stopped in this little cirque,” I suggested, “where an escalator could take them up to the dome.”

“Possibly,” said Bill with a shrug.

“I wonder why they cut the road into the slope when the landslide danger was so great,” Hana said.

“Mass wasting is a hundred times faster now,” I said irritably. “They built for the erosion of their time.”

Bill and Xhosa took off down the course of the road with metal detectors and seismic probes, intent on mapping what they could. The others dug away at the edges of the slides, and searched the bottom of the canyon, where intermittent ice creeks alternated with slides that had filled the canyon and pushed up the other side. We would have stayed until dark, but the wind was rising. Plumes of sand spindrifted off the rim above us, turning the sun a dull copper and obscuring its troop of mirrors entirely. “We’d better get back,” I shouted. “We can continue when the weather improves.” For the weather satellite photos had shown a cyclonic system approaching.

So we hiked back over the rim, across the city and over the escalator to camp, swathed in masks and goggles for the final descent down a slope made invisible by the flow of wind-driven sand. The next day the storm broke in earnest, and we were trapped in camp for ten days while thick sandhail pummeled the tents and drifted against their windward sides. For my group it was a long wait, particularly since none of the old maps showed a road in Spear Canyon, implying that it had been built in the city’s last days. When the storm broke we were ordered by Satarwal to help dig the camp out of the mud, and that took three more days.

On the afternoon of the third day Hana and Xhosa and I went up to the crater rim to look at the dome foundation above Spear Canyon, and check for signs of an escalator. The foundation was battered in this area, and Hana was giving one of her munitions lectures when something caught my eye. I stared down Spear Canyon, which snaked away from its head about half a kilometer down from the rim. There in the clear post- storm light, had something blinked? Some light had winked at me. I moved my head about experimentally, and there it was again: blink. Reflected sunlight, as yellow as fire. On the south slope. “Have either of you got a pair of binoculars?” I said, interrupting Hana.

“There’s one in my tool box,” Hana said. “What is it?”

“Something down there.” I took the binoculars from their case. “Do you see a mirror down there, reflecting light at us? Here, stand where I was standing. On the road, about halfway down what we can see.” I looked through the binoculars and focused them, fingers slipping in my haste.

“No light,” Xhosa said.

“No, but the sun’s moved, and it was small. Look there. There’s a new slide, just above the road.” Magnified twenty times, the slide was clearly a fresh one, dark brown and sharp-edged at the top and sides. “You should be able to see it even without the glasses, it’s dark—”

“About halfway down,” Hana said. “I think I see the slide, anyway.”

The newly exposed face had the shimmery holographic look of things seen through binoculars. Something floated through the superimposed rings of vision, and I veered back to it. Near the upcanyon edge of the slide something — a regular shape, rust-colored, just darker than the smectite clay… something smooth, rounded, with a shiny patch in it, like glass. I moved from side to side, and the patch flared gold.

“By God.” I cleared my throat. “I think it’s — a hut or something. Take a look.” I gave the glasses to Xhosa. Hana was shading her eyes, staring at it. “I definitely see the slide.”

“I see it,” Xhosa said. “Close to the upper end of the slide?”

“Yes.”

“That’s about where the road would be,” he said, and handed the glasses to Hana. He and I looked at each other.

“Let’s get down there,” I said.

“I’ll radio for help,” Xhosa said, hurrying to the tool box. “It won’t take long for them to catch up.”

“I see it!” Hana said. “It looks like a field car to me.”

When Xhosa was done radioing for reinforcements we hopped down the ledges of the rim slope like we were in a race. When we got to the head of the rift we jogged down the road. Halfway there we had to slow down and catch our breath. I turned up the oxygen supply from my suit and instructed the others to do the same. We hurried again, and after a short scramble came to the wet, rime-crusted rubble at the bottom of the new slide. A stiff climb up the canyon’s side brought us as close to the object I had spotted as we could get without stepping on the new slide.

“It is a car,” Hana said.

“Looks like burn marks on the front end there, see?” Xhosa pointed.

That stopped us for a moment; the implication was clear, and I saw foreboding mix with the anticipation on the others’ faces. We had all found too many bodies.

I stepped onto the broken clay to test the stability of the slide. The clay was soft, and it seemed possible I might start another slide by walking on it. The car was only five or six meters from the slide’s edge, and I wanted badly to reach it before anyone else arrived. Carefully I tamped a footprint down until it was ankle deep; stepped onto it, and tamped down the next one.

“Maybe you should wait,” Hana said.

“We’ll still have to do this.”

“But it would be safer if you were roped to us.”

“It seems solid enough.”

And so it was. I continued very slowly, and was only a meter or two from the car when a large group came bounding down the canyon, all talking at once. “We scanned this section with a metal detector,” Bill said peevishly. “I wonder how we missed this.”

“Did you bring any rope?” I called.

“We brought everything,” Petrini said. “Have you found buried treasure?”

“Maybe so,” Hana said sharply.

“An old field car, slightly burned,” I said. “Throw me one end of a rope, please.” Now that a rope was available I felt exposed. Bill threw an end to me, and I tied it around my chest, just under my arms. Upcanyon McNeil and two students were hurrying to reach us. I stepped the final distance to the car, checked beneath a rear wheel to see what kind of ground it rested on, and found it was on the edge of the buried road. I hiked back over the slide, finding it solider than it felt before the rope’s arrival, and took a holo camera from McNeil. Then I retraced my steps.

The door of the car still had its plastic window intact; it was this that had reflected the sunlight and drawn my eye. I cleared the window of a film of dirt, and peered inside. An empty interior; it looked like a little cave in the canyonside. The windshield was crazed but still intact. The opposite door’s window was gone, and dirt spilled through it onto the floor of the car.

“Any bodies?” Petrini asked. Always the first question at New Houston.

“No bodies.” It was an eight-passenger car, and the last two seats held boxes. I tried the door; it gave and opened with a loud creak. I reached in and put the holo camera on its stand, set for six holos. When the six beeps had sounded I took the camera out, and carefully tested the floor of the car with my foot. “Don’t disturb anything!” McNeil said.

“Oh, McNeil!” several voices cried in unison. The car was firm as bedrock, and I stepped in to look at the boxes in the back.

“They’re full of papers,” I said, but no one heard me. I could hear my pulse hammering in my ears. Folders, notebooks, plastic sheaves, computer disks, folded maps, blueprints. I picked up a box and carried it outside, hefted it and walked on my prints one more time.

“There’s going to be a time when you’ll want it all in the position you found it, that’s all I’m saying,” McNeil muttered. But he looked in the box as curiously as the rest of us when I set it down. And when I returned with the next one he was on his knees with Petrini, poring over the contents.

As I picked up the last box, I noticed a notebook on the floor of the car, nearly buried by the spill of dirt from the broken window. It was a little plastic-covered spiral bound thing, and I almost missed it. I pulled it free, knocked some dirt from it, and carried it across the slide clamped in between glove and box. When I put the box down I kept the notebook in my hand, and showed it to the others. “This was free on the floor.”

“Here’s a news poster signed at the bottom by an Andrew Jones of the Washington- Lenin Alliance,” Hana said from her crouch over one of the boxes. She showed it to Petrini, who read it swiftly, eyebrows lifted.

I was shivering; from the cold, from my excitement, I couldn’t tell. I put the notebook in one of the boxes. “Let’s get all this back to camp,” I said. “I’m running low on oxygen.” I looked at the group of clay-smeared people around me, and I couldn’t help smiling. “There’s a lot of work here.”

Lava Channels

Plans for the city’s defense; tapes and xeroxes of communications with the Washington-Lenin Alliance in other cities, and in space; lists of people, casualties, weapons, supplies; partial accounts of the revolution in New Houston and the Nirgal Vallis, and around Mars; memos from the Johnson still stations; and maps, including one of the east or lower end of Valles Marineris.

McNeil organized and catalogued as the little boxes were emptied, and he handed each piece or bundle of paper to an eagerly waiting scientist. Almost everyone in the expedition was in the main commons, helping to figure out what we had. Two Xerox machines were working full time to copy everything, several computer consoles were in action, and a cassette player suddenly spoke in voices obscured by radio crackle. The excitement in the air was as palpable as the smell of the copiers. Satarwal was there too, grimly working to appear unconcerned. Few people met his eye, or addressed a comment to him.

As for me — I felt as if I were dreaming. Kalinin and McNeil clapped me on the shoulders, and Kalinin said, “This is it right here, Nederland. You’ve got your proof.”

Hana heard this and looked downcast. I didn’t understand this; but then, reflecting on it, I thought I did. I followed her to the coffee machine in the hall.

“He’s wrong, you know. We’ll need every bit of supporting physical evidence that we can find.” So that her taggarts would still mean something, you see.

And the way she smiled at me I knew I had guessed what troubled her. She had felt what I would have felt in her place; and I had figured it out and done something about it to help. I don’t know if I am less able than other people to understand my fellow humans, but I suspect it is so. It happened so seldom like this, to see someone’s face and know what they felt! Elation bloomed in me like a flower, and impulsively I shook Hana’s hand. Even the sight of Petrini and Satarwal conferring down the hall could do nothing to dampen my mood. I returned to the main commons and wandered, looking over shoulders and congratulating students right and left for their good work, causing a growing ripple of smiles and laughter. I shook hands with McNeil, who was still cataloguing. Behind him the Kleserts were leaning over a table, absorbed in one of the notebooks. “It’s like reading Scott’s journal,” Claudia said.

Satarwal came back into the room, and I approached him. “This material implies a cover-up by the Aimes Commission, you know,” I said in a friendly way. “Aimes and many of the witnesses are still in government service. Questions are going to have to be asked.” And the answers will make heads roll! I wanted to add. Satarwal gave me a cold look, and Petrini joined him.

Petrini, looking over at Satarwal to be sure he had it right, said, “We feel that even though the rioters here in New Houston obviously fancied themselves part of a larger thing, it is still a question whether any planet-wide revolution was planned. Especially given the great bulk of evidence to the contrary in the Aimes Report.”

But it only made me laugh, at the time. I was too happy for such nonsense to disturb me. “You people will try to explain away anything. But how much longer can you carry it off?”

So I ignored them and went back to it. Bill Strickland was repacking one of the boxes of Xeroxes under McNeil’s direction. He had a worried look on his face, and he said to me, “We should re-scan the whole south slope of Spear Canyon. There may be other things we missed.”

“You do that.” I saw by his elbow the little plastic notebook that had lain free on the floor of the car. Curiously I picked it up and tucked it under my arm; I had forgotten about it, and now I wanted to have a look at it. McNeil asked me where the boxes of duplicates should be sent; and that took a while. “Hiroko Nakayama and Anya Lebedyan will really enjoy these.” Then there were more questions concerning the car from Kalinin, and a quick meal, eaten on our feet; then Hana wanted me to look at one of the city maps found in the first box, which showed that the Leaky Tap tavern had been one of the neighborhood defense centers. With these and other matters a few hours passed, and it was not until everyone but McNeil and I had gone to bed that I got a chance to sit down with the notebook and look at it. “You’ve had this copied?” I asked McNeil.

“Several times.”

So I opened the dirty blue cover. The first page was blank; the second filled with careful, pointy handwriting.

The first indication I had of the mutiny came as we approached the inner limit of the first asteroid belt. Of course I didn’t know what it meant at the time; it was no more than a locked door.

I followed the crabbed lines of script rapidly. “Emma Weil,” I said, looking up at McNeil. “Have I heard that name before?”

“Hellas?” he said, without looking up. “I think she helped design the first city over the reservoir. I repaired the plumbing there once — it was good work for that time. I think she disappeared in the Unrest.”

“Well, I’ve found her again. It says here she was on a mining ship.”

“So how did she end up here?”

“I don’t know yet.”

McNeil came over to my table. “Where’s a duplicate of that?”

I laughed. “Did I hear that from McNeil?” I went back to reading. McNeil found a duplicate of the journal, and joined me.

So a Mars Starship Association had started their own private revolution, using the larger one on Mars to cover their theft of three miners, their construction of a starship…“That Soviet fleet,” I said in wonder, and McNeil was far enough along to nod his agreement. “Have you ever heard of this Mars Starship Association?”

McNeil shook his head. “I just heard of it two pages ago.”

He looked up. “This is really something!”

“I know.” And once I got to the point where Weil agreed to help the mutineers construct their jury-rigged starship, curiosity got the better of me, and I began skimming the pages to discover what happened next. Evading the police — readying the starship — departing for deep space — each incident set me reading faster, until Emma Weil returned to a Mars in the throes of revolution. At that point I slowed, and read with care. I cannot well describe my emotions as I made my way through the last part of her journal; each sentence seemed to answer some question I had, so that I was galvanized repeatedly by shocks of confirmation or surprise. It was as if her voice spoke to me in direct revelation, as if I had stumbled on the greatest samizdat account of them all. I was completely unprepared for the end of the account; on one page she was detailing their plans for the escape from the city, and the next page was blank. The notebook was only two-thirds full. I closed it slowly, thinking hard.

“Looks like they didn’t make it,” McNeil said. He had skimmed even faster than I. “Those burn marks — the car must have been hit.”

“True.” I stood to walk around. “But there weren’t any bodies in the car. Maybe the car was hit, and in their hurry they left all this.”

“Maybe.”

“Where’s that map of the chaotic terrain east of Marineris?”

“Second box, top. But it’s such a small scale map, it couldn’t have been used to lead them to anything. The marks may just be water stations.”

“Same problem for them, though.” I found the map and opened it. Topographic map in faint brown lines, marking the unmistakable forms of the eastern end of Valles Marineris, and the patches of chaotic terrain farther east; and in this wordless forest of closely set lines were four small red dots, three in the southern border of one of the sinks of chaos, and the fourth in its center. Without print I could not immediately name the sink, but a quick check with a planetary map was enough to recognize it; the red dots were in the Aureum Chaos, a deep sink of what was still untouched wilderness. “Maybe this was a general map, and they took the local ones with them.”

“Maybe.”

I folded the map and placed it in the notebook. “A starship! Can you believe it?”

“No. No wonder she thought they were crazy.”

“Yes.” But I liked the spirit of the group, their resistance to the Committee. “I wonder how they did.”

“Weil was a good designer. If they had the fuel, and the supplies, they might have gone a long way. But who knows how far they would have to go. What did they think they would find? Another Earth?”

“Or another Mars. They were desperate people.” Their hatred of the Committee — I knew the feeling, but I had never acted on it. All my work only helped the Committee. What had prodded them to action? What kept me from it? “Is there a spare copy of the journal?”

“Over on the far table.”

I walked over and picked up a copy, took it to our mail slots, shoved it savagely into Satarwal’s tray, where it wedged firmly. “I don’t think he’s gotten a chance to see this yet.”

McNeil smiled. “The prize of the dig. Martian history won’t be the same.”

“Yes.” I was warm all through, and I knew I was flushed dirt red and grinning like a clown, but I didn’t care. I clutched Emma Weil’s journal to my stomach and waggled my other hand speechlessly. It felt so strange to have what I wanted. An empty camp commons, tables covered with boxes and papers, lights faintly pulsing, coffeemaker faintly buzzing, a single colleague hunched wearily over a chair in the midnight calm: such a familiar scene in my life, and yet now utterly transformed by the words pressed against me. Now I was the victor in a strewn battlefield, the dreamer standing in his dream realized. “I almost… I almost lost hope.” McNeil cocked his head at me, showing he was listening with the relaxed economy of a tired man. “But I didn’t! And—” I felt the grin grow across my face again. “I’m going to go to bed and read this thing properly.”

And so I did. That was the second reading. And how many times since then have I lain down at night to be with Emma Weil, and read her mind, and feel her anger and hope, and wonder fearfully at the blank pages, with their unwritten message concerning her survival and whereabouts, I would not care to guess. A hundred times, perhaps, perhaps more. I lived with that notebook, and Emma Weil became part of my mind, so that I often wondered (fearfully) what she would have made of me, and a day never passed when I didn’t think of her. But I never read her again as I did on that first night, when I trembled uncontrollably in my bed at the shock of it, and each successive phrase was like a window into another person’s mind — like a new world.

Within the week dozens of reporters joined us, and the students guided them down Spear Canyon to look at the field car, which had been completely excavated and pulled out of landslide danger. The car appeared on all the Martian holo stations. I observed this activity with great interest; Public Information and Publications Review were letting all of these reports on the air, and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Satarwal’s bosses in Planetary Survey had not released any statements concerning the find, and until they did we wouldn’t learn how they planned to deal with it. I answered reporters’ questions over and over: “Some of this evidence contradicts the Aimes Report, yes. No. I can’t explain it. Speculate? You can do that as well as I. Probably better.” Soon the reporters were off to Burroughs, to question Aimes himself; but Aimes refused comment. And the Committee and all its subcommittees stayed silent. Still, since they had allowed the dig to take place, they surely had plans to deal with a discovery like this. I waited to see what they were.

Satarwal threw his copy of Emma’s journal back on my desk. “Bad luck for her, to fall in with such fools.”

I smiled. “One might say the same of you.” I tried to hide my sense of triumph over him, but it may be I failed. “You see, there was a Washington-Lenin Alliance fighting you.”

He grimaced. “No matter what they called themselves, they were still murderers.”

Then a few days later he was recalled to Burroughs. He had all of his policemen pack up, and they left together, in the cars of the last group of reporters. What the reporters made of the opportunity I never discovered. I did not go out to see them off.

A few days after that, word arrived that Petrini and I had been made codirectors of the dig. No mention of Satarwal. With this announcement came news of a press conference to be held in the state office in Burroughs. We gathered to watch it on the holo in the main commons. Petrini shook my hand. “Now we are codirectors, as we should have been from the start.”

“And with so much left to do,” I said; but he took me seriously.

The Committee’s spokesman was Shrike. I moved to the back of the commons to watch him, feeling uncomfortable under the eyes of the others in the room.

Shrike was as languid and charming as always with the press, and they loved it. He looked down at the podium, composing his features to an official seriousness: a lean, silver-haired man in a very expensive gray suit; small silver rings on each little finger and in each earlobe; sharp nose, thick eyebrows, dark blue eyes. He read a statement first. “The recent finds in the excavation of New Houston are an exciting and moving addition to our knowledge of one of the most troubled times in Martian history. Those months of 2248 called the Unrest were a time of great suffering and heroism, and this new account of the brave defense of a beleaguered city is inspiring to all of us who love Mars. The men and women who fought for New Houston were struggling for the rights and privileges that we now take for granted, and it is partly because of their sacrifices that we enjoy the free and open lives that we now live. We commend the fine archaeologists of the Planetary Survey and the University of Mars for their historic discovery.”

And he looked directly into the cameras, knowing that I would be watching — so that I could feel the shock of his mocking smile, and know it was meant for me.

First news woman: “Mr. Selkirk, don’t these discoveries, particularly the proof of the existence of the Washington-Lenin Alliance, contradict the conclusions of the Aimes Commission Report on the Unrest?”

“Not at all,” Shrike said cheerfully. “If you will read the Aimes Report again” — he stopped to allow the laugh he had drawn to extend as far as possible, smiling a little — “you will see that it concludes that there was a well-organized revolt against the legal authority on Mars, led by the Soviet mining fleet. The Commission never found the name of this organization, but the new discoveries in New Houston do substantiate what the Commission found. Eminent historians such as Hiroko Nakayama and Hjalmar Nederland have been working for years to identify the secret organizers of the Unrest, and in fact it was Nederland who discovered the so-called ‘escape car’ outside New Houston. In the same way other historians have been exploring the connections between the Unrest and the reforms made in Martian government in the century following the Unrest.”

And the reporters nodded faithfully and whispered their approval into their wrist recorders, for the general populace, still in the mines and dormitories, to hear.

So they would explain it all away.

I left the room feeling sick. They would admit what they had to, and twist everything else to fit their new story, which would constantly change, constantly protect them. I tasted defeat like copper coating my tongue. Every thing I stabbed them with they would accommodate with elastic facts, until the thing was absorbed and dissolved.

But I had expected it. I was prepared for something of the sort; I had already made plans to keep stabbing away. Still, it had been a shock to hear Shrike lie like that. My old heart fluttered and my stomach clenched, and though I wanted to leave the main tent I had to sit down for a while first. Even though I had known perfectly well they would do something like this.

The computer link-up to Alexandria told me a little about Emma Weil. She was born in the Galle Crater camp on the rim of the Argyre basin, in 2168. Her parents divorced and she lived with her father. She studied mathematics on the campus in Burroughs, led the ecologic engineers designing the Hellas basin complex, broke records in four middle- distance runs. When the Committee took over the mining fleets in 2213 she was shifted from Royal Dutch to the center for development of life-support systems, then shifted again to active duty on the miners. The records for the asteroid mining projects were incomplete, because of damage to offices and archives in the Unrest; I found no account of Rust Eagle, or of Emma after 2248. And there was no comment on her disappearance.

For Oleg Davydov, I could find only a listing in the Birth Registry (born on Deimos in 2159) and an appointment as a rocketry and guidance cadet in the Soviet mining fleet. After that, nothing: no appointments, no trial, no command of Hidalgo. No mention of Hidalgo, either.

And I could find nothing whatsoever concerning the Mars Starship Association. Not a single word about it.

Clearly the censors had been at work. But the documentation of Martian history was damaged and disorganized for good by the Unrest. Pockets of information exist in odd places, and it is seldom the censors can catch everything. It would take a more extensive, on-site search than I could make from New Houston, but I thought that if I had some time in Alexandria, I might be able to ferret out more. I had done it before.

I gave up on that aspect of things and switched back to Emma. I had a picture of her sent out, one taken at the beginning of her mining service. She had an oval face, a serious mouth, brown hair and eyes, fine cheekbones and jaw; I liked her look. I stared at that photo for many a night, and read her journal, I hated the Mars Development Committee as much as I hated anything, I hated their lies; that they were taking over power to make a better life on an alien planet etc. etc. Everyone knew that was a lie. But we kept our mouths shut; talk too much and you might get relocated in Texas. Or on Amor. The members of the MSA had compensated with a stupid plan, but they resisted! And me? I didn’t even have the guts to tell my friends how I felt. I had thought cowardice was the norm, and that made it okay, and so I sat in my plush university apartment writing papers about events three hundred years past, pretending I was the fiercest anti-Committee man on the planet, while I lapped up every sop they threw me, and fawned for the favors of a Committee member. What kind of resistance was that? What had I ever done but gesture and shout, before rulers who tolerated me and smiled behind their hands to hear one of the professors at it again. Oh Emma! I wanted to be like her, I wanted to be able to act.

Nakayama and Lebedyan and several others rose up in protest against the Committee’s claim that what we had found in New Houston could be squared with the Aimes Report. Criticisms were flying in from every direction, and I only needed to stand aside and help orchestrate it, and keep records. Parts of Emma’s journal were released by the university to the newspapers, and the whole thing was published soon after; it became a bit of a best-seller. It seemed there was a public intrigued by this news from their own forgotten pasts, at least for a week or two. Anya Lebedyan gave me a call to congratulate me and ask some questions, and without hesitation she began the conversation in Russian; I felt a thrill to speak in the language of the samizdat. I found I spoke Mars’s underground language as fluently as I read it, though I could not remember the long-ago life in which I had learned it.

Out on the rim on a cloudy day: chocolate thunderheads scudded north, and thick bolts of lightning alternated with shafts of buttery sunlight. Then the clouds flattened out and covered everything like a rumpled blanket, and it was evening all afternoon. Below me my team worked in the dead city. Strolling the rim ridge I examined its texture as if I could see the world beneath the rock. Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” floated through my mind. Down at the physical plant Hana and Bill discussed something intently. They paid more attention to each other than to their work. I hiked down the rock ledges to Spear Canyon, descended the canyon to the field car. Climbed in and sat down.

Here Emma Weil had once sat, perhaps in the very seat I was occupying. It had been night; their lights would have been off as they inched down the road with the canyon dropping away to their left. Police artillery hammering at the city. Hearts hammering inside spacesuits that are no shield against shrapnel or bullet or heat beam. The electric motors are silent, and no helicopters fly in the primal atmosphere; but somewhere, on the rim perhaps, heat-seeking automatic artillery has turned in its bed, aimed and fired, and some cars explode, others are damaged and halt, still others, perhaps, turn off their motors and coast down the canyon, rolling to freedom.

Some of them undoubtedly were killed. But there had been no bodies in this car. If the police had removed the bodies, they would have taken the papers as well. The same was true of the rebels. Since we found the papers, no bodies had been removed. Thus the explosion that stopped the car had not killed the occupants. Or so one line of reasoning could lead one to conclude. And it appealed to me, oh yes, it appealed to me. Sitting there on the crackly frozen plastic seat I tried to feel what had happened to her; and in my vision she lived. There was no sense of death in that car. Perhaps she had only lived long enough to crawl out of the car, so that her body lay in the soil of her beloved planet just meters from me. But no. The metal detectors would have indicated her suit. No, she had escaped. Escaped to the hills. Not dead, not my Emma.

I took out the small photo of her that I carried in my suit pocket, and smoothed it over my thigh. They had been headed for refuges in the chaos, where they very well might have hidden, from that day to this. Emma still alive, working with her biogeocenosis on the planet she loved.

And it occurred to me that I might find her.

Impact crater — with a diameter of 2,000 kilometers, Hellas Basin is the largest impact crater on Mars.

Then came the discovery on Pluto. It was Strickland who brought word out to us in the city. We were digging out a defensive center that had been bombed flat, and I was down with Xhosa attaching crane cables to a beam we had cleared. “Dr. Nederland! Hana! There’s news in from Burroughs,” and crunch he jumped over the rubble and into the cellar with us. We stared at him, surprised, and he drew up like a policeman at attention.

“What is it,” I said.

Hana looked into the cellar and Bill turned to her. I thought that in his agitation there was a certain pleasure. “They’ve found a monument on Pluto. The Outer Satellites Council sent the first manned expedition out last year, and they’ve just arrived and found some sort of monument. Rectangular beams of ice set on their ends, in a big circle. Apparently it looks very old—”

“But that’s crazy!” Hana said.

“I know! Why do you think I ran over here shouting and all?” Bill sat on the ground, dialed up his oxygen flow.

“It is crazy,” Xhosa said. “Somebody must have…”

“Come back to the tents and see,” Bill said. “They sent pictures.”

So we dropped our work as if it were nothing, and followed him back to camp. The main tent was already filled with people, and the clamor of voices assaulted us as we entered; it had never been so loud in there. I barged through the crowd and wedged into the group surrounding the largest table. Several photos were being passed from hand to hand; abruptly I reached out and snatched one as it was held across the table. “Hey!” my victim yelled, but I turned my back on her and plunged out of the crowd, into the dining room.

It was a small photo and it looked as though it had been taken in black and white. Black sky, a gray regolith plain marked by the low superimposed rings of ancient craters, and in the middle distance, a ring of tall upright white blocks, some slender, others thick and massive. They were lit by searchlights set off to one side, and five or six of the columns’ faces were brilliantly white, as if they were mirrors catching the light. Human figures in bulky whitish suits were a quarter or a fifth of the height of the columns; they stood on the outside of the circle, heads craned back as they looked up at the closest block to them. The ring appeared to be about two hundred meters in diameter, maybe half again more, I couldn’t be sure. A little stone circle (white stone?) on Pluto.

I must have stood hunched over that photo for half an hour. I don’t know what I thought in that time; I was a blank. The photo seemed out of a dream. It was just the son of thing I would dream. And I am always stunned to blankness in my dreams. Yet here my colleagues milled about the next room chattering, announcing the real.

Petrini banged on the table. “Please, people. I have more news. Listen here. Pretty clearly the group that recently arrived there was not the first to visit Pluto, as they thought they were. It must have been quite a shock! Anyway, they’ve sent back some information with these photos. The object is located at the geographical north pole. The towers in the ring are made of water ice. There are sixty-six of them, and one has fallen over and shattered. Another has an inscription on it.”

This brought complete silence.

“Jefferson at the university library in Alexandria has identified the inscription as Sanskrit. I know, I know! Don’t ask me to explain it. I suppose someone has been up to games out there. The inscription is a couple of verbs and a series of slashmarks. The verbs both mean roughly ‘to push farther away.’ The slashes make a simple arithmetical progression, two then two, then four then eight.”

“Twenty-two forty-eight,” I said. “The year of the Unrest.” And immediately a certain passage in Emma Weil’s journal came to mind. She had visited Davydov’s cabin, found him sleeping, found plans on his desk…

Petrinin shurgged. “If you assume the slashes are a date in our calendar. But with this I don’t think it’s safe to assume anything.”

I scarcely heard him. “Where are the expedition’s transmissions coming to?”

“Burroughs. The university’s space center.”

“I’m going to go there and send up some questions, and monitor everything they send down.”

“But why?”

“I’ll be back as soon as I can. “I excused myself and left. Some curious looks were given me, but I didn’t care. Let them think what they liked.

…They were diagrams, several versions of the same thing… all circular, or near it… a circle slightly flattened on one side. Around this faint circumference were little rectangles, set at different angles, blackened by pencil… “Something to leave a mark on the world, something to show we were here at all—” Perhaps, I thought, perhaps this discovery on Pluto, which had given me such a shock, and made me so uneasy, might be turned to advantage after all. Perhaps it was not the disaster it had felt to me down in that cellar.

Ejecta

The Planetary Survey refused me permission to leave New Houston, so I called Shrike. “You need help,” he observed.

“Yes.”

“Did you see my press conference?”

“Yes. Did you write the speech yourself?”

“No.”

“I didn’t think so. Do you know how many lies there were in it? Or do you care?”

“Were there lies in it?”

“You don’t care. You’d read anything you were given, wouldn’t you. That’s the fate of the new man on the Committee. It’s disgusting.”

“I thought you were calling for a favor?”

“…I am.”

“I’ll think about it. But I’m disappointed you didn’t like my performance.”

“A performance is just what it was.” I couldn’t contain myself. “But it won’t wash, you know. Lebedyan and the rest are already poking holes in what you said, and in all the other statements made by the Survey on the find. You can’t pretend there wasn’t a false history, Shrike. There are too many contradictions. What we’ve found here plain contradicts what Shay said about the assault on New Houston. Check it out in the Aimes Report.”

“I’ll do that, Hjalmar,” he said with a smile.

“You’d better! Aside from the gall of it, which is disgusting, it makes you look foolish to get sent out there to spout obvious lies. It weakens your position because as the spokesman you get associated with the lies, and the clumsiness behind them. It’s bad for you. And you aren’t going to be able to lie your way out of this, one. You’d better tell your bosses that, and start figuring out something else.”

“Thanks for the statecraft lesson, Hjalmar,” he said, mocking me.

“I’ll trade it for a trip to Burroughs,” I said roughly. “I want to find out more about that thing on Pluto.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it? It’s the talk of Burroughs. What is it, do you think?”

“More trouble for you.” But I saw his upper lip lift a touch, and I let off. “But good for Mars, my Shrike; you can bet on that.”

“Hmph.” And he made me sweat and plead for a while. But I said the right things, and he agreed to help.

Riding the train to Burroughs, forehead pressed to the window glass: copper clouds shredded under a dark brown sky. Sometimes I feel like those clouds, torn east and scattered in the gales of Time. I knew that with this trip another life of mine was ending. Around me in the train car voices discussed the marvel of the day, the mysterious monument on Pluto. Did it mean the Atlanteans had actually lived? And developed space flight too? In my mind’s voice, so much more mellifluous than my own, I groaned and lectured the speakers severely. No crackpot theories, please! This is difficult enough as it is! But of course crackpot theories would spring up around this discovery like a ring of daughter mushrooms around one of those spore-exploding kinds. No avoiding it. Out on the rock-stubbled expanse of Sinus Sabaeus someone had cleared an area and lined up the collected rocks to spell REPENT. I stared at the message through the faint reflection of my head: tufted black hair, close-set eyes, grim little mouth. How could Shrike stand me.

I knew that my distress at this Pluto discovery was personal; it disrupted my habits. I had been in a situation I could predict, in a little society I could understand. I worked hard to create such nests of habit, as everybody does, for without habit life would be too abrasive and too long to live. And for a decade or two I would have been peacefully at work in the heart of the most important excavation in Martian history. The dig itself would have been Martian history. Now this Pluto monument had arrived like a meteor through the roof, knocking everything apart and thrusting me into the new. Now I wandered in new terrain, in the bare interregnum between successive exfoliations of life, completely exposed to the danger of the new.

Now the historical community and the fickle world would forget New Houston in favor of this more exotic discovery — unless I could show that Emma’s journal held the key to the new find. Show that the starship she had refused to join had left the monument as marker and proof of their transplutonian passage; show that it was a monument to the Unrest. I would need more than the brief paragraph in her journal to stem the flood of crackpot theories. It would take an entire case, and the plan for that was clean a search for the Mars Starship Association in the archives at Alexandria.

Another mystery to solve. I should have been pleased at the thought, but still I felt only the sharp distress of exposure, and something other than that which verged on fear, and which I did not recognize. Perhaps we undertake the solution of mysteries as a sort of training, so that we can attempt with some hope of success the deciphering of our selves.

In Burroughs I went to my apartment on campus to store my bags. Kitchen in mahogany and black-green ceramic; living room dominated by a bookcase that extended from floor to ceiling around two walls; a thick silver-gray carpet leading down a skylighted hall to a tiled bathroom the size of the living room, almost; and a bedroom filled by a square bed on a dais. The stupid splendor of the bachelor professor. I couldn’t believe I had had it furnished myself. Who was that Nederland, anyway? No wonder I always wanted to be out on a dig.

I crossed the big campus yard, muttered, “Tear it all out, leave bare chambers of wood and plaster, books piled up, mattress in the corner.” The yard lay above the city center and I paused near the statue of the Princess to look out at it. My year in New Houston had warped my sense of scale, and the skyscrapers by the river, the bridge of the water district, the broad boulevards like spokes of a bent wheel, radiating out to the higher residential areas on the slopes of Isidis Planitia, all of it seemed fantastically large to me, gigantic beyond the ability of city planners to conceive. An entire basin made into a river valley, a city of four million under the open sky: what would the citizens of New Houston have thought? What would we have thought of it, three hundred years before?… The past was a simpler place (I know that’s wrong). Our minds are formed in our youth, and stay the same no matter how long we live. “Come on, fossil,” I told myself. The Princess looked down on me compassionately. “Stone man, go see this circle of ice men.” Students glanced at me, walked on unconcerned.

In the department office everything was the same, of course. Lucinda and Corey greeted me and gave me my mail. I have often thought of the department as family: secretaries as aunts and uncles, colleagues as fierce siblings, students as children. How much closer to me were these people than my biological family. Children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great, etc. — I don’t know how far it extends — I had seen none of them in decades. Most of them were in the asteroids, or farther out, where the Outer Satellites Council lets anarchy reign. Blood, when you get right down to it, is not much thicker than water. But here in the familiar offices Lucinda asked how the dig was coming, how Hana and Bill were progressing, what Xhosa’s latest complaint was — and what did I think of this remarkable thing on Pluto? “Alien radio receiver,” I said, and they laughed. That’s family for you.

My mail was junk, except for a long handwritten letter from my third wife. She was struggling with a funk, and this letter was part of her therapy. It had taken her a month to compose it, and it read like the diary of a zombie. “I took a walk by the canal. The ice was thick and starred by rocks thrown by little boys.” Poor Maggie. I put the letter away to finish another time. She had written boring letters even when she wasn’t in a funk.

Over in the space center’s big projection room Stallworth, Lewis, Nguyen, and some others I didn’t know were ready and waiting for me. “Roll it,” Nguyen called to the technician.

Black room. Then over the floor appeared the dark ringed plain I had seen in the little photo. A star-thick night sky appeared against the domed ceiling; the sun was two or three times brighter than Sirius, and lay low on the horizon.

“Icehenge at its closest is fifty meters from the geographical north pole,” Nguyen said.

“Icehenge?”

“That’s what they’re calling it.”

“A henge is a circular earthen mound,” I objected.

“The analogy is with Stonehenge,” Nguyen said cheerfully.

“Besides, the liths have been set on the rim of a subdued crater, so that they’re a meter or two above the plain. So you can call the rim your henge.”

“Ridiculous.”

“So where is it?” Stallworth said. I had worked with him before on dating methods, his specialty.

“This holo was made by Arthur Grosjean, the chief planetologist on the Persephone. He gives us the same walking approach that they had. Note the jiggling horizon. It’ll appear in front of us. It’s summer in Pluto’s northern hemisphere, so the megalith is in constant sunlight.”

“Shouldn’t that be megahydor?” I asked caustically.

“You know what I mean. Quiet, here it comes.”

But Stallworth said, “This cratering must have spanned billions of years. How did a planet so far away from everything else get so heavily cratered?”

“There’s no agreement on that,” Lewis said. “One theory is that Pluto was a moon of one of the gas giants, and that after it took the usual heavy bombardment it was cast out to the edge of the system by a near collision.”

“With what?” Stallworth said.

“I don’t know. Ask Velikovsky.” Lewis laughed. “Mountjove claims the cratering is fifteen billion years old, and that Pluto is a captive planet from a very early solar system.”

The horizon was suddenly cracked by a dozen white points, like stars growing to spires of white light. We shut up. The cart that had carried the holo camera jiggled over a submerged crater wall. Soon the entire ring of towers was over the horizon and in our sight. As it came toward us my heart began to flutter painfully. The cart moved between two towers and into the center of the ring. The regolith surface was undisturbed; shouldn’t the construction of the monument have chewed up the area with tracks?

The average towers were ten to fifteen meters tall, two or three meters wide, and one or two thick; some were much bigger. Three of the liths were triangular in cross-section rather than rectangular. One of the big squarish ones had broken off near its base and fallen in toward the center, shattering into scores of sharp-edged white blocks. The holo camera rolled toward this ruin, and when it stopped I walked over to that side of the chamber and stood waist deep in the mirage of an ice boulder.

The others chattered to each other about Saturn’s water ice and the stone circles of Neolithic Britain, etc., but I shut my ears to them and looked at the thing. I fell into the illusion of vast space that the holo created, and tried to get a sense of the place.

“The north pole is beyond the sequence of very large liths,” Nguyen said.

“Be quiet for a while and let us look,” I said.

I walked around and looked at it. Someone had had a good sense of form. It was a human construct, I felt sure; it had the look of mind marking cosmos, like the paintings on a cave wall. Sixty-six liths. Distance between them, ten meters or so. Something brushed the edge of memory and I walked away from it, over to where the others were reading the inscription lith. Deeply cut curved calligraphy, and under that the sixteen slashes.

Was it Stonehenge I was reminded of? No — I had a postcard picture of that in my mind, a little domesticated thing in a protective dome, looking like a piece of sculpture by Rinaldi. And the lintels gave it a different shape. No, it was something else — a moor — the sea like pewter-

Another tendril of an image was drowned in the present. What the senses tell us can overwhelm all else, and that is good, but sometimes I could wish otherwise. Or was it relief I felt? Confused, I stepped away from the others. Looking around at the ice beams poking out of that stark landscape I was struck by the strangeness of it, and I sank to the floor, slipping through the gravel as if I didn’t exist, as if I were the holo and the ground were real. The sense of the room left me entirely and for a moment I was on Pluto, on an almost transparent Pluto where you could sit unsuited, and breathe cool air, and stare at a megalith more silent and enigmatic than any pointing at Earth’s sky. Awe — so rare, so longed for — so much like its cousin terror, when it does flood the mind. And it was the edge of deep fear that brought the elusive memory crashing out of presque vu into consciousness: the moor by the sea, a thumbnail crescent of moon, Madeleine’s round face full of pity. I scrambled to my feet, frightened and excited. My trip to Earth — images from it were strung like algae in filaments, one led me to the next immediately. My nerves jangled and my blood spurted through me, and Pluto and Mars alike vanished.

I was holding my temples in my hand when the lights came up, and I am afraid my colleagues saw me in that pose and thought me mad. I barely noticed; I made some excuse to Nguyen and Stallworth, and stumbled out of the center into the surprising light of a clear afternoon.

Lemniscate islands — in the outflow channels these knobs of rock harder than their surroundings were scoured into their characteristic shape by the catastrophic floods that carved the channels.

I remember I spent the trip to Earth in the centrifuge, working out in terran gravity to prepare myself for landfall. My third wife Maggie had just left me; she hadn’t wanted me to make the trip. I didn’t want the marriage to end. We had children, my habits were firm. Nothing would have tempted me to break them but a voyage to Earth. The Committee hated anyone going, but I got the chance and I left, feeling utterly depressed, a whole life shattered behind me. Again I was in an interregnum, stripped of habits, painfully alive.

Quickly I took new habits, grew a new exfoliation. The voyage itself was a life, and I remember it all of a piece. I worked out every day until my body no longer felt like a backpack weighing me down; it was still heavy, but I could carry it. Every day I worked on those machines until I was too tired to think.

There was a woman there doing the same work, though her motives were less negative. She worked to make her lungs pump like bellows, her skin pop sweat at every pore. She attacked the machines with brio, and laughed at my grimness. Have you tried this machine? she would ask. That one? I would shake my head and try them. She only talked about workouts, and I liked that. Her name was Madeleine. She was about my age — one hundred or so. Of her appearance I recall only a mass of thick dark blond hair, tied back in the centrifuge, let free in the commons, where it drew my eye always. And she was strong.

But it didn’t occur to me that I was falling in love. How could I be? I was tired, sick of love, too drained ever to feel it again. How many times could it happen, after all? Wasn’t love another finite power of ours, that would run out like water from an aquifer? And Madeleine was so distanced (but I liked that). So we talked for hours as we worked out. She taught me to jump rope. We traded our stories. She had helped to organize the tour, and had been to Earth twice before. And every day we worked until we collapsed, in the “air soup” of Earth. Perhaps that soup does something to the brain. Because I could feel it happening again, no matter what I commanded myself to think. It’s frightening how helplessly people are themselves! We think, “I understand myself, I will change, I will take control, I will protect myself,” and then in any kind of stress we behave with exactly the same character we were born with, the character beneath the “I.” So I fell in love helplessly, as if catching a disease.

And Madeline liked me. I pumped weights until I could be pleased with my body, and I avoided looking in the centrifuge mirrors, where my red cheeks and stiff black hair would have mocked me. Too bad you can’t work out on your face. (Vanity is slow to die; even past two hundred, when our faces resemble turtles’, we value them as great maps of experience, histories of emotional lives. And at this time I was only a hundred, and looked very young.)

The memory exists in small linked cells, like diatoms of algae in a filament; next diatom: stepping out of a shuttle onto a desert floor, our group like a croud of Columbuses. Despite my workouts I felt heavy, and the blazing sun stunned me. It seemed the sky burned. And the blue — that color doesn’t exist on Mars, but I felt that there was a part of my brain that was made to recognize sky blue.

Brief images of our tour: Madeleine led me up trails from Macchu Pichu; we laughed at the solemn statues of Easter Island; a tour guide deferred to my knowledge of some site or other. Though I felt a dreamlike recognition for Earth’s ruins from my years of study, I still clumped around as wide-eyed and rubber-necked as the rest of our group. We looked like asteroid miners in Burroughs, I am sure.

Bigger diatom: at Angkor Wat one evening, Madeleine and I crawled over the crumbling temples under smeary twinkling stars. Standing on a vine-covered roof in the twilit jungle I saw a look I knew on her face. Just as I embraced her to kiss her a bug the size of my fist buzzed between our faces. We leapt back — “My God!” — stumbled on vines, laughed. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” Madeleine said, “but it sure was ugly!”

“You’re not kidding! A dragonfly?”

“You’ve got me.” We looked about warily. “Hope there aren’t more.”

“Me too.”

“Sure glad there aren’t any big bugs like that on Mars.”

“Me too. Pretty scary bug, all right,”

And we laughed. That was the embrace. A few minutes later she said, “But we can’t do it out here. We might get attacked by bugs!” And we went back to her room at the hotel.

And in Persepolis, one sharp image: as I strode over the hectares of strewn marble like Tamburlaine, euphoric with the raw impact of the past, she said to me, “You make it new.”

But in Florence we joined another group, from the university in Hellas, and their guide and Madeleine were old friends. Wasn’t that how it happened? They took off together into the city. Why not? Jealousy, what foolishness. Perhaps I am less able than most people to control my emotions. Florence reminded me of Burroughs, with the yellowing stone and the river running down the crease in the hills, and all the bridges. I walked the narrow streets with a marble pedestal in my stomach that almost bowed me over. The fierce sun beat on me in pulses and burned my neck, and I could hardly breathe in the thick wet air. Madeleine and her friend appeared in an alley, searching for local ice cream. I got sick of all the beggars and sat in my room at the hotel listening to the cutting melancholy of the “Souvenir of Florence.” I forgot the Etruscans, the Renaissance; all I cared for was the feeling in that sextet. You can make unhappiness into an aesthetic experience, and everyone tries to, so there must be something to it; but I don’t think it does much good. It only means you will remember it better, because of the coding in objective correlatives. It doesn’t make you less unhappy.

Well, it was stupid of me. I admit that.

Last diatom, the largest — the one remembered in the holo chamber we visited the Orkney Islands north of Britain, to see the passage graves and the stone rings of Stenness and Brodgar. The islands were abandoned, and a rime of frost covered the ground in the mornings, as it was early winter. I insisted that Madeleine take a dawn walk with me, over the heath to Stenness ring. The land we crossed looked almost Martian. I told her that I loved her, she said I didn’t know her well enough to say such a thing. As if knowledge had anything to do with love. “You know what I mean,” I said.

“I think I do. But you know Onega, the guide for the Hellas group?”

I nodded.

“I love him, Hjalmar. I have for years. Please don’t be angry! I’ve enjoyed our trip,” etc. Then she left, claiming duties at the hotel.

I walked among the standing stones of Stenness, overlooking the lochs of Harray and Stenness to east and west. The narrow irregular gray stones spiked up at the swiftly moving, stippled clouds. Off across the loch the ring of Brodgar, tiny in the distance, stood in a patch of sun. A world of slates. Slate people: old tales said these stones were farmers caught dancing in a pagan rite. I leaned my forehead against the pitted, lichen- covered side of one, and felt myself shake. So often this had happened and I had resolved never to extend myself again — the aquifer was drained, the land above collapsing! — and here just the slightest show of friendship and I had done it again. Not the slightest bit of control over myself. There was something wrong with me, I knew it. I felt it.

What I wanted then was a marriage like the Greek ideal, two strong trees grown round each other in a double helix, each stronger for the help of the other, and intertwined for good. Some people found such marriages even in our age, and I wanted one. I was just beginning to understand that my life was a series of discrete lives, and that I could not count on any family or friend to stay with me through more than one life. So that I would never really come to know anybody. Unless I could find that partner, you see, that Greek marriage.

But I couldn’t. And leaning against that rough stone it seemed to me that there were two kinds of people: the attractive sociable people, who drew to each other and had their serious relations together; and the rest of us, the plain or ugly or maladroit, who had to make do with one another no matter how much we loved beauty and charm. And realizing this warped the maladroit even more, so that our relations among ourselves were filled with resentment and frustration and anger and pity, which doomed them to failure. As in my three marriages, and in all the other liaisons in which I had tried so hard and failed so miserably.

In the midst of this fit of bitter self-pity I caught sight of a dozen or so of our party, hiking in my direction and pointing across the loch at the stones of Brodgar. One great ring viewed from another, across a band of metallic water: it was an eerie, wonderful sight. The group was like a pantomime of excitement, and though I did not feel it, I understood. On all of Earth I had not seen a place more beautiful (that is, more like Mars). So the cheerful alien tourists approached, happy on familiar ground, and when they saw me some waved. They entered the ring. One of the women was telling them about the megalithic yard, and the astronomical significance of the stones’ placement. She was a withdrawn, shy woman who had scarcely said a word during the rest of the tour, but the stone rings appeared to be her subject. “They could calculate the midsummer and midwinter sunrises, and they could even predict eclipses.”

“Wrong,” I told them. “Your information is as dated as the idea of ley lines. These rings had some simple sun alignments, but they were by no means scientific observatories. To think so is to impose our way of thinking onto the prehistoric mind, and so to distort the past. And the megalithic yard, by the way, is no more than a freak of statistical interpretation.”

The woman looked down, turned away. The others glanced at her awkwardly; her reign as expert was done. But I saw they also thought me an ass, and I knew I had been rude at best. Immediately I wanted to apologize to the poor woman, to explain my ill humor, but I couldn’t see how without bringing up my own affairs. Besides, she had been spouting nonsense; what was I supposed to have said? A tall, brown-haired woman broke the uncomfortable pause with a hearty, “Well, shall we see Brodgar and the Comet Stone?” And they trooped off around the shore of the loch, surrounding the expert, pointedly not inviting me along. The tall woman stared back at me.

I was left walking about the frosted hummocks of dead gray-green grass, feeling worse than before. I didn’t want to stay there, but there seemed no reason to leave, and nowhere to go. I wrapped my arms around a lichen-chewed standing stone and watched the gray clouds blow over, leaving a white sky that turned pale blue at dusk. At my feet were little flowers, specks of color scattered over the rock and heather, violet, yellow, pink, red, white. I began to feel very odd indeed, and I banged my forehead against the stone rhythmically, thump thump thump.

My hands were as blue as the sky. A thin crescent moon hung over the distant loaf hill across the loch to the west. A cutting breeze wafted off the ruffled dark silver water, and I was cold. Four thousand years before, humans had put up these stones to mark the strangeness of the place, and of their lives in it; I knew four thousand times what they knew, but the world was no less strange and harsh for that. With the sun down the standing stones, the island, the loch, the little ring on the land beyond, the bone-bare hills in the distance, they all gleamed under the rich dark blue sky, and I was frightened by their starkness. A world stripped bare.

Near dark I roused myself and walked stiffly back to the stone hotel near the passage grave of Maes Howe. I sat before the fireplace and held my hands over the flames for a good part of the night; but I could not get the chill from them.

Jokulhlaups — these glacial bursts occur in Iceland, where underground reservoirs heated by volcanic action melt through glacial caps in catastrophic floods.

Now I begin to see that I have underestimated the memory. Events keep piling into it beyond its natural capacity, and it becomes packed tight. The chambers of the hippocampus and amygdala are overwhelmed. What remains of the distant past is jammed under the weight of subsequence, so that recollection is stressed, then disabled. But the memories remain. To be able to recall them takes a particular form of intelligence; so that when I curse my poor memory, I am really lamenting my stupidity.

The other form of remembrance, the epiphanic recollection, is not really recollection at all. Under the right pressure the past bursts into consciousness, as a string of images we have created — so we see not the past, but a part of ourselves, a sweet fragment to make us ache with the poignancy of time lost, and the beauty of connection with it.

In the interregnum, in the naked moment between lives, we are most vulnerable to experience.

On the Earth events have a sheer physical weight of significance.

When we leave our natural span, and venture into the centuries, we are like climbers on Olympus Mons, hiking up out of the atmosphere. We must carry our air with us.

I don’t know what I am.

Valles Marineris — just south of the equator are several enormous interconnected canyons, extending some four thousand kilometers from the Tharsis bulge east to low- lying areas of chaotic terrain.

The Subcommittee for Planetary Affairs and the University Faculty Board and the Planetary Survey all denied me permission to visit the libraries at Alexandria — I suspected Satarwal was behind the refusals, exerting influence in Burroughs — and so I went to Shrike for help again, and got it. I knew it was bad to pile up too many debts to Shrike, but there was no other way to get the work done.

On the long train ride west I sat in a window seat in a nearly empty car. From the car ahead came the sound of a child playing, and I went up to have a look; it was a ten-year- old, flying plastic airplanes to his parents; and at the other end of the car was a crowd of spectators, watching curiously. The child ignored them as he retrieved his planes from under their hungry stares. I felt bad for him and returned to my seat. Outside, the train slid along the southern rims of Eos and then Coprates Chasma. Coprates, so simple and huge, gave me the feeling we were flying; the canyon floor was kilometers below us, and off to the north the other wall of the canyon made an abrupt horizon, as if Mars itself was rolling toward us in a fantastic tidal wave. It was like traveling in an optical illusion, and I could only watch it for moments at a time before it made me dizzy. The weather cooperated in this assault on my senses. High clouds topped a dusty sky, and the sunset was one of those extravaganzas of color too garish for art; but Nature knows no aesthetic restraint, and purples, pinks, and pale clear greens stained the tall dome of the sky, which altered imperceptibly from raspberry to blackberry above it all. Finally the sun fell, and in the mirror dusk the train crawled up the gentle slope of the bulge, appearing a filament of algae in the big barren world. I switched on my little overhead light and read for a bit — stared through my faint reflection at the canyon — read some more — looked out again.

I had purchased a book in the train’s store called Secrets of Icehenge Revealed, by a Theophilus Jones. The introduction began, “Let us look at the case reasonably,” which made me laugh outright. I flipped ahead. “The academic scientists have also ignored all signs indicating Icehenge’s extreme age, so that they may explain it as an artifact of modern civilization. They find these explanations preferable to the one most clearly indicated by the facts — for all that we find points to the existence of a prehistoric space technology; evidence of it lies scattered over the Earth from Stonehenge to Easter Island. Icehenge was built by that antediluvean culture, whose language was Sanskrit, and whose spaceship designs can be found on Mayan temple walls. Over the years the ice liths have become pitted with age (see photos), and one has even been struck by a meteorite, an event that almost defies probability, and indicates the passing of eons.”

Atlantis as home of this prehistoric high technology — Sanskrit as mathematical code, as well as the first language — Tibet as refuge of this ancient wisdom — the lost continent of Mu — the Nazca Plains “spaceport” — the “Great Pyramid” on Ios: this book had them all. I read it with a peculiar mixture of satisfaction and anger. On the one hand I found its utter stupidity reassuring; the primacy of my explanation was not threatened by this pap. On the other hand, my long letter pointing out the connection between the megalith and the Davydov expedition, as revealed in Emma’s journal, had been published in Marscience without comment; while there were ten copies of this ragged collection of exotica in the train’s bookrack.

I put the book down and looked out the window again. Now the mirror suns were setting, repeating the true sunset in muted tones of mauve and olive and dusky turquoise. When the mirrors blinked out over the bulge the shadowed sky darkened instantly, and the great black chasm lay obscured until Deimos (Dread) shot over the western horizon like a flare. The retrograde moon… I leaned my head against the window, depression falling across me like the long shadows across the canyon floor.

I have always feared that one of these depressions will not end, that it will shift my biochemistry and help drive me into a funk. I know many people who have fallen into funks for years, or stayed in one until they died. The malady is fairly common among people my age. The purpose of life eludes them, and though they continue to exist their chemical balance shifts, and they lapse into trancelike indifference to the world, for ten, twenty, thirty years. Rip Van Winkle’s disease, a comedian called it. Reduced Affectual Function, say the medicos, but it is more than that. And once or twice I have felt the depression, the complete lassitude and indifference, that I imagine leads one into the empty world of a funk. This is one reason I pursue my projects so fiercely, I know — out of dread. We cannot live in a world without meaning! And yet so often that just is the sort of world it looks as though we’ve been placed in. When I pass people in funks being helped down the street, or sitting in doorways like zombies, I can barely look at them, afraid that they will convince me with their eyes that they are right. And their lives: they can be trained to minimal functioning, and left to wander like beggars — or they are kept in special asylums, full of kindergarten stimulation — or they are helped by a friend or relative or therapist — or they die.

Or, if they catch themselves sliding down the long slope soon enough, they move to Alexandria.

For Alexandria is a city of the senses, and one can live a full life there with the senses alone; this despite the libraries and the archives. I understood this anew as I debarked from the train and walked out of the station into the broad central boulevard — and part of me was relieved. The city is at the western end of Noctis Labyrinthus, and because it is nearly at the top of Tharsis (eleven kilometers above the datum), it is still tented. So the greenhouse air is warm, and pungent with smells. And the public buildings in the heart of town each are fronted with a different stone, so that the eye is surprised at every turn. As I walked across town toward the campus I passed a skyscraper of purple marble, another of rose quartz, both anchoring parts of the dome tent and blending into the color of the sky; the blocks of archival buildings alternated between serpentine, chalcedony and jaspar, the police station was a square tower of obsidian reflecting the buildings around it; and in the big central park were bathhouses of coral and olivine, turquoise and jade and chert. I cut through the park looking only at the Martian juniper and Hokkaido pine, and walked onto campus feeling virtuous. My rooms in the visiting scholars’ apartment would be ready, but I hesitated, already feeling the spell of the city. Perhaps it would be all right to go to a bathhouse; perhaps it was just what I needed. From a dusk-dark kiosk shone a white handprint. This city looked nothing like the Egyptian sink of the old novelist, but in every way that mattered it was the same place — such is the power of naming. I shook off the attraction of the bathhouses, and took an escalator to the roof patio of the scholars’ apartment. Off to the west the three great volcanoes appeared over the horizon like peaks of another planet entirely, their upper halves in full sun though I stood in murk. Ascraeus Mons, the one farthest north, had snow on its middle slopes. I felt as though my heart had expanded to fill my chest, and I recognized the emotion: Alexandria…

It was a marvelous Idea they had had, to bring together all of the material of Martian history in a single spot, and create a Planetary Archives, and add to it a collection of libraries and galleries and conservatories and a campus of the university. (Chairman Sarionovich, trying to be Alexander the Great.) Alexandria, the Capital of Memory: but it could not be said that the idea had been realized with any success. A hothouse tented city full of money, on the route from Burroughs to Olympus Mons, from Arcadia to Argyre, Alexandria had drawn a whole other city into itself, and now co-existing with the city of libraries was the city of banks and brothels, bazaars and bathhouses, dorms and slum tenements.

In the archives there were failures caused chiefly by the Unrest itself. The rebels had destroyed all the records they could in the final days of the revolt, to hamper the ferreting of them; so data of all kinds for the years before 2248 were patchy. Another problem, almost as serious, was that each regime of archivists had used a different filing system, using different programs; one had to become a historian of programming to work through the records.

I set to work in the archival labyrinth in a fever of energy, as if struggling against a spell. I spent days typing before a screen, for most of the records were on disks: files of the Soviet mining fleet (fragmentary); minutes of the Mars Corporations Co-op for the Outer Satellites (trivial); records for all the people mentioned in Emma’s journal. These last were the most interesting, for they confirmed that all those named in Emma’s account had disappeared in the Unrest; and for most, there was no explanation nor any definite last locations. This was common in the annals of the Unrest, but still, it was something.

When I got sick of staring at screens I walked across a park to the Physical Records annex. Here were all the remaining documents. Some of them were originals for what I had found on disk, others had never been recorded. At first it was a relief to deal with the actuality of paper. I am happier with things than with facts, I know this. But in a few weeks the big rooms lined with file cabinets and shelves, filled with the excrement of bureaucracy, were more frustrating and depressing than the computer screens. In these rooms I could see the extent of my task, and I could finger the results of endless hours of wasted labor. And I could see the disorganization and the gaps, not merely as bad results on a screen, but as whole drawers and cabinets and rooms of botched filing, uncatalogued documents — unknown material. Eventually I was forced back to the computers, and I shuttled between them like that, driven by frustration.

In neither building could I find any mention of a Mars Starship Association. Three months after I came to Alexandria I hadn’t found a thing. And there was still no response to my letter in Marscience.

Emma searched; We research.

The city pulled at me. The smooth face of a young man, in a bathhouse door. On a sidewalk cafe table, lying in coffee stains face down: the Martian translation of Cavafy’s poems. How well the old poet’s work fit this namesake city. I saw the collected edition everywhere — on trolley seats, on the leaf-strewn paths of the parks, in libraries misshelved under Astronomy or Polynesia; and from the back of every dog-eared copy, Cavafy’s sad weird bespectacled gaze, which said: the scholar melts in Alexandria. I tried to ignore it. Same with the white handprint, glowing out of every dark alley. Mornings and afternoons I spent in the archives; evenings I ate in the plaza cafes, watching the poor who lived in great crowds around the big public buildings, eking a living from those inside. Nights I stayed in my apartment, blank as a computer screen turned off.

One night I glanced at my kitchen calendar and understood that I had lived a week without knowing it. If the thalamus breaks down, we are incapable of laying down new memories. Fearfully I dressed and took a late trolley downtown. I stood on the curb of the broad sidewalk before the skyscraper containing Shrike’s apartment. Up there were his big rooms with all their windows, above the dome. I wanted to go into the foyer and ring his bell, I wanted him to be home, to ask me up. I went into the foyer and stood before the console. Alexander Selkirk, 8008. But he wouldn’t want me calling him from the building, would he? If he were in town, he would have someone else with him. He wouldn’t care what shape I was in; he wouldn’t want to know I needed him. The idea would make him very polite — as unlike Shrike as it was possible to be. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.

Under the curious eye of a policeman I left the building and walked around the corner into the nearest bathhouse. I paid my fee, shed my clothes and stuffed them into a locker, walked out into the tight network of red hallways, to one of the steam-rooms. Sat in the hot water and tried to calm myself and feel sensually. In the dim red light bodies moved languorously, skin wet and gleaming, ruddy and smooth. Muscle definition of male backs. Smooth curves of female legs. Breasts and cocks, wet hair, parted lips. I took one of the hoses snaking about the bottom of the bath, ran the cold stream over my body. Across the room two lithe bodies tangled, slid together in a slow rhythm. They sloshed off, seeking one of the niches in the hallway corners. Another pair coupled in the corner of the steaming pool; blind eyes stared through me. I ran the cold spurt from the hose over my cock, felt nothing. Leaving the bath I wandered the halls, looking into niches. In one a woman straddled a man, slid up and down on him; she looked up and saw me, smiled, leaned forward to cover him; I felt a faint stir in my pelvis.

In a distant niche beyond the last bath Emma sat cross-legged, alone. She gestured to me — she crooked a finger at me. I knelt beside her in the niche, heart pounding. Up close I saw she only looked like Emma, but I banished the thought and kissed her. Our hands explored each other, I slid into her and we copulated right there where passers-by would trip over my feet. When we were spent she rolled me to one side, got to her knees; she put a finger to my lips, kissed my forehead, left.

So I added a new component to my life. Every night I visited bathhouses. Sometimes I met my Emma-partner, and we made love with ever-increasing facility. Most nights our paths didn’t cross, and I merely soaked and watched, or found another partner. But what happened with her was different. We never said a word; that was what created the passion, we knew. Days now passed when I read Emma’s journal and thought only of her, and on some nights I walked from bathhouse to bathhouse, searching for her. Once in front of the Physical Annex we crossed paths; neither of us acknowledged the other by more than a meeting of the eye. But that night, in the bathhouse where we had met, we almost fused in our mute passion. We understood.

And I felt I was coming to life: when actually I was only coming to Alexandria.

We lead our lives as if perpetually waking from a long coma. What really happened to me in my first lives, to lead me to Alexandria? Some midnights on the streets, with all the poor, I would stop and ask myself that. How had I gotten to this strange state? What had my life been like? I knew I had been a child, a student, a driver for the Planetary Survey — but what had happened, what had it been like? “I only know it got me here, and here I am.”

During the long days in the Archives I chatted with the people who worked there, solicited their help and their opinions, and told them about my task and my theory concerning the Pluto megalith and the Unrest. I am a very social person, you see; I need to talk to people every day, perhaps more than I have ever gotten a chance to. One day over an after-lunch Turkish coffee I asked an archivist I had just met, Vadja Sandor, if he knew of any records for the mining subcommittee that had been labelled confidential, and hidden in the data banks by a secret code. “Especially records for the years between the Committee takeover and the Unrest.”

Sandor was a respected historian of that period; it was said he had sixty papers waiting for the approval of Publications Review. “I know of such records,” he said in his musical Russian. “But they’re still classified, and I don’t have access. My requests for the entry codes have been denied.”

I got out my notebook. “Tell me which ones they are. I’ll make my own requests.” And I sent off the forms that very day, wondering if I would have to ask Shrike for help again. If I could bring myself to it.

But I didn’t have to. Perhaps Shrike helped without being asked. The codes were sent to me with letters from the police, loyalty oaths, etc. I threw them out and hurried to the Archives to type in the codes.

One of the many confidential files for that period was the Subcommittee on Mining’s records on missing asteroid mining ships.

Five asteroid miners had been lost in the years 2150 to 2248. Wreckage of the first had been found, but not of the last four. And the last three had been commanded by Oleg Davydov, Olga Borg, and Eric Swann.

I called Sandor over to my console to take a look. He saw the list and nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard of those before. The Committee declassified a general report on mining history forty years ago that mentioned these.”

“You didn’t tell me about them?”

“But you knew they disappeared. No one denies it. Besides, I figured you had seen that stuff — it’s right there in the public record.”

“Damn it! I went back to the primary sources, and never looked in that report! You knew I was looking for something like this—”

He looked nonplussed, and I tried to calm down. I said, “The Committee must have been worried by these disappearances.”

“Probably. But the report I read claimed that such disappearances weren’t a complete mystery. If an explosion destroyed a miner and propelled a wreck out of the planetary plane, there would be little chance of finding it.”

“But three of the five disappearances came in the five years before the Unrest! And now we’ve found the New Houston material, and the Pluto monument.”

“Yes.” Sandor smiled. “You’ve got something here, you should write it up.”

“I need more.”

“Maybe so, but that shouldn’t keep you from writing this up and getting it out there. You might get some help.” So I wrote it up: a full article outlining the revisionist account of the Unrest, detailing what I knew of the MSA. I proposed that the Unrest included the mutiny and starship construction revealed in Emma’s journal, and that the starship crew had built the Pluto monument to mark its departure from the solar system. I sent the article to Marscience, and they published it. My explanation of the monument was now out there competing with the Atlantean theory, the alien theory, the natural coincidence theory, and all the rest. No one seemed very impressed. Letters were sent to Marscience complaining about the sparseness of my evidence compared to the largeness of my conclusions; and then there was silence. It was like dropping a rock through the ice of a canal. I began to understand that there was jealousy among my colleagues. They thought that I was being given preferential access to classified sites and records — and I couldn’t very well deny it — so naturally they disliked my work and snubbed it.

Discouragement in the mirror dusk of a sidewalk cafe: drinking a thimble of coffee I watched the poor go home, each face a map of trouble. Rust-coated policemen on every corner to watch with me. Someone had left a red-backed copy of Justine on the dirty tabletop next to mine. I paged through it. Strange jumble of thoughts and images: I liked the helpless lack of structure. “I simply make these few notes to record a block of my life which has fallen into the sea.” Or: “I began to describe to myself in words this whole quarter of Alexandria for I knew that soon it would be forgotten and revisited only by those whose memories had been appropriated by the fevered city—”

I was interrupted in my bemused reading by a young man and a pregnant woman, standing before my table. “Are you Professor Nederland?” asked the woman.

“Yes, I am.”

“We’ve seen you on the news.”

I lifted my eyebrows. Fame: a curious sensation, to be known by strangers. Maybe there really was something happening out there, with the news of the excavation and the thing on Pluto.

“Yes?” I said.

“I’m your granddaughter, Mary Shannon. Hester’s daughter?’

“Oh, yes.” I recalled Maggie mentioning her. I hadn’t heard from Hester herself in more years than this young woman had lived. And here she was pregnant; they must have had influence somewhere.

“And this is my husband, Herbert.”

“Hello.” I stood and extended a hand toward the man. Mary lifted his arm and he took my hand, looking past me. I realized he was in a funk, and felt a stab of fear. “Pleased to meet you,” I said, and napkinned my mouth.

“Pleased to meet you,” he said. Mary darted a glance at him, smiled at me apologetically.

“And you’re soon to be a great-grandfather again,” she said. “As I guess you noticed.”

“Yes. Congratulations.” How could she have gotten permission to get pregnant when he was in a funk? I wondered if my name had been invoked in the permission proceedings. “It will be my ninth, if I’m not mistaken.”

“No, Hester told me that Stephanie had another one two years ago.”

“Oh? I hadn’t heard.”

“Oh. Well… We’re about to move to Phobos. So when I saw you I thought we should say hello.”

“I’m glad you did. Phobos is an exciting place, I’ve heard.”

“We’ve been ordered to move there, actually. But Herb works on sunsailers, so it will be good for him.”

I felt a pang for this brave woman, exiled to Phobos with two such responsibilities. “I’m glad.”

Family. A whole genealogical chart extending away in both directions — especially, for an old man like me, downward. A whole clan of descendants. Most of mine were on the Outer Satellites. I never saw the point of keeping in touch with so many strangers, who proved over and over again that nothing of you lasts beyond yourself. My granddaughter shuffled her feet, glanced at her husband anxiously. What would she be, sixty? Hard to say. She looked like a large child.

“We should let you eat,” she said. “I just wanted to say hello. And that we enjoy hearing about you on the news.”

“Good, good. Good to see you. Good luck on Phobos. Nice to meet you, ah, Herb. Take care, yes. Say hello to Hester. Bye bye.”

I sat down again on the uncomfortable metal chair, picked up the book automatically. “I suppose events are simply a sort of annotation of our feelings—” I shut the book. Down the boulevard the white streetlights came on all at once. In the plaza fountain’s basin water, squiggles of light S’ed over the glassy black surface. Couples walked around its edge. Some threw tokens in, the rest watched. It reminded me of Earth, somehow.

Those memories of my voyage to Earth that had burst into me in Burroughs, what did they mean? Was that really what happened? Suddenly I doubted it. Could we ever hold on to enough of the present to represent it accurately when it was gone? We try. We rehearse our pasts to ourselves in images and repeat them through the years until the images are all we have. Which means we have nothing. We are stuck in the knife-edged present, it extends everywhere — except during the hallucinatory moment of involuntary memory, when images impact like the real. I felt on the verge of such a moment, the pressure welled up at the bottom of my mind: something evoked by this granddaughter, descendant of a wife I scarcely remembered — something — something-

But it never came. A blocked epiphany. And suddenly I did not believe in my voyage to Earth. I remembered the night in Burroughs, after seeing the monument — but now it meant nothing to me. A hallucination. And how much of my written account of it was made up? I no longer believed any of it. Opening my notebook, I jotted a couplet to describe the process — in alexandrines, of course—

The memory’s the bone; imagination, flesh; The animating spirit? — is a forlorn wish.

Emma the only refuge, Emma the only anchor. How many nights I read her, and was re-oriented to the real.

The codes sent to me unlocked other classified information, and eventually I found a long list of files never programmed, which sent me running over to the Physical Annex. The reference was to Davydov, and the file collection was in a room I had familiarized myself with. I began searching the cabinets that stood in rows in the room. One bottom drawer was jammed with folders and pages; it looked like someone had ransacked it, or dropped the drawer and then replaced the contents in a hurry. Near the back I found the folder Davydov — Confidential. Inside it was a sheaf of papers.

Soviet fleet papers. Expedition to the Jovian moons in 2182-8. Record of an assault on a superior officer. Permissions for a leave on Earth.

Then in 2211 he was brought before a court-martial, but he was found innocent. Written under Charge was sedition — see Space Security, Valenski. Nothing more.

The next document was a fifteen-page application for a lobbying association and club to be called the Mars Starship Association. “Ah ha!” I shouted. The application was dated 2208. At that time any meeting of over ten people had to be approved by the police, so the questions were detailed. Davydov was named copresident of the club along with Borg. All potential members were identified. Many I had seen in Emma’s journal. Under Purpose of Association was typed, “To advocate the use of a certain percentage of mining profits for the construction of a long-range ship and the financing of a transplutonian expedition.”

So I had found it. Independent confirmation of the Mars Starship Association, right there in a cabinet drawer open to anyone’s inspection, in a cabinet I had casually glanced through several months before. That was archival cataloguing for you. I called Sandor to the room and got him to witness the find, and we had it copied. “You’re building quite a case,” he said. I wrote it up, Chronicle of Martian History published it. No comment.

Oh, I suppose there was some comment, I got calls from Nakayaina and Lebedyan and some others. But the theory popular that week was that Pluto was an erratic caught by the sun, and that the megalith was ancient, perhaps fifteen billion years old — nearly as old as the universe itself. Naturally this created a stir and there were calls for a new expedition to Pluto to investigate the megalith and test this theory.

Over a year’s labor and all I had found were scraps. I thought they were important scraps, but few people agreed. Meaningless work. And me so deep in the rhythms of Alexandria that I could scarcely see out of them, to know they were habits I had recently sheathed myself in. Each night I visited the bathhouses, and cared not who I saw, who I joined for company. I no longer searched for the woman who looked like Emma; I still found her occasionally, and we still coupled, but it was tempered by familiarity. Even the strangest liaisons lose their mystery.

And relationships grow whether we want them to or not. Once I recognized the woman in a restaurant — we were both leaving. It was peculiar to see her with clothes on. She smiled and indicated I should follow; I accompanied her to what I assumed were her rooms, and inside we stripped each other violently — a new touch to our liaison — and made love in our customary silence.

Later, when I had dressed, we sat on the bed and looked out the window at an alley wall. She said, “And what are you running from?”

I felt my stomach drop. “My work.” A pause. “And you?”

“The same.”

We laughed. It was more intimate than anything we had shared thus far; sex can be as solipsistic as suicide. To laugh together was not Alexandrian. “Does it work for you?” she sputtered. I shook my head, still giggling. “Me neither,” she said, and set us off again. After that we talked. She too worked in research, in one of the libraries. I told her she looked like Emma Weil, and and shrugged. Later, when we met in bathhouses, she merely smiled and continued on her way. Once we tried it again. But it was over.

Sometimes I get so tired. Day follows day follows day in an endless round, each day filled with habits constructed to patch over the emptiness at the heart of things. I exist and so I have to occupy my time. But there is no more to it than that. Apprehensions of this truth make it hard even to keep to the day to day. I feel like a stagehand moving all the props of the play by myself — holding the backdrops steady, placing the costumes on their hooks, conducting the pit band, cueing the players, rushing to and fro — and at the same time I am expending all this backstage effort I am supposed to pretend to believe that the production is real life. It’s impossible.

I never felt this exhaustion more than in my last months in Alexandria. I kept to my habits out of the strength of habituation, and fear, but I was lost. I didn’t know what next to search for in the archives, and grubbed in them randomly. I stopped paying attention to my dress; grew a beard to avoid shaving; paid no attention to my food, and ate semi- consciously on the schedule of habit; lived in an apartment piled with worn clothes and refuse; and if it weren’t for the habit of the bathhouses, I doubt I would even have stayed clean. I was far enough into a funk that I didn’t recognize it, and that is dangerously far.

I have always feared insanity. It seems to me the most horrifying of illnesses, and the Achilles heel of modern medicine. And I feel that I might be particularly susceptible to it. I am anxious and easily frightened, so that terror might overwhelm me. And I have little understanding of why other people act as they do, so that I am often isolated to a nearly unbearable degree. And I bear all the physical marks of the potential schizophrenic: over- large head, low ears, tufty electric hair, poor meeting of the bone ridges at the intersection of eyebrows and nose. These are all signs, used by doctors.

One day I found myself sitting outside the great jade library, stroking one of the chert lions that flanked the steps, almost too tired to move my hand. I couldn’t remember how I had gotten there, or where I had been, or what I had been doing, for… I didn’t know how long. And then I knew I was lost.

It was Shrike who pulled me out. One look at my face: “Jesus Christ, man, you’ve fallen in a funk!” Right there at my front door. “You of all people! I thought you were too full of bile. Here it’s all coming your way at once and you’re falling in a funk. I don’t understand you, Hjalmar, I truly don’t.” He looked past me at my apartment with distaste. “Come on up to my place and clean up. Where have you been?”

“I don’t know.”

He looked at me oddly. “You’ve been working too hard,” he said in a tone I’d never heard from him, and took me by the arm.

He led me across the city to his apartment, muttering all the way. “Should have known something like this had happened, it’s been so long since you last pestered me. What’s the matter, lost your nerve? Got yourself on the big stage and found it a scary place?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He took me by the shoulders and shook me. “Wake up.” Into his bathroom, clothes yanked off, shower first boiling then freezing, and back and forth like that. “What’s this,” I moaned, “you got a degree in physical therapy?” He laughed crazily. I felt his hands like the hot water, his barbs like the cold. He pulled me out, forced me to swallow some pills, slapped me, pushed me into the wall. “Enough of this,” I said. “I should think you’d get enough of pushing people around in your daytime work.”

He shouted his laughter. “You prig! How you bore me with your self-righteousness! What are you but a self-serving academic bourgeois ass, after all, living fat off the very system you denounce. An archaeologist! Archaeology, what dull nonsense! Why pursue it at all? What could be less re-vo-LU-tionary?”

“Well, no,” I said slowly, struggling. “That’s not exactly right. It’s a search for reality, you see. The presence of history in our moment. In those objects we can see truths of our nature. Expressed in the way we lived during the eons of prehistory. Which formed our brains and our desires and our goals and our satisfactions and our raptures—”

“What crap! What do you mean? We’re not cavemen anymore, fool—”

“No! No. We also see the few millennia of change that transformed us from that stable cycle to our current misery on Mars.”

“How you hate Mars. Why don’t you go back to Earth if you hate Mars so much.”

I wiped wet hair off my forehead. “Because I’m a Martian!” I burst out. I shook a fist at him: “I lived too long on Mars before I ever went to Earth, and so I grew the last part of my brain — the part grown by living — into the brain of a Martian. So when I went to Earth it was foreign to me, it fired synapses in the parts of my brain that never grew, and every waking moment was a dream. And I saw everything in a double focus, of real and dream, Martian and ancient Earth mammal — so that I had to come back here to see clearly.”

“So there you have it! Here—”

“Here I do see clearly, you Shrike, and what I see disturbs me! We could be making a Utopia of Mars, the planet insists we create a new society with every bloody icy dawn — in fact we need to create such a society for our sanity’s sake, because now we’re all going to live a thousand years and we are going to have to live in the system we make, for year after year beyond our ability to imagine! That’s what we’ve forgotten, Shrike. It used to be that people could say to themselves, why should I sacrifice my life for social change, it will take years and I’ll not see the benefits of it, let this time be peaceful at least and the next generation can worry about it. That was one of the biggest forces against change, the selfishness of the individual who only wanted peace. But now people are dragging it out day to day on Mars forgetting that not their children but they are going to have to live in the future they build. Why I think they must forget it to keep from revolting that very moment in the streets! I see it on every face in every street of every city, all of them working desperately to make profits for people we never see. And we elite desperate at our collaboration in it — or at least I am — I hate my position and I want to strike out and I barely hold it in, I hop in the gutters to hold it in and I must do something—”

“Please, Hjalmar.” Now he was in the kitchen, cutting vegetables on the wooden counter for the wok. “Look at it less idealisticaliy. How can any person change anything single-handedly?” Big knife: chop chop chop chop chop. “Aren’t you taking on too much? Have you ever considered how well entrenched the system is?” Chop chop chop chop chop. He waved the knife at me like a baton, big shrug, sigh of resignation: “Marx never guessed how technology would fix wood-and-steam capitalism into concrete for the ages. We’re just tiny organic components of a solar-system-wide machine, Hjalmar. How can you fight it?”

“Show where we came from. Show we were once an organism.”

“But we’re Martians. It was never an organism here. Things as they are have been destroyed, remember? We were always a machine. You can’t show it here.”

“Show, then, that once all the Martians revolted together, and broke spontaneously toward Utopia. And show they almost succeeded, show they had a real, workable plan. Show how they were crushed, with the idea of indicating what they did wrong, so that implicit everywhere in the exposure is the idea of doing it right — of doing it again, with maps of things to be avoided. We are twenty million millennials on this planet, Shrike, condemned to live out every day of our lives. What mere form can hold us?”

“Pretty abstract.”

“Okay — I’ll be more concrete — why should we spend our lives making profits for Terrans? Why shouldn’t we — why can’t we — throw off Earth’s colonial rule?”

“Perhaps we c—”

“And so archaeology, you see Shrike? It’s the best way I can figure out to do it! I mean for me to do something to start it, or work in that direction, at least—”

“All right, Hjalmar. All right. Calm down. Ha! I knew you wouldn’t fall into a funk. You were just on the big slide. But listen here. You’re talking to a member of the Mars Development Committee, the newest and brightest. That means something. Things are changing. There’s more ways to work at this than your own, and more people than you working at it. Keep that in mind! You’re so wrought up these days, and I think it comes from this feeling that you’re doing it all yourself — that no one else on Mars thinks!” He threw cabbage in the heated oiled wok, and it sizzled madly.

“…That’s because it’s not working,” I admitted, and felt myself drain again. “I brought the past back, and it doesn’t matter. Your bosses are just slotting it into the machine. It isn’t going to make any difference.”

“You don’t know that yet. Listen to this, wild man — you’re going to be appointed head of the Planetary Survey.”

I thought I had heard him wrong in the crackle of vegetables. “What’s this?”

“Satarwal’s out. You’ll be given the authority to open up any site you want for a dig. And to convene an inquiry into the Aimes Report.”

I must have looked like a cretin, I was so shocked; Shrike looked up from stirring and laughed like a maniac. “Go get some clothes on for dinner. And dry off first.”

“But why?”

“So you won’t get your food wet!”

“No, damn it, why? Why the appointment?”

“Haven’t you been paying any attention to the effect your work has had?”

“Of course! It hasn’t had any effect at all! I’ve barely found anything.”

“Well. People say you are very conservative in interpreting your data. Which is all to the good as far as the rest of the Committee is concerned. You’ve got a reputation for responsible science. And though there hasn’t been a big public reaction to your findings, you can hardly expect it, since none of them have appeared in the news. But the scientific community has been impressed, I’m told. It stands to reason — after all, what other explanation of Icehenge even makes sense? I ask you!”

“Don’t ask me! I’ve often wondered that myself.”

“Well there you have it. We’ve been contacted by Nakayama and Anya Lebedyan and other advisors to the Survey, who have pointed out the implications of your work for — for Mars. Here, eat. And the Committee has decided to make the appointment, so you can do the job properly.”

“Ah,” I said. Now I began to understand. “You’re going to make me into a good party man, eh?”

Shrike grinned. “You were always a good party man, Hjalmar. You just didn’t know it.”

I dropped my fork in my plate, went to the bathroom, dried off and dressed. A great fear was filling me; I saw their plan, I saw what they were hoping to do with me. I returned to the living room.

“I’ll show there was a revolution! A civil war!”

Shrike nodded. “I believe you. And you will show that Icehenge was constructed by Martians.”

“By Martian rebels! Fighting the Committee!”

He nodded, smiling one of his private smiles, one that said, It won’t matter. All those years the Committee had lied, they had crushed not only the revolution but the memory of it, and now so much time had passed that they could smile and say yes, that’s what happened — it’s true — we killed a fifth of the population, almost a million people — and then we buried it all. Now they’ve dug it up in New Houston, but so what? We’re still here; everybody’s happy; no one remembers it; nobody cares.

They were counting on our amnesia. They could co-opt any act, no matter how brutal, into their history; as long as it was old enough, it wouldn’t affect them at all. It was as easy as co-opting a malcontent professor: give him an important-sounding job in the system, where he became part of the machine; let him taste a little power, let him censor himself to taste a little more-

“I’ll be different!” I shouted at Shrike. “I won’t fold up and do what you say to crawl higher! I’ll use what you’ve given me against you, I swear. You’ll regret giving me this chance.”

Shrike nodded, eyes downcast, the little smirk still in place. It said, That’s what they all say, at first.

“I have to get out of here,” I said, suddenly terrified.

“This city is bad for you.” He looked annoyed. “Why don’t you eat?”

I crossed the room in search of my coat. “Didn’t I bring a coat?”

“No! Damn it, Hjalmar, will you be reasonable? Sit down and eat this meal I’ve cooked for you!”

I was shivering. “I’m going to borrow one of your coats.” I took one from the closet. “I’ve got to get out of here.” I put on the coat and went to the door.

“Jesus Christ. Hjalmar! Wait a second — you’ll take the appointment?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, damn you.”

I hurried down the wide boulevards in a frenzy. The big public buildings loomed over me like colorful Committee flags. Of course they gave me the codes to find what they wanted me to find. Of course their censors let me publish the results. All this happened with their permission, supervision, planning. Their power over me was as tangible and massive as the great stone libraries that I scuttled between. Furiously I packed a single travel bag and left my apartment. Down the boulevards to the giant olivine train station. I had to escape before they destroyed me. Faces I passed were slack and incurious, almost dead. Bathhouse doors gaped like wet mouths, the colored stone towers pulsed and wavered in the glow of the streetlights, bending until they almost met in the sky over me. In the train station I found that a sleeper to Burroughs was about to depart; it would make a stop at Coprates, where I could rent a car and return to New Houston. I had to get to New Houston, I would be safe there. I got on the train and huddled in a corner window seat, hugging my bag, shivering violently until with a gentle bump the train slid out of the station and into the night. After a time my body calmed; but my mind spun, I could not sleep.

Nothing I could do would bring them down. Kolpos Crater — this small crater (Btt 8 km. diameter) in the western section of Hellas Planitia is the lowest point on the Martian surface, four kilometers below the datum. Back in New Houston I found no changes. A reconstruction: “Twenty-sixth century archaeological dig, Mars.” When they were done the place would be studded with plaques and roped off: the war trophy as historical landmark. McNeil showed me around the city. He was still going at it with a toothbrush, so it looked no different than it had a year before.

Petnni hurried up with a realistic smile of welcome. “Congratulations on your new appointment,” he said. “We just heard about it today. It’s quite an honor! I hope you’ll remember your old friends when you’re up there in Burroughs.”

“I’ll remember a lot of things.”

Hana and Bill and Heidi and Xhosa were all at the physical plant, and they greeted me and showed me around the cleaned-up walls. The whole plant was ready for the plaques. “Well, it’s something,” I said. “I had hoped you would get more done.” Later Bill and Hana took me up to the rim to see the work they had done on the dome explosions. It wasn’t bad work, though one of them would have been enough for it.

“We’re going to get married,” Bill said.

“Yes?” I tried to hide my surprise. “I didn’t know people did that anymore. Congratulations.”

“We figured you would be back soon,” said Hana, “so we delayed it a bit hoping you could make it. It’ll be in the camp here on Saturday.”

“Thanks for waiting,” I said. “Tell me, have you gotten this work published?”

They gave each other a look.

“I know I’m supposed to be keeping tabs on your work, but I’ve been busy in Alexandria and I thought you might have gone ahead with it.”

“We’ve got it ready for your review,” Hana said slowly. “We had thought you would be co-author—”

“Oh no, no, dispense with that. Your paper. I wasn’t even here while you did it.” They looked odd, and Bill glanced at Hana. I said, “Ha — a little wedding present, so to speak.” Only then did it occur to me that they might want my name on the paper, to get it attention. “Again, congratulations. I’ll make a point to be there.”

Marriage. What idealism. On Saturday afternoon we all gathered in the main tent, which was decorated with stained screens and strings of flowers. It was a fine day, the air still and clear, the sky a deep violet.

The ceremony was short. The Kleserts were matron of honor and best man; Xhosa, who was a Unitarian minister, performed the service. Bill and Hana exchanged the usual impossible vows, and the party began. Several cases of the finest Utopian champagne had been shipped in, and I did my share in downing them, going at it with a will. After seven glasses I moved to a corner to make room for dancing. Our whole community was there, nearly sixty people, and most danced to the complex crossed rhythms of Eve Morris tunes. I looked through their gyrations to the crater rim above our tent. How many weddings had taken place in New Houston? Had any of them miraculously survived? Not likely — but perhaps — out there in the chaos-

Petrini came and stood by me, glass in hand. “It must be nice to see your students get along so well.”

“Is that what you call it?”

He laughed. “Something like that.”

I saw he was a bit drunk himself. Alcohol is a strange drug. “We’ve got a lot of work to do at the Survey,” I said, and downed my glass. “We’ll be starting digs at all the proscribed sites, and farming out grants to the university where we have to. I might be able to send some money your way, if you want to start investigating what really happened in the revolution.” I nodded seriously. “Maybe you could look into those green natives, eh?”

He was still struggling to form a response when Hana came and asked me to dance. She had tactfully chosen one of the slower numbers, and once on the floor we were able to circle sedately among the other couples, in a roar of music and voices. “You look beautiful,” I said. She was wearing a white skirt and a blue blouse. I leaned to kiss her on the cheek and lost my step, kissing her too hard.

“Thank you.”

“But I don’t understand this marriage,” I complained. “It’s an archaic ceremony, it makes no sense in this day and age. I’d have thought you’d know better. You’re twice as smart as Bill—”

She pulled away from me, and I saw the pained expression on her face and realized what I had done. Desperately I pulled her back into the dance and said, “Oh wait, Hana, please excuse me, that was a stupid thing to say, I’m very sorry. I’m — I’m upset. I’ve had too much champagne.” She nodded once, looking down. “It’s just that you’re the best of them, Hana. The only one who never went along with Satarwal and his lies. And I worry about you. They can take anything you do and turn it bad, you know. Your victories are sucked in and used just as efficiently as your defeats. Everything can be used. You have to watch out. Don’t let them suck you in, Hana — you’re too good for that, too young, too smart.”

“No, Dr. Nederland. I won’t. But thanks for the warning—”

“Only right! That’s part of my job, being your teacher. You’re the best of them, and I’ve got to teach you what I’ve learned.” I tried to give her another kiss and she held herself rigidly for it. Of course. Drunk advisor, coming on at the wedding reception itself. Disgusting. I saw that and stepped back, appalled. Hana stopped dancing and gave me a brief pitying look. To my relief McNeil cut in — he couldn’t dance either, and had to take advantage of the slow song. I walked dizzily to the drinks table.

I drained a few more glasses and went outside. My mood plummeted and I pulled my hood off; the cold brought me to my senses, but I still felt black. I stared up at the bronze sun and its squadron of mirrors. When I ran away from Alexandria I had hoped I would escape this feeling; New Houston had seemed my home, my real life, my real work. But things were the same no matter where I went; here my work was just as useless, my life just as empty. No matter where I ran it would be the same. I recalled the end of Cavary’s poem “The City”—

“Ah! don’t you see Since your mind is the prison You’ll live behind bars Everywhere now — over all of Mars?”

Sometimes I get so tired.

The chaos — collapsed terrain characterized by jumbled arrays of short, block-filled valleys and ridges.

We left New Houston in six big expedition cars and two little field cars, headed north to the Aureum Chaos, the dotted area of the map found in Emma’s escape car. Hana and Bill and Xhosa and Heidi rode with me in the lead car, along with a surveyor named Evelyn from the Survey office in Coprates, who navigated for us. We drove over the plain in the gentle morning light of mirror dawn: the four bright chips of the leading mirrors cast a clear light, the sky was white gold, the plain amber, cut with shadows from every pebble and boulder. Over the radio we heard the chattering in the other cars, but in ours it was tranquil. We passed a steel strut, protruding from the plain like a bone of Ozymandias; Evelyn identified it as the remains of a long gone pipeline, and she followed a line of these struts north.

Late that afternoon we came on a road. In the cratered terrain roads are easy to construct; drive a car pulling a V-shaped snowplow, and a lane is cleared of loose ejecta, which form rows of piled rock to each side of the road, “This one will take us most of the way,” Evelyn said. I looked back and saw the other cars following; tall plumes of dust wafted away from our caravan to the east. We drove between craters so old the rims were mere rounded bumps, and occasionally the road led right over one. From these low prominences we saw that the pocked rocky plain extended uniformly to a flat horizon eight or ten kilometers away.

On the road we made good time. We camped by it, and early the next day we left the road and turned east, to skirt the southern edge of Eos Chasma, and the whole bottom end of the Marineris system. Late in the day we came to the rim of Aureum. The plain dropped away in uneven segments, and to the north for as far as we could see was broken land, land that had collapsed from below. Because the Aureum was a sink, slumping two kilometers and more below the surrounding plains, we could see for many kilometers to the north — perhaps forty — and all of it was hacked and tumbled, like the no-man’s-land of some giants’ war. My heart sank as I gazed out at it; how could I possibly find the rebels’ refuge in such topographic insanity?

But the map from Emma’s car gave me courage. And as Evelyn directed us down a broad ramp into the edgelands of the chaos, I saw that each short valley was relatively flat-floored, though sometimes the pass from one valley to the next was pinched and steep. But crossing the terrain did not appear impossible.

The other cars followed us down: green metal bodies with clear bubble tops and big wheels at each corner. When the dusk created by shadows turned to real twilight, we stopped in a narrow defile and set the tents. Evelyn said we were on a road again, one that led to an old water station. Still I retired to my cot and unfolded Emma’s map. The reality of Aureum made me anxious; I wanted the reassurance of a representation, with its inevitable ordering. Around the southern edge of Aureum were three water stations, set where they best exploited what was left of the ancient aquifer underneath them. All of them had once been little self-sufficient settlements, pumping water upcanyon to the arid highlands of Tharsis. One of the water stations had probably been used as a departure point for the hidden refuge, for building anything very big in the chaos would have required a few trips in and out at least. The station Evelyn was leading us to was the one closest to the red dot at the center of the map.

We reached the water station late the following day. It consisted of two plastic greenhouses, collapsed under sand, and five little blockhouses made of brick. They had had a clever system: the old Johnson stills mixed soil and warm water, to free the oxygen in the soil; to the mud created in this procedure they added a fixative, and made “adobe” blocks with which the compound was built. The whole settlement was set on one of the mesalike blocks that protruded everywhere in the chaos.

We drove up a narrow ramp and got out of the cars to investigate. Another ruin of the Unrest. The brick buildings still looked ordinary enough to make broken windows a surprise. All the doors were open. The interiors were thick with dust and sand. I decided one building could be disturbed, and we entered it. In its kitchen were cupboards full of pots and pans, drawers full of dishware and utensils. No food. It was odd. Back outside I crossed the little yard created by the circle of buildings, and found Xhosa already testing the old pump. The generator still worked. Soon we would see whether the thawing, filtering, and pumping mechanisms underground also remained functional.

We set tents in the yard, and in the next couple of days while the others investigated the site, I hiked into the maze of valleys and blocks to the north. At first I found nothing. With the growing atmosphere tire tracks that before the transformation would have lasted a million years now would be buried. I explored in a fan pattern, checking avenues to the west and north, returning to the station to re-orient myself, trying again farther east. I left green marker balls to show where I had been, and came back upon them more than once.

But I found no sign of a road until the fourth day, when I tried a long sloping canyon that started two valleys east of the one leading to the station, and split the terrain to the northeast. I had stopped to inspect some Tibetan figwort growing between two rocks. I had seen a lot of lichen and alpine moss, but the figwort drew my attention. These sinks held a lot of air and water, to support such life. When I looked up from the cushion- shaped plant I saw that the little canyon floor was lined by two parallel depressions, like ruts almost filled in. I took out my little whisk broom and dusted away a few centimeters of fine sand, revealing a clear tire track. Our cars left tracks very like it. I followed the two ruts down the canyon and over a pass into a V-shaped valley that wound between ridges for as far as I could see; then, running short of light, I returned to the station.

That night I failed completely to hide my agitation. I forked my food as if stabbing ants. When the meal was finished I said, “I’m going to take one of the field cars for a few days and explore to the north.”

Xhosa and Bill looked at each other. Hana frowned.

“It’s possible some of the occupants of this place went north when it was abandoned. It’s a bit of a long shot, and I don’t want to disturb the main work here, but I’d like to follow some tracks I’ve found. I won’t be long.”

“It would be safer to go in a group,” Xhosa suggested. “We can spare the people.”

“I’m going to do it alone.” And I began to feel how power could corrupt. It made things so easy. On the other hand, even though I had the authority, they had the force to be able to disobey, and stop me. Authority must be backed by force to be true authority. So I added, “Don’t worry. I drove field cars for the Survey for more years than you all have lived.”

Bill said, “We only have so much air.”

“Get the Johnson still going again, then,” I said roughly, with a wave of dismissal. “I won’t take much.”

“Easy to get lost out there,” Xhosa said. “Safer if I came along.”

“I’ll be all right.”

Speechlessly Hana was asking me a question. I said again, to her, “I’ll be all right. I want to take a look up there, just for myself.”

She nodded reluctantly. Xhosa looked worried; Bill frowned as if weighing his permission. Annoyed, I said, “Help me get a car ready.”

Xhosa helped me fill a compartment of the car with green marker balls. “Set a lot of these,” he said. “We’ll listen for you on the radio.”

It was the mirror dawn, and in the dimness I could not read his face. Plumes of frost fell from our breath. Hana and Bill emerged from a tent, and Hana approached me. “You shouldn’t do this,” she said. “It isn’t safe. We should stop him from going—” This to Xhosa.

“You’ll do what I say,” I cried; and then, embarrassed at my outburst, I had to make the rest of my preparations mumbling and avoiding Hana’s gaze. I climbed into the little field car without acknowledging their farewells, feeling foolish, and drove down the ramp.

Maneuvering the car over the two low ridges to my canyon was easy enough, and then I followed the faint road. My car’s wheels almost fit the tracks. Turning off my radio I felt my spirit blossom inside me, inspiring an exultant shout. I was off in search of Emma and the rebels! I swore that if I found them I would join them and never go back.

The tracks were easy to follow, and it took less than an hour to retrace all my previous day’s hike. Beyond the point where I had turned back the V-shaped valley stretched for four or five kilometers, and the faint parallel ruts continued right down its middle. A little creekbed, born since the tracks were made, ran between them and sometimes over them; sometimes the bed was filled with jade ice, mostly it was dry. But the ruts were visible until I came on a box canyon ending the valley. There the ruts disappeared. I put the car in reverse and retreated, and at the first pass over the side ridge of the valley, I saw the two ruts again, cutting deeply over the pass. I cursed my inattention, but mildly, since it had caused no harm, and left a green marker at the turn before driving on.

Over the pass were scalloped ridges like dunes, offering no obvious way north; slowly I followed the tracks over this broken land, and then they dropped into an area of massive blocks divided by narrow canyons or defiles that offered a path through the blocks, sometimes. Apparently the first long canyon and the valley after it had been features of border terrain, and now I was in the chaos proper. I could seldom see more than a kilometer in any direction, and often less than that. It was as if I drove through the rubble-filled streets of a city of jasper or chert, which had been struck to shambles by a cataclysmic earthquake. At less than my walking pace I drove over faint traces of tire track, and it seemed that the only reason I kept finding it was that it was the only route through the maze. But in every kilometer’s progress there were three or four choices to be made, and at each fork I stopped, looked at the two or three possibilities, and concluded I had lost the trail; then a line of rocks, or a smooth depression, or two parallel lines in the distance made by shifts in the soil that could not be perceived when near to them, would become evident, and with a hum of the car’s electric motor I was off again. At each fork or crossroads I guided the robot arm out and stabbed a green marker ball into the hard sand. Looking back I could almost always see one.

As I proceeded north the height of the giant blocks diminished — or the defiles between them rose — and a few kilometers farther on the canyons ascended to the height of the blocks. I drove over a fractured plain, a sort of crazed plateau surrounded by jagged hills not much higher than it. It was the inversion of the maze: low ridges crossed each other everywhere on this plateau, dividing it into frozen ponds and drifts of sand; Passage over this ground was difficult, and the tracks skirted it to the west, leading me to another plateau, one split by fissures or crevasses so that to continue north the track had to wind in big S’s. Here I ran into difficulty. The land was exposed to the wind, and in the fissures and etch pits were frozen ponds, surrounded by icy Syrtis grass, cushions of sandwort and rock jasmine, stiff leaf sedge, and boulders dotted with lichen of several colors. In this weird Arctic meadow the tracks were impossible to trace. I drove back to the last point I had been sure of seeing them — on one of the eskerlike ridges dividing the depressed plain — but once there, my own car’s tracks marred the landscape ahead, and I saw no others. No other direction seemed feasible; to veer right was to return to the ridged plain, to turn left was to drop back into the maze that the old tracks had worked out of. It seemed most likely that the road had crossed the crevassed plateau I had driven onto, and that in the last century the tracks had been destroyed by erosion and deposition.

So I was on my own. But I was loath to believe that. I got out of the car and ranged forward on foot, inspecting each route between fissures for sign of the road. Nothing. The rough jumble of peaks to the north might protect a canyon section of the road enough for it to reappear — or so I hoped — and in the last hour of daylight I drove north across the plateau, zigging and zagging to avoid fissures. When blocks began to dot the plateau like immense erratics on a dusky morraine, I slowed the car and kept close watch. I saw only a pebbly broken plain, which became canyon mouths as the blocks became more frequent and continuous. I drove up one anxiously; then for no reason I looked up at the left wall of the new canyon, and there, dug into the rock like three cracks, was an arrow, like so:

I laughed aloud. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I was wondering about that.” I drove on, but immediately I saw that the shadows of late afternoon would obscure any sign of the trail. I backed out of the canyon onto the plain to have a view for the evening, and stopped for camp beside one of the frozen ponds. The evening mirrors were pinpricks in a burgundy sky. I heated some beef soup, dipped crackers in it. After eating I sipped a cup of brandy, and located my position on the map. The fissured plain was clearly marked, an island in rougher terrain. The red dot was still a good distance to the north. The sky darkened to blackberry, the mirrors winked out over a horizon like a row of black teeth. The stars glowed yellow, making the clear dome of the car a planisphere. Sleep was difficult. Late in the night I jerked awake and knew I had been speaking with Emma, in a long conversation, a crucial one. What can you offer, she said. I tried to remember it; the starlit chaos, a vast jumble of black and gray, disoriented me, and even Emma’s last words fled. The whole dream forgotten. And so much of our waking lives are lost in the same way. I felt a pang of grief for the way we live, for all that we go through, and can never return to.

When the mirror dawn came I ate some cereal, and at true dawn I started the car and hummed up the arrow canyon, determined to find the road again. The canyon led to another stone maze, with forks at every turn that might have been paths through to the north; but there were no signs of passage to show me the way. I drove back to the arrow and considered what to do. Studying the map, it seemed to me that I could navigate my own way to the red dot. It was about sixty or seventy kilometers away, and the terrain in between did not appear markedly different from that I had already crossed. It was midmorning already, and I didn’t have an endless supply of air; in fact, my choice was to press on without the road, or turn back.

So I resolved to press on without the tracks. The rest of that morning I made good time north. The tumbled-down stone city I entered seemed to have split into hexagonal “city blocks”: a dogleg of thirty degrees right, followed by the same to the left, brought me time after time to Y-shaped canyon intersections where I could make the same choice again. Then a long broad fault allowed me to drive directly north for several kilometers, pausing only to maneuver over slides. My spirits rose, and with them my hopes (and a bit of fear): perhaps I would reach the region of the red dot that very day.

But I had forgotten that maps do not contain very much of reality. In the Aureum Chaos it would have been more accurate to leave a blank, with the legend “This is chaos — terra incognita — no map can show it and be faithful to its nature.” For I drove into a narrow valley where the map indicated I could continue northward and downward to the center of the chaos, the bottom of that huge bowl—

And the valley ended in an escarpment. Not a very tall one, but tall enough — ten or twelve meters — and it extended east and west for as far as the eye could see. The whole land took a step down, in a sheer drop. A cliff!

Angrily I pulled out the map. In the appropriate area was a contour line — in fact two of them, drawn together, in a dark line that I had taken for an index contour. Disgusted, I tossed the map to the floor. Contour line or no, the escarpment was there; I could drive no farther.

For nearly an hour I sat there and thought. Then I packed some food into the survival cart, filled its water tank, filled my field suit with its maximum load of oxygen: a hundred hours, on minimum flow. In the drawers of the cart I put map, bivouac tent, lamp, etc., and then I shoved the cart out of the car’s lock. The rush of cold air filled my lungs, but it was warmer than I had expected; there was more air down in this sink than I was used to.

The car’s trunk contained a rope ladder and a big square flag of lime-green nylon. I used the ladder to lower the cart down the cliff. Rocks served to hold down the corners of the green flag, and I dropped the unsecured end over the side. Then I climbed down the rope ladder’s metal rungs. The flag stood out against the cliffside clearly enough, and I tied its two bottom corners down with line so it couldn’t be blown back over the top by a north wind. Satisfied, I took another look at the map, put it in my thigh pocket, and set off hiking, pulling the little cart behind me.

Now there was no chute too narrow, no pass too steep. I hiked almost directly north. According to the map the red dot was about fifteen kilometers away, so I would have to hurry. But I had started late in the day, and soon the sun fell, and I had to use the mirror dusk to pull the bivouac tent from the cart and inflate it. That done, I climbed through the little lock and pulled the cart in after me. I fixed and ate a meal rapidly, as if I were going to be able to hike again when I was finished.

It was a cloudy night. Through scudding breaks the stars twinkled, and Deimos flew eastward like an omen. I could not sleep; hours passed; I was surprised to wake and find that I had been drowsing in the mirror dawn. I slipped out of the tent and the shock of frigid air burst my senses awake. Soon after the tent was back in the cart the sun rose, and I started hiking again.

Hours passed, and there was nothing for me in the world but that maze of canyons and the map. It is a form of grace to become nothing but a task; one can believe in meanings because they are all that exist. At each fork in the system of giant fissures I got out the map and made a choice. The sun overhead warmed the air, and ice on the clumps of Syrtis grass turned to drops of water, sparking like prisms in the light. Icicles hanging off rocks dripped, and the surfaces of the ice ponds got slick and smooth. Junipers and needle grass filled cracks, and sprays of saxifrage and gentian surprised me with their color. Sometimes it was hard to match the terrain to the map, which was too small-scaled for my purpose. Estimating heights and distances in the dense amber air was difficult; at times I had a prospect of fifty meters, other times I could see all the way across the chaos; what appeared to be mountains in the distance often proved to be blocks just over the next ridge, and vice versa. Each correspondence I made between my location and a point on the map was more of a guess than the last — but once, in the afternoon, I climbed a tall rock and had a look around, and the view corresponded perfectly to a point on the map five or six kilometers southwest of the dot. Full of confidence I hiked on.

The general slope of the terrain tilted up against me, and hauling the cart up stone terraces got to be hard work. The dawn mirrors had set and the sun was about to, when I sat in a narrow pass to rest. I had just caught my breath when I saw a trail duck, right there before me in the sand. Four flat rocks laid on top of each other. “Yes!” I exclaimed. I knelt to inspect it. A human construct. I hooted loudly, and leaving the cart I ranged down both sides of the pass looking for another duck. I found nothing. “Which way?” I said, suddenly free to speak. “No one makes only one duck — where’s the next?” In both directions I saw nothing but a rumpled carpet of rock, a shambles of brown and black and red. “Odd. Order leaps to the eye, I should be able to see two ducks, one before, one behind.” But perhaps the others had fallen, or been buried. Or maybe I was supposed to continue in the same direction, and when the route changed direction another duck would appear. “Yes. Carry on, a sign will appear.”

I was tired. By the time I returned to the cart the sun was down, and it was the most I could do to get the tent up and wiggle inside before dark. Once again I made soup, sipped brandy, pored over the map and charted a course for the next day, lay back in my bag, looked up at low dark clouds. Failed to sleep, except in fits and starts near dawn. Dreamed, and forgot the dreams on waking.

Next morning I was stiff, and it took a while to break camp. Before leaving I made a reconnaissance of the area, and over a steep ridge to the east of my pass I found another duck. Sand had drifted around it until it looked like a mound of dust filled with pebbles, but there it was. Lichen growing on the sides of it. I crunched back over the ridge to the cart. The new duck indicated a different course than the one I had charted the night before, but at one-to-one-million scale, the map wasn’t going to give me much help once I got into the immediate area of the red dot, and the duck might be part of a trail leading straight to it. So I hauled the cart over the ridge, and very nearly twisted an ankle. “That will never do.” The tendonitis in my knee was flaring up, but I ignored it. At the second duck I left the cart and searched for a third. I found it over another ridge; it was a fairly big duck, though it had fallen on its side and looked like a talus spill if you didn’t look closely. It was unfortunate the terrain was so rough. But it made sense. The rebels would have put their refuge in the most inaccessible location they could find. Still, it took me nearly an hour to recover from the crossing of that ridge. I turned up my oxygen supply a bit, and searched again.

The next duck led me up a narrow, shallow chute, one that gave me a way to climb a broad tilted face that was like the side of a mountain. Thankful that I was done with ridge crossings, I hauled the cart up the chute twenty steps at a time, pausing after each twenty to catch my breath and strength. Out on the slope it was very hot, at least on the side of me facing the sun. I was surprised to find it was after noon. The sweat on my brow tasted good. When I moved my hand I saw it blur through space a bit. Wondering vaguely when the next duck would appear, I started climbing again.

I was near the top of that pitch, and feeling that the chaos must have turned on its side, when I saw the figure climbing ahead of me. My heart pulsed violently, its thump banged in my ears. “Hey!” I called weakly, and gathered myself for a shout. “Hello! Hellooo!”

The figure kept climbing. It wore a helmeted suit, and was bent nearly double in the steep last section of the chute. It was fast; I would have to hurry to catch up. I turned up my oxygen flow again, and started after this mysterious climbing partner. It disappeared over the top of the chute, and when I topped out myself I was surprised to see it hiking across a plateau that seemed relatively level after the wall we had just ascended.

So the rebels had placed their refuge in a knot of steep hills at the center of the chaos, giving them a view of the whole bowl. Admirable. Sweat got in my eyes and stung them badly; the whole world wavered through my tears. My breath came in such harsh gasps I could hardly talk. “Don’t hike so fast! Hey up there! Stop.”

The plateau suddenly folded up and then dropped away. The edge of the fold led up to the right, and on the plateau’s side it was a broad ridge, easy to climb. But broken layers of rock lay on the ridge like shingles, and pulling the cart up each step was hard. My body felt like the skin was everywhere aflame, and I sloshed in my own sweat. Above me on the ridge the figure was standing upright, looking back at me. It waved a hand, gesturing for me to follow. “Yes! Yes,” I said, and gasped, “only, go slow, er.” But it didn’t, and I had to continue to hurry, losing ground on it all the time. Not far above it was a knob of rock, and above that sky, meaning soon it would top this ridge and head off in another direction. Fearfully I yanked the cart sideways and braked the wheels with stones, then left it and hurried up the ridge by myself. I was glad I had; even alone I could barely walk up the ridge to the top knob, and once there I had to crawl on my hands and knees over the knob, which was not very tall.

Once over the knob I found myself standing on a small saddle that led to an even higher peak. I could see for kilometers, all across a world that curved slightly upward as it moved away from me. We were on a knobby saddlebacked hill, at the bottom of the huge bowl of Aureum. The figure was standing in the saddle, looking at me. Its helmet faceplate reflected the low blood-red sun. I waved a hand over my head several times. The faceplate tilted up and the sun’s reflection disappeared; then the glass came down and turned red again. I stumbled off the lower knob, made my way onto the saddle. All my strength was gone. I could barely walk. Mercifully my companion stayed put. Soon I stood before it. It watched me without moving. I spread my hands. “I’m here.”

No movement. Then it lifted a hand, laconic in gesture, and pointed at its ear.

“You don’t need full helmets anymore,” I said. “There’s air enough to breathe now, air enough to talk in. You can’t talk to me with that on.”

No reply. I lifted my hands and mimed unlatching the helmet, but that got no response either. I took a step forward, it took a step back. I raised my arms and displayed the palms of my gloves; what could I, played out, do to it? Perhaps my companion understood this expression. In any case it allowed me to approach. I came at it from the side, so that the reflected sunlight slid away, and I saw that it was Emma.

She looked almost like the photos: brown eyes, down-swooping mouth, a strand or two of dark hair. All my breath left me. “So you did survive,” I whispered. “Oh, Emma. It’s me. I mean, my name is Hjalmar Nederland. I found you. I came here looking for you. I found your journal. I want to join you out here. I’m not going back, not ever. There’s nothing for me back there—” a wave at the world. “Nothing, I say. I’ve left it for good.”

She nodded once, very slightly, and turned and walked along the saddle’s spine looking once over her shoulder to see if I was following. I kept at her heels, stumbling because I would not look away from her. I could not see enough of her — Emma Weil! There she stood! I could scarcely contain my amazement, my joy. Even when walking she was fast; I had to work to keep up with her runner’s walk, but now I was strong, I could do it.

By the time we closed on the higher peak of the saddleback the sun had set, and we stood in the half light of the evening quartet. Now her faceplate was glass only, and her slim face was clearly visible. I indicated again that she should remove her helmet; she shook her head. She looked older, I was glad to see; she looked a woman my age, in her fourth century of life, skin lined with experience, eyes suffused with wisdom. She led me by the hand up the last slope to the summit, and I saw that under the final nest of peak boulders was a band of empty air. That is, there was a chamber without walls that she led me into. Its floor was flagged with smooth stone, and a circle of fluted columns twice our height was all that stood on this floor; and these pillars held up an equally smooth roof, on which the serrated boulders of the summit knot rested.

Emma smiled at my obvious astonishment, and led me between two pillars into the center of the… pavilion. The light of the dusk mirrors flooded the chamber, and the shadows of the pillars banded it. All the chaos lay below us, striped with light and shadow in a fantastic tumble of rock.

“What is this place?” I asked. “Is this your lookout, invisible from above? Is this a temple, and your refuge nearby?”

She nodded.

I walked to the edge of the room to the north, opposite where we had entered. Another broad ridge led down into shadows. I sat on the edge of the flagging, feeling very tired, very happy. Emma came and stood beside me, a hand resting on my hood. “I see now why you stay out here,” I said. “It’s not fear of the Committee. It’s this place. Here you have Mars the way we always should have had it. A Greek temple from which to contemplate the land, a slowly wrought sculpture that the planet controls. And the life — lichen and moss, stonecrop and Syrtis grass, primrose and rock jasmine — isn’t it lovely, struggling there around the edges of the ponds? All the meadows in this desolation. And soon it will be treeline down here — Martian juniper, have you seen it? Oh, Emma — what a world we have! What a world!”

She took my arm, pulled me up, led me several steps down the north ridge. When I began to wonder at her purpose she pointed down, at the ground between us. Under the glowing indigo sky I could barely make them out at first, but then I saw what she pointed at, and I thought that she must have heard what I had been saying. They were alpine flowers, tucked between the plated angular rocks: gentian and saxifrage, primrose and Tibetan rhubarb, little points of light color in the gloom,

I looked up, and she was gone. Then I caught a glimpse of her down the ridge, descending swiftly. Crying at her to stop I hurried after. I stumbled, lost ground. “Emma, don’t leave. Don’t leave.”

It was dark. I no longer saw her. Perhaps she had been running out of air. I tried to hike back up the broad ridge, and couldn’t. I would never be able to make it back to the cart. Slowly I pulled the thick woven cup of the facemask over my nose, and slid the hood’s goggles down over it. I turned up the heat dial on my suit’s forearm console, and climbed until I couldn’t take another step. Then I lay down. I didn’t know if I could survive the night or not.

So I lay in the lee of a boulder, thinking, she must have run low on air. Or, this is a test, a way to weed out the weak ones. She’ll come back and get me in the morning. And I fell into unconsciousness.

Several times in the night cold stabbed deep enough to wake me, but I only shifted and slept again. At last the cold conquered even my exhaustion, and I sat up stiffly, flexed fingers and arms to generate warmth. I could not tell the time. Already the night seemed to have lasted years. And all I could do was wait.

Dawn in the chaos. Archimedes the first mirror sun cracked the distant horizon, and the world shifted from black to gray; then two mirror suns appeared, and another, and the diamond pattern of morning mirrors was complete. In the mirror dawn the chaos was gray, capped by a pearl sky. It was very cold. I had a bad sore throat, a pulsing headache.

The sun rose an hour later, and its brilliant yellow light rolled over the land like a gel. I got up and climbed the ridge, very slowly; but it seemed it led me to a different peak. No pavilion under a dolmen greeted me when I topped the ridge, though it was a broadly saddled hill. I crossed the saddle and inspected the other knob, thinking I might have confused them in the twilight. But it too was an ordinary hilltop; and down the ridge that led away to the south was my cart.

I hiked down to it and drank a liter of water, then ate a bit; Curiously I reascended the hill and climbed all over the two peaks, looking for signs. It seemed possible that the pillars could have descended into the hilltop, bringing the peak boulders back down to their proper roost. But I could find no sign of a break under them. I found quite a few footprints, though, and despite Emma’s odd disappearance the night before, I was still reasonably sure that her refuge was nearby. Perhaps a search in the canyons around the hill…

I checked the gauges in my forearm console, and stopped short. Came to. My oxygen supply was low, I only had twenty-five hours minimum flow left! I couldn’t believe it. I had used a lot to survive the night, but how could I have let it get this low and never checked?

But if I found the refuge, it wouldn’t matter.

I stood there, undecided, on the saddle, between the two peaks. Both of them solid rock. But the pillars could have been retractable, the refuge nearby, Emma low on air, testing my resolve, my desire…

I shook my head. I was afraid to risk it. I backed away from the taller north peak, unwilling to turn from it. The refuge could have been right under it, a fortress under the mountain!

I tore myself away, hiked down to my cart, started the tedious process of lowering it down the long south ridge.

Quickly I found that the long day’s hike and the night’s exposure had sapped me of all strength. The cart kept trying to plunge away from me down the long chute, and when I managed to ease it to the bottom of that gruelling slope, pulling it farther was nearly too much for me. The hike became nothing but a brute struggle to haul that cart through the rock jungle.

The great sun and its flock of goslings flared overhead, until it seemed the sky burned. All the world, stone and sky, blazed in shades of red, and every pebble and boulder in my path pulsed with my heart, as if I walked in my body, across a plain broken like retina or tongue. The man as planet. Ponds glared white and I kneeled, consumed by thirst, to suck down the skim of water over the ice. Around one pond tufts of Syrtis grass broke from their ice sheaths and stood like green miracles in the talus. I dragged myself from stunned contemplation of them and hiked on, wandering in the chaos with the great poem of winter rolling deliriously in my head.

Lost in one of the canyon mazes, overwhelmed by exhaustion and headache, I checked my oxygen gauge and wondered if my folly had led me to death. The thought was like a spur to every cell in me, and I drank more water, checked the cart’s radio compass. I even got out the map and tried to consult it, but ended up tossing it aside and laughing weakly. A map of chaos! What an idea!

Something in the planet broke, and a lump bulged up under Tharsis. This stressed the land around it, and the biggest fracture was the giant canyon system of Valles Marineris. Deep underground, water ran downhill through the gardened regolith, and it pooled underneath the lower end of the canyons in great aquifers. Tharsis kept up welling and the pressure on the aquifers continued, as well as the fracturing in the crust, and eventually the aquifers burst onto the surface in massive outflows. Great outflow channels were scoured in the land downhill, to the north and east; and the land over the aquifers collapsed into chaos.

And so I came here. This is the only map we have. Death is the mother of beauty, the old poets said; but I think they lied to console themselves in the face of their premature end. I felt the weight of death on me that day, and all that expanse of stone and the blaze of suns in the chrysoprase sky were reduced to nothingness. Only the landscape of the next few steps meant anything. I felt each breath in my raw throat as the work of a plant, turning rock into root. I felt my burned nose, throat and lungs taking the world in with a constant and insatiable thirst. If that drinking of air ever stopped, I would die: I could feel the cold rasp of that truth in me. To die was to become so sick that the body broke down and stopped, utterly and irreparably. It was such a radical dysfunction that I had never been able to properly imagine it. But now I could feel in my body how it would happen. And then beauty was the last thing in the world that might have occurred to me.

And danger did not sharpen my senses, either. The chaos was blurred, my limbs were wood; tears leaked from my eyes and hurt my chapped cheeks, I moaned wordlessly, I dragged myself and the cart on with only a last patching together of the will. Up a small scarp, by lifting the front of the cart and putting the wheels on the higher ground. Backtracking to avoid a long fissure. Righting the cart. Pulling one wheel over a four- centimeter pebble. And so that whole long day passed, in work like that, in the dreadful confused blur of a nightmare.

In the fanned horizontal beams of sunset I sat on a rock. I had intended to heat some soup, and eat my remaining candy, but I was too tired to move. I sat there and watched the light of my last sunset drain off the land. When the sun disappeared I felt the sobs in me that I was too tired to make. Above the horizon the diamond pattern of mirror suns cast a streetlight glow over the dark land. And there in the plum sky, so high that it was still lit by the sun, was a bird. I could see its broad wings catching the westerlies, dipping and flapping once or twice as it pursued the sun. Canyon hawk, or Arctic eagle. Or more likely a garok, a big Tibetan crow. A Martian bird. Manipulation of their gene stock made it possible for them to live. That bird is an idea, I thought. I felt my thirst, and stirred to get water from the cart. I needed to clean my suit of wastes, dump the flask in the cart for recycling. The idea floated over the chaos, observing it with hungry care. It must have been blown east by the wind. “Should be over the canyons with the foxes and moles. Nothing here but mouse hares and snow finches, living in the same holes together.” Winds filled my chest, I breathed in and out unevenly, the soaring bird wavered in my sight and then held firm. Flight is a miracle, you know; it was bold to think of it. “You are an idea, Nederland. And you had better eat some soup, or the planet will forget you.” I ate soup, crackers, candy, beef sticks. Drank a lot of water. I got out the cart’s little spyglass and turned it south. Through the glass I saw a low line of cliff, still catching mirror sunlight. My escarpment. And perhaps a green point on it, there to my left. I drank more water, feeling my rehydration. I had only six hours of oxygen left. I packed the pockets of my suit with food, water bottle, telescope. Then, leaving the cart behind (a find for some future archaeologist to ponder), I hiked south through the mirror dusk.

The bird still soared over me; I got a good look at its beak, and decided it was a garok. No disappearing vision this, but a real bird. I remembered then something I had once read, that it was not uncommon for solo climbers at high altitude to hallucinate a companion climber, ahead or behind on the pitch. Unhappily I banished the thought. I didn’t want to think about what had happened to me.

When the last mirror sun disappeared the temperature plummeted. Night-time temperature on Mars: forty degrees below zero. But there was no wind, my facemask and goggles were in place, and my suit’s heater and my exertions kept me warm. It was an odd sensation — the suit radiated heat all over my skin, while breathing turned my insides to ice.

For an hour or two I advanced cautiously, resolutely, checking my landmarks and watching every step. After that exhaustion and dehydration made me clumsy, and inexorably the cold expanded from my lungs through my body. Every breath tortured my sore throat. I was thirsty, and my water was ice; I was tired, and my bed was rock. In the night’s dark the floor of the chaos was a field of fanglike seracs, hanging overhead as if I ascended a stone glacier. My head and throat roared, I thought I might go blind with the ache of it. And I could not sit down and rest for fear of dying. A few steps, a standing rest; a few steps, a standing rest — and on forever.

Then I ran out of oxygen. My pulse tripped crazily, I was sure I was dying. What a stupid idea, I raged, to hike out here alone! What were you thinking? My body pumped air that was like dry ice in and out of me; my throat even lost its pain, or went beyond it. Here was the test: Could Martian air alone keep a man alive at night? Waves of faintness nauseated me and I saw the dim shadow world in pumping red, then in greens, and I leaned against a rock wall, all my powers focused on holding to consciousness. Breathing dry ice. Carbon dioxide, argon, inert gases, a fat dollop of oxygen — all at three hundred and ninety millibars, maybe four-fifty in Aureum — was it enough?

Apparently it was. For the moment. Enough to move? I tested it, and found I could walk. But now the cold was more penetrating than ever. I couldn’t think, and I could barely walk, but I was afraid to sit. So I staggered on, slowly freezing to death, and killing my brain with lack of oxygen. Hours passed, and I carried on. The oxygen deprivation induced a mild euphoria in me; not a euphoria of spirits, exactly, but rather a sort of physical lightness. I stepped, stood, swayed, all with the distinct impression that if I did not keep my balance I might float away.

And then dawn came. Archimedes burst over the horizon without warning, taking me completely by surprise. I had forgotten daytime. Chapped lips broke to blood in a deathly grin. “The sun… is an idea.”

And it showed me I had somehow kept hiking south. The escarpment was no more than two kilometers before me, and hiking toward it I saw off to my left the green flag. “Dead reckoning, all right.” My headache was gone, and I felt free to sit for a moment and rest. I nearly failed to stand again, but when I managed it I floated along fairly well, feeling quite relaxed. Just after sunrise proper I made it to the bottom of the cliff, where I considered the problem of the rope ladder. There was no way around it; I was going to have to climb the thing. I took three quick steps up and hung my arms over a rung until I caught my breath. Then I added two rungs, and hung against the scarp again; and did it again, and repeated the maneuver until every muscle screamed, and my lungs pumped fast as a bird’s. Getting over the edge was a technical problem that stopped me cold; but the idea of surviving the whole night and then falling at the last bend was too distasteful, and I lunged up and onto flat land. On hands and knees, without looking up, I followed the ladder to the car. Then through the lock — hard work — and into the inexpressibly warm air of the car. From my knees I switched on the car’s systems, and collapsed onto the couch. I looked out at the great sink of Aureum, flooded by the lemon light of a new day, and falling asleep I shook my fist at the scene. “I went as far as I could for you, Emma Weil!”

And so I had. I slept without stirring until late that day, when intense thirst roused me. I found I was almost too stiff to move: I had pulled a muscle behind my left knee, tendonitis locked my right, and my arms and armpits were bruised and sore from the ascent of the ladder.

I stripped off my suit, shuddering at the sour smell; tossed it in the laundry drawer, and went to the toilet to clean up. I stared at myself in the mirror, appalled. My beard was like a stubbled field, and sweat covered this field like a white frost. My cheeks and nose were cracked and whitish. “They’ll have to regrow that skin. Dr. Laird will be angry.” Beady eyes were sunken deep, the skin under them was black. So I would look on the last day of my life. So my corpse would appear. I splashed water onto my face and felt the sting voluptuously: water of life, sting of living.

I went back to the driver’s seat and looked out the window. Dusk in the chaos, brown- black shadows under a banded sky.

The violent purples of the world’s end. But it was just another day. Every day was a stroke on the calendar: live a thousand years, it was still true. I had lived my life as if I were immortal, but now I knew differently. Extend as far as I could, there would still come the day of the dysfunction, the radical breakdown, the end. And the face in the toilet mirror believed it.

So I had lived my life on false premises. All those complaints about the pain of existence — what a fool I had been to ape the ennui of the immortal, ignoring the flesh metronome ticking inside, marking each of a finite number of moments we could never return to. I had behaved as if I were a god, and hiked alone into the chaos careless of my own life; and in the cold night learned better, the hard way.

And as the light leaked out of the sky, and black clouds loomed out of the north over the land like immense dark beings, I felt that all my springs of action were wrong. I groaned, shuffled to the heating ring and the cabinet below it. Making each move like a wooden man I rehydrated a packet of beef stroganoff, and stirred it in a fry pan. I got out the brandy and drank from the bottle. At the smell of the beef my stomach growled. All those times when Shrike had pricked me with his scorn; each time he had been right. I took another swig of the brandy. “You’re an ass, Nederland. An idiot, a fool. You’ve lived your life like a mouse hare in its hole, while all the while red Mars spun through the ether like a top. A hare pawing over stones, wanting to feel the same way over and over, alive only when the shrike seized you and impaled you on his thorn bush.” Another swallow of brandy, burning its way down, swimming in the brain. I poured the stroganoff onto a plate and sat before it at the tiny table. Only the heating ring illuminated the compartment; I turned on a lamp, and faint reflections of the interior appeared in the windows, obscuring the cloudy sky outside. I ate for a while; then the fork halted over the plate, and I stared out at the night. “You must change your life.”

The next day I followed my route back, driving with a ruthless skill that returned to me from my life in the Survey. That had been a good time, those years of driving over the planet; I remembered that in my hands, in the act of driving itself, and it gave me something to ponder during the trip from marker to marker. It was still early afternoon when I drove up the ramp onto the mesa, and into the old water station’s yard.

The whole crew tumbled out of the buildings and gathered around the car to greet me. As I eased my way awkwardly out of the lock, and looked at all their round-eyed faces, full of curiosity and dismay, I knew what it was to be a prophet returning from the wilderness, I felt that my stubble should have been a beard flowing to my knees, that I should have carried tablets or the like. Xhosa’s face was split into a big grin; Hana tried to help me walk, and I brushed her off irritably, limped across the yard and into the biggest tent, followed by the whole congregation. “What happened to you?” Bill asked in a horrified tone.

I told them a little, leaving most of it out. When I got to the escarpment and my decision to hike, Hana sucked air through her teeth as if I were still in danger. And when I mentioned my night in the open without oxygen, Xhosa whistled. “I’m not sure that’s ever been done before,” he said.

That intrigued me, and later I looked into it. I found that a group of four climbers in the Kasei Vallis had lost their cart in a crevasse (easy to do!) and been forced to bivouac a night in suits, without oxygen, at two kilometers above the datum. Two of them died, but the other two were rescued the next day. So I was not the first human to spend a night free on the surface of Mars; but close enough.

When I was done with my story, Bill said, “There’s been a radio message for you. They want you to return to Burroughs as quickly as possible. Apparently you’re to head an expedition to Pluto, to dedicate Icehenge.”

“Dedicate Icehenge?”

“To the memory of those killed in the Unrest. The Committee is sponsoring the expedition, and Mr. Selkirk is organizing it. He hopes they can leave soon, he wanted to tell you — he would like to have the expedition reach Pluto in time to coordinate the dedication with the three hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the convening of the Committee.”

I couldn’t help laughing. Pierce me, Shrike! Prick me to life! Of course my companions stared at me as if I were mad. Yes, I could see them thinking it: he wandered in the chaos and suffered oxygen deprivation, and it’s killed so many brain cells that he’s over the rim at last. That’s the trouble with a reputation for eccentricity; after you’ve got it, even the most ordinary behavior looks odd, just because it’s yours.

So after I had my skin tended to, and rested a couple of days, I took a car and a couple of students I barely knew, and started back, taking a detour so I could visit New Houston one more time. Selkirk’s expedition would wait for me.

The Aquifer

In New Houston I limped up and walked around the rim, to look down into the town of my birth, now a ruin. And then I went down to the abandoned field car, and sat in it. Through the starred windshield the sun shone brightly.

Here sat Emma Weil. Here in New Houston lived Emma Weil, for a few embattled weeks, anyway — weeks when I too had lived here. I rubbed the seat’s arms with a gloved finger. Soon I would be off to Pluto, to “dedicate” the monument left behind by Oleg Davydov and his band of voyagers — to dedicate it to the Mars Development Committee, the very force that had driven Davydov’s group to its desperate act.

And yet Davydov and Emma and the Mars Starship Association would be remembered; this megalith would be theirs, now, forever. The Committee flexed back where it had to like a judo wrestler, hoping to pull me off balance and spin me away; but if I kept the pressure on in the right way, I might topple it. This time their plan might be foiled. The Mars Starship Association had resisted, Emma Weil had resisted, I had resisted, and I would keep resisting; and perhaps one day we would make Mars free.

What does it mean to love the past? Each day disappears into nothingness, and we must live every moment of our lives in the present. The present is the whole of reality. But human beings are more than real. We plunge through the years like giants, as the poet said, and not one of us can be understood except as creatures continuously exfoliating. When memory fails to contain us we must love the past more than ever, to hold it to us — or else the present becomes a meaningless blaze of color and sound, in which no two humans, great elongate beings, will be able to do more than touch at their very tips, their spatial selves — no one will ever truly understand another. To love the past is to become fully human.

I clutched the armrests of that old car seat as hard as I could, and heard them crackle. Here a human being I understood had once sat. Whether she had died here or escaped, I would never know. My pilgrimage to find her had failed, and all I had met out there in the broken land was myself; or ghosts. But then the realization came to me that it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. Immediately I was filled, as with water or air, with an overwhelming sense of peace. Whether Emma lived or died that night in Spear Canyon, she had lived, she had resisted — one great woman loved Mars and struggled for it, committed the whole continuum of her self to the idea that we could live here as free human beings. And I knew that it was so. So that whether she escaped from the car or died right there in the very seat I sat in, she lived on in my heart, in my mind and my life. And that was enough.

Our lives are plants, creating leaves and flowers that fall away and are lost forever. I suppose that writing this account on these leaves will make little difference; words are gossamer in a basalt world. Still I am glad I did it. Soon we will descend to the ninth planet, and in this interregnum I feel completely cast loose, on the edge of a new world, a new life; stripped of all habits, opinions and expectations, I tremble like a blade of grass in the open air. The old life swirls in my mind like rock jasmine blooms down a canyon stream, and I wonder what will live on into my new existence, for even my unsheathing feels like a dream to me now, fragmentary, delirious, unreal. Still, spun into gossamer these parts of a world may remain within my ken: what we feel most, we remember best. The weak link is.