Moving Mars

Part One

The young may not remember Mars of old, under the yellow Sun, its cloud-streaked skies dusted pink, its soil rusty and fine, its inhabitants living in pressurized burrows and venturing Up only as a rite of passage or to do maintenance or tend the ropy crops spread like nests of intensely green snakes over the wind-scoured farms. That Mars, an old and tired Mars filled with young lives, is gone forever.

Now I am old and tired, and Mars is young again.

Our lives are not our own, but by God, we must behave as if they are. When I was young, what I did seemed too small to be of any consequence; but the shiver of dust, we are told, expands in time to the planet-sweeping storm…

An age was coming to an end. I had studied the signs half-innocently in my classes, there had even been dire hints from a few perceptive professors, but I had never thought the situation would affect me personally… Until now.

I had been voided from the University of Mars , Sinai. Two hundred classmates and professors in the same predicament lined the brilliant white floor of the depot, faces crossed by shadows from sun shining through the webwork of beams and girders supporting the depot canopy. We were waiting for the Soils Dorsa train to come and swift us away to our planums, planitias, fossas, and valleys.

Diane Johara, my roommate, stood with her booted foot on one small bag, tapping the tip of the boot on the handle, lips pursed as if whistling but making no sound. She kept her face pointed toward the northern curtains, waiting for the train to nose through. Though we were good friends, Diane and I had never talked politics. That was basic etiquette on Mars.

“Assassination,” she said.

“Impractical,” I murmured. I had not known until a few days ago how strongly Diane felt. “Besides, who would you shoot?”

“The governor. The chancellor.”

I shook my head.

Over eighty percent of the UMS students had been voided, a gross violation of contract. That struck me as very damned unfair, but my family had never been activist. Daughter of BM finance people, born to a long tradition of caution, I straddled the fence.

The political structure set up during settlement a century before still creaked along, but its days were numbered. The original settlers, arriving in groups of ten or more families, had dug warrens in water-rich lands all over Mars, from pole to pole, but mostly in the smooth lowland plains and the deep valleys. Following the Lunar model, the first families had formed syndicates called Binding Multiples or BMs. The Binding Multiples acted like economic super-families; indeed, “family” and “BM” were almost synonymous. Later settlers had a choice of joining established BMs or starting new ones; few families stayed independent.

Many BMs merged and in time agreed to divide Mars into areological districts and develop resources in cooperation. By and large, Binding Multiples regarded each other as partners in the midst of Martian bounty, not competitors.

“The train’s late. Fascists are supposed to make them run on time,” Diane said, still tapping her boot.

“They never did on Earth,” I said.

“You mean it’s a myth?”

I nodded.

“So fascists aren’t good for anything?” Diane asked.

“Uniforms,” I said.

“Ours don’t even have good uniforms.”

Elected by district ballot, the governors answered only to the inhabitants of their districts, regardless of BM affiliations. The governors licensed mining and settlement rights to the BMs and represented the districts in a joint Council of Binding Multiples. Syndics chosen within BMs by vote of senior advocates and managers represented the interests of the BMs themselves in the Council. Governors and syndics did not often see eye to eye. It was all very formal and polite — Martians are almost always polite — but many procedures were uncodified. Some said it was grossly inefficient, and attempts were being made to unify Mars under a central government, as had already happened on the Moon.

The governor of Syria-Sinai, Freechild Dauble, a tough, chisel-chinned administrator, had pushed hard for several years to get the BMs to agree to a Statist constitution and central government authority. She wanted them to give up their syndics in favor of representation by district. This meant the breakup of BM power, of course.

Dauble’s name has since become synonymous with corruption, but at the time, she had been governor of Mars’s largest district for eight Martian years and was at the peak of her long friendship with power. By cajoling, pressuring, and threatening, she had forged — some said forced — agreements between the largest BMs. Dauble had become the focus of Martian Unity and was on the sly spin for president of the planet.

Some said Dauble’s own career was the best argument for change, but few dared contradict her.

A vote was due within days in the Council to make permanent the new Martian constitution. We had lived under the Dauble government’s “trial run” for six months, and many grumbled loudly. The hard-won agreement was fragile. Dauble had rammed it down too many throats, with too much underhanded dealing.

Lawsuits were pending from at least five families opposed to unity, mostly smaller BMs afraid of being absorbed and nullified. They were called Gobacks by the Statists, who regarded them as a real threat. The Statists would not tolerate a return to what they saw as disorganized Binding Multiples rule.

“If assassination is so impractical,” Diane said, “we could rough up a few of the favorites — ”

“Shh,” I said.

She shook her short, shagged hair and turned away, soundlessly whistling again. Diane did that when she was too angry to speak politely. Red rabbits who had lived for decades in close quarters placed a high value on politeness, and impressed that on their offspring.

The Statists feared incidents. Student protests were unacceptable to Dauble. Even if the students did not represent the Gobacks, they might make enough noise to bring down the agreement.

So Dauble sent word to Caroline Connor, an old friend she had appointed chancellor of the largest university, University of Mars Sinai . An authoritarian with too much energy and too little sense, Connor obliged her crony by closing most of the campus and compiling a list of those who might be in sympathy with protesters.

I had majored in government and management. Though I had signed no petitions and participated in no marches — unlike Diane, who had taken to the movement vigorously — my name crept onto a list of suspects. The Govmanagement Department was notoriously independent; who could trust any of us?

We had paid our tuition but couldn’t go to classes. Most of the voided faculty and students had little choice but to go home. The university generously gave us free tickets on state chartered trains. Some, including Diane, declined the tickets and vowed to fight the illegal voiding. That earned her — and, guilty by association, me, simply slow to pack my belongings — an escort of UMS security out of the university warrens.

Diane walked stiffly, slowly, defiantly. The guards — most of them new emigrants from Earth, large and strong — firmly gripped our elbows and hustled us down the tunnels. The rough treatment watered my quick-growing seed of doubt; how could I give in to this injustice without a cry? My family was cautious; it had never been known for cowardice.

Surrounded by Connor’s guards, packed in with the last remaining voided students, we were marched in quickstep past a cluster of other students lounging in a garden atrium. They wore their family grays and blues, scions of BMs with strong economic ties to Earth, darlings of those most favoring Dauble’s plans; all still in school. They talked quietly and calmly among themselves and turned to watch us go, faces blank. They offered no support, no encouragement; their inaction built walls. Diane nudged me. “Pigs,” she whispered. . I agreed. I thought them worse than traitors — they behaved as if they were cynical and old, violators of the earnest ideals of youth.

We had been loaded into a single tunnel van and driven to the depot, still escorted by campus guards.

The depot hummed.

A few students wandered down a side corridor, then came back and passed the word. The loop train to the junction at Solis Dorsa approached. Diane licked her lips and looked around nervously. The last escorting guard, assured that we were on our way, gave us a tip of his cap and stepped into a depot cafe, out of sight.

“Are you coming with us?” Diane asked.

I could not answer. My head buzzed with contradictions, anger at injustice fighting family expectations. My mother and father hated the turmoil caused by unification. They strongly believed that staying out of it was best. They had told me so, without laying down any laws.

Diane gave me a pitying look. She shook my hand and said, “Casseia, you think too much.” She edged along the platform and turned a corner. In groups of five or less, students went to the lav, for coffee, to check the weather at their home depots… Ninety students in all sidled away from the main group.

I hesitated. Those who remained seemed studiously neutral. Sidewise glances met faces quickly turned away.

An eerie silence fell over the platform. One last student, a female first-form junior carrying three heavy duffels, did a little shimmy, short brown hair fanning around her neck. She let one duffel slip from her shoulder. The shimmy vibrated down to her leg and she kicked the bag two meters. She dropped her other bags and walked north on the platform and around the corner.

My whole body quivered. I looked at the solemn faces around me and wondered how they could be so bovine. How could they just stand there, waiting for the train to slow, and accept Dauble’s punishment for political views they might not even support?

The train pushed a plug of air along the platform as it passed through the seals and curtains. Icons flashed above the platform — station ID, train designator, destinations — and a mature woman’s voice told us, with all the politeness in the world and no discernible emotion, “Sou’s Dorsa to Bosporus, Nereidum, Argyre, Noachis, with transfers to Meridiani and Hellas, now arriving, gate four.”

I muttered, “Shit shit shit” under my breath. Before I knew what I had decided, before I could paralyze myself with more thought, my legs took me around the corner and up to a blank white service bay: dead end. The only exit was a low steel door covered with chipped white enamel. It had been left open just a crack. I bent down, opened the door wide, glanced behind me, and stepped through.

It took me several minutes of fast walking to catch up with Diane. I passed ten or fifteen students in a dark arbeiter service tunnel and found her. “Where are we going?” I asked in a whisper.

“Are you with us?”

“I am now.”

She winked and shook my hand with a bold and happy swing. “Someone has a key and knows the way to the old pioneer domes.”

Muffling laughter and clapping each other on the back, full of enthusiasm and impressed by our courage, we passed one by one through an ancient steel hatch and crept along narrow, stuffy old tunnels lined with crumbling foamed rock. As the last of us left the UMS environs, stepping over a dimly lighted boundary marker into a wider and even older tunnel, we clasped hands on shoulders and half-marched, half-danced in lockstep.

Someone at the end of the line harshly whispered for us to be quiet. We stopped, hardly daring to breathe. Seconds of silence, then from behind came low voices and the mechanical hum of service arbeiters, a heavy, solid clank and a painful twinge in our ears. Someone had sealed the tunnel hatch behind us.

“Do they know we’re in here?” I asked Diane.

“I doubt it,” she said. “That was a pressure crew.”

They had closed the door and sealed it. No turning back.

The tunnels took us five kilometers beyond the university borders, through a decades-old maze unused since before my birth, threaded unerringly by whoever led the group.

“We’re in old times now,” Diane said, looking back at me. Forty orbits ago — over seventy-five Terrestrial years — these tunnels had connected several small pioneer stations. We filed past warrens once used by the earliest families, dark and bitterly cold, kept pressurized in reserve only for dire emergency…

Our few torches and tunnel service lamps illuminated scraps of old furniture, pieces of outdated electronics, stacked drums of emergency reserve rations and vacuum survival gear.

Hours before, we had eaten our last university meal and had a warm vapor shower in the dorms. That was all behind us. Up ahead, we faced Spartan conditions.

I felt wonderful. I was doing something significant, and without my family’s approval.

I thought I was finally growing up.

The ninety students gathered in a dark hollow at the end of the tunnel, a pioneer trench dome. All sounds — nervous and excited laughter, questioning voices, scraping of feet on the cold floor, scattered outbreaks of song — blunted against the black poly interior. Diane broke Martian reserve and hugged me. Then a few voices rose above the dull murmurs. Several students started taking down names and BM affiliations. The mass began to take shape.

Two students from third-form engineering — a conservative and hard-dug department — stood before us and announced their names: Sean Dickinson, Gretyl Laughton. Within the day, after forming groups and appointing captains, we confirmed Sean and Gretyl as our leaders, expressed our solidarity and zeal, and learned we had something like a plan.

I found Sean Dickinson extremely handsome: of middle height, slight build, wispy brown hair above a prominent forehead, brows elegantly slim and animated. Though less attractive, Gretyl had been struck from the same mold: a slim young woman with large, accusing blue eyes and straw hair pulled into a tight bun.

Sean stood on an old crate and gazed down upon us, establishing us as real people with a real mission. “We all know why we’re here,” he said. Expression stern, eyes liquid and compassionate, he raised his hands, long and callused fingers reaching for the poly dome above, and said, ‘The old betray us. Experience breeds corruption. It’s time to bring a moral balance to Mars, and show them what an individual stands for, and what our rights really mean. They’ve forgotten us, friends. They’ve forgotten their contractual obligations. True Martians don’t forget such things, any more than they’d forget to breathe or plug a leak. So what are we going to do? What can we do? What must we do?”

“Remind them!” many of us shouted. Some said, “Kill them,” and I said, “Tell them what we — ” But I was not given a chance to finish, my voice lost in the roar.

Sean laid out his plan. We listened avidly; he fed our anger and our indignation. I had never been so excited. We who had kept the freshness of youth, and would not stand for corruption, intended to storm UMS overland and assert our contractual rights. We were righteous, and our cause was just.

Sean ordered that we all be covered with skinseal, pumped from big plastic drums. We danced in the skinseal showers naked, laughing, pointing, shrieking at the sudden cold, embarrassed but greatly enjoying ourselves. We put our clothes back on over the flexible tight-fitting nanomer. Skinseal was designed for emergency pressure problems and not for comfort. Going to the bathroom became an elaborate ritual; in skinseal, a female took about four minutes to pee, a male two minutes, and shitting was particularly tricky.

We dusted our skinseal with red ochre to hide us should we decide to worm out during daylight. We all looked like cartoon devils.

By the end of the third day, we were tired and hungry and dirty and impatient. We huddled in the pressurized poly dome, ninety in a space meant for thirty, our rusty water tapped from an old well, having eaten little or no food, exercising to ward off the cold.

I brushed past a pale thoughtful fellow a few times on the way to the food line or the lav. Lean and hawk-nosed and dark-haired, with wide, puzzled eyes, a wry smile and a hesitant, nervously joking manner, he seemed less angry and less sure than the rest of us. Just looking at him irritated me. I stalked him, watching his mannerisms, tracking his growing list of inadequacies. I was not in the best temper and needed to vent a little frustration. I took it upon myself to educate him.

At first, if he noticed my attention at all, he seemed to try to avoid me, moving through little groups of people under the gloomy old poly, making small talk. Everybody was testy; his attempts at conversation fizzled. Finally he stood in line near an antique electric wall heater, waiting his turn to bask in the currents of warm dry air.

I stood behind him. He glanced at me, smiled politely, and hunkered down with his back against the wall. I sat beside him. He clamped his hands on his knees, set his lips primly, and avoided eye contact; obviously, he had had enough of trying to make conversation and failing.

“Having second thoughts?” I asked after a decent interval.

“What?” he asked, confused.

“You look sour. Is your heart in this?”

He flashed the same irritating smile and lifted his hands, placating. “I’m here,” he said.

“Then show a little enthusiasm, dammit.”

Some other students shook their heads and shuffled away, too tired to get involved in a private fracas. Diane joined us at the rear of the line.

“I don’t know your name,” he said.

“She’s Casseia Majumdar,” said Diane.

“Oh,” he said. I was angry that he recognized the name. Of all things, I didn’t want to be known for my currently useless family connections.

“Her third uncle founded Majumdar BM,” Diane continued. I shot her a look and she puckered her lips, eyes dancing. She was enjoying a little relief from the earnest preparations and boredom.

“You have to be with us in heart and mind,” I lectured him.

“Sorry. I’m just tired. My name is Charles Franklin.” He offered a hand.

I thought that was incredibly insensitive and gauche, considering the circumstance. We had made it to the heater, but I turned away as if I didn’t care and walked toward the stacks of masks and cyclers being tested by our student leader.

Neither a Statist nor a Goback, Sean Dickinson seemed to me the epitome of what our impromptu organization stood for. Son of a track engineer, Sean had earned his scholarship by sheer brainwork. In the UMS engineering department, he had moved up quickly, only to be diverted into attempts to organize trans-BM unions. That had earned him the displeasure of Connor and Dauble.

Sean worked with an expression of complete concentration, hair disheveled, spidery, strong fingers pulling at mask poly. His mouth twitched with each newfound leak. He hardly knew I existed. Had he known, he probably would have shunned me for my name. That didn’t stop me from being impressed.

Charles followed me and stood beside the growing pile of rejects. “Please don’t misunderstand,” he said. “I’m really behind all this.”

“Glad to hear it,” I said. I observed the preparations and shivered. Nobody likes the thought of vacuum rose. None of us had been trained in insurrection. We would be up against campus security, augmented by the governor’s own thugs and maybe some of our former classmates, and I had no idea how far they — or the situation — would go.

We watched news vids intently on our slates. Sean had posted on the ex nets that students had gone on strike to protest Connor’s illegal voiding. But he hadn’t told about our dramatic plans, for obvious reasons. The citizens of the Triple — the linked economies of Earth, Mars, and Moon — hadn’t turned toward us. Even the LitVids on Mars seemed uninterested.

“I thought I could help,” Charles said, pointing to the masks and drums. “I’ve done this before…”

“Gone Up?” I asked.

“My hobby is hunting fossils. I asked to be on the equipment committee, but they said they didn’t need me.”

“Hobby?” I asked.

“Fossils. Outside. During the summer, of course.”

Here was my chance to be helpful to Sean, and maybe apologize to Charles for showing my nerves. I squatted beside the pile and said, “Sean, Charles here says he’s worked outside.”

“Good,” Sean said. He tossed a ripped mask to Gretyl. I wondered innocently if she and Sean were lovers. Gretyl scowled at the mask — a safety-box surplus antique — and dropped it on the reject pile, which threatened to spill out around our feet.

“I can fix those,” Charles said. “There are tubes of quick poly in the safety boxes. It works.”

“I won’t send anybody outside in a ripped mask,” Sean said. “Excuse me, but I have to focus here.”

“Sorry,” Charles said. He shrugged at me.

“We may not have enough masks,” I said, looking at the diminishing stacks of good equipment.

Sean glared over his shoulder, pressed for time and very unhappy. “Your advice is not necessary,” Gretyl told me sharply.

“It’s nothing,” Charles said, tugging my arm. “Let them work.”

I shrugged his fingers loose and backed away, face flushed with embarrassment. Charles returned with me to the heater, but we had lost our places there.

The lights had been cut to half. The air became thicker and colder each day. I thought of my warren rooms at home, a thousand kilometers away, of how worried my folks might be, and of how they would take it if I died out in the thin air, or if some Statist thug pierced my young frame with a flechette… God, what a scandal that would make! It seemed almost worth it.

I fantasized Dauble and Connor dragged away under arrest, glorious and magnificent disgrace, perhaps worth my death… but probably not.

“I’m a physics major,” Charles said, joining me at the end of the line.

“Good for you,” I said.

“You’re in govmanagement?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“I’m here because my parents voted against the Statists. That’s all I can figure. They were in Klein BM. Klein’s holding out to the last, you know.”

I nodded without making eye contact, wanting him to go away.

“The Statists are suicidal,” Charles said mildly. “They’ll bring themselves down… even if we don’t accelerate the process.”

“We can’t afford to wait,” I said. The skinseal wouldn’t last much longer. The nakedness and embarrassment had bonded us. We knew each other; we thought we had no secrets. But we itched and stank and our indignation might soon give way to general disgruntlement. I felt sure Sean and the other leaders were aware of this.

“I was trying to get a scholarship for Earth study and a grant for thinker time,” he said. “Now I’m off the list, I’m behind on my research — ” He paused, eyes downcast, as if embarrassed at babbling. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do something in the next twenty hours. The skinseal will rot.”

“Right.” I looked at him more closely. He was not homely. His voice was mellow and pleasant, and what I had first judged as lack of enthusiasm now looked more like calm, which I was certainly not.

Sean had finished weeding out the bad helmets. He stood and Gretyl called shrilly for our attention. “Listen,” Sean said, shaking out his stiff arms and shoulders. “We’ve had a response from Connor’s office. They refuse to meet with us, and they demand to know where we are. I think even Connor will figure out where we are in a few more days. So it’s now or never. We have twenty-six good outfits and eight or ten problem pieces. I can salvage two from those. The rest are junk.”

“I could fix some of them if he’d let me,” Charles said under his breath.

“Gretyl and I will wear the problem pieces,” Sean said. My heart pumped faster at his selfless courage. “But that means most of us will have to stay here. We’ll draw sticks to see who crosses the plain.”

“What if they’re armed?” asked a nervous young woman.

Sean smiled. “Red rabbits down, cause up like a rocket,” he said. That was clear enough. Martians shoot Martians, and glory to us all, the Statists would fall. He was right, of course. News would cross the Triple by day’s end, probably even reach the planetoid communities.

Sean sounded as if he thought martyrdom might be useful. I looked at the young faces around me, eight, nine, or ten — my age — almost nineteen Terrestrial years — and then at Sean’s face, seemingly old and experienced at twelve. Quietly, as a group, we raised our hands with fingers spread wide — the old Lunar Independence Symbol for the free expression of human abilities and ideas, tolerance against oppression, handshake instead of fist.

But as Sean brought his hand down, it closed reflexively into a fist. I realized then how earnest he was, and how serious this was, and what I was putting on the line.

We drew fibers from a frayed length of Old optic cord an hour after the mask count. Twenty-six had been cut long. I drew a long, as did Charles. Diane was very disappointed to get a short. We were issued masks and set our personal slates to encrypt signals tied to Sean’s and Gretyl’s code numbers. We had already gone over and over the plan. Twenty would cross the surface directly above the tunnels leading back to UMS. I was in this group.

There were aboveground university structures about five kilometers from our trench domes. The remaining students — two teams of four each, Charles among them, under Sean’s command — would fan out to key points and wait for a signal from Gretyl, the leader of our team of twenty, that we had made it to the administration chambers.

If we met resistance and were not allowed to present demands to Connor personally, then Sean’s teams would do their stuff. First, they would broadcast an illegal preemptive signal to the satcom at Marsynch, forcing on all bands the news that action in the name of contractual fulfillment was being taken by the voided students of UMS. Contractual fulfillment meant a lot even under the Statist experiment; it was the foundation of every family’s existence, a sacred kind of thing. Where Sean had gotten the expertise and equipment to send a preemptive signal, he would not say; I found his deepening mystery even more attractive.

Sean would personally take one team of four to the rail links at UMS junction. They would blow up a few custom-curved maglev rods; trains wouldn’t be able to go to the UMS terminal until a repair car had manufactured new rods, which would take several hours. UMS would be isolated.

Simultaneously, the second team of four — to which Charles was assigned — would break seals and pump oxidant sizzle — a corrosive flopsand common in this region — into the university’s net optic and satcom uplink facilities. That would break all the broad com between UMS and the rest of Mars. Private com would go through, but all broadband research and data links and library rentals would stop dead…

UMS might lose three or four million Triple dollars before the links could be repaired.

That of course would make them angry.

We waited in two lines spiraling from the center of the main trench dome. At the outside of the spiral lines, Sean and Gretyl stood silent, jaws clenched. Some students shook their red-sealed hands to get ready for the cold. Skinseal wasn’t made to keep you cozy. It only protected against hypothermia and frostbite.

My own skinseal had come loose at the joints and sweat was pooling before being processed by the nanomer. I had to go to the bathroom, more out of nerves than necessity; my feet and legs had swollen, but only a little; I was not miserable but the petty discomforts distracted me from the focus I needed to keep from turning into a quivering heap.

“Listen,” Sean said loudly, standing on a box to peer over our heads. “None of us knew what we’d be getting into when we started all this. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the next few hours. But we all share a common goal — freedom to pursue our education without political interference — freedom to stand clear of the sins of our parents and grandparents. That’s what Mars is all about — something new, a grand experiment. We’ll be a part of that experiment now, or by God, we’ll die trying.”

I swallowed hard and looked for Charles, but he was too far away. I wondered if he still had his calm smile.

“May it not come to that,” Gretyl said.

“Amen,” said someone behind me.

Sean looked fully charged, face muscles sharply defined within a little oval of unsealed skin around his eyes, nose and mouth. “Let’s go,” he said.

In groups of five, we removed our clothes, folding them neatly or just dropping them. The first to go entered the airlock, cycled through, and climbed the ladder. When my turn came, I crowded into the lock with four others, held my breath against the swirling red smear, and slipped on my mask and cycler. The old mask smelled doggy. Its edges adhered to the skinseal with the sound of a prim kiss. I heard the whine of pumps pulling back the air. The skinseal puffed as gas pressures equalized. Moving became more difficult.

My companions in the lock began climbing. My turn came and I took hold of the ladder rungs and poked through the hatch, above the rust-and-ochre tumble and smear. With a kick, I cleared the lip, clambered out onto the rocky surface of the plain, and stood under the early morning sky. The sun topped a ridge of hills lying east, surrounded by a dull pink glow. I blinked at the glare.

We’d have to hike over those hills to get to UMS. It had taken us half an hour simply to climb to the surface.

We stood a few meters east of the trench dome, waiting for Gretyl to join us. In just minutes, smear clung to us all; we’d have to destat for half an hour when all this was over.

Gretyl emerged from the hole. Her voice decoded in my right ear, slightly muffled. “Let’s get together behind Sean’s group,” she said.

We could breathe, we could talk to each other. All was working well so far.

“We’re off,” Sean said, and his teams began to walk away from the trench. Some of them waved. I caught a glimpse of Charles from behind as his group marched in broken formation toward the hills, a little south of the track we would follow. I wondered why I was paying any attention to him at all. Skinseal hid little. He had a cute butt. Ever so slightly steatopygous.

I bit my lip to bring my thoughts together. I’m a red rabbit, I told myself. I’m on the Up for the first time in two years, and there are no scout supervisors or trailmasters in charge, checking all our gear, making sure we get back to our mommies. Now focus, damn you!

“Let’s go,” Gretyl said, and we began our trek.

It was a typical Martian morning, springtime balmy at minus twenty Celsius. The wind had slowed to almost nothing. The air was clear for two hundred kilometers. Thousands of stars pricked through at zenith like tiny jewels. The horizon glimmered shell-pink.

All my thoughts aligned. Something magical about the moment. I felt I possessed a completely realistic awareness of our situation… and of our chances of surviving.

The surface of Mars was usually deadly cold. This close to the equator, however, the temps were relatively mild — seldom less than minus sixty. Normal storms could push winds up to four hundred kiphs, driving clouds of fine smear and flopsand high enough and wide enough to be seen from Earth. Rarely, a big surge of Jetstream activity could send a high-pressure curl over several thousand kilometers, visible from orbit as a snaking dark line, and that could raise clouds that would quickly cover most of Mars. But the air on high Sinai Planum, at five millibars, was too thin to worry about most of the time. The usual winds were gentle puffs, barely felt.

My booted feet pounded over the crusted sand and tumble. Martian soil gets a thin crust after a few months of lying undisturbed; the grains fall into a kind of mechanical cement that feels a lot like hoarfrost. I could dimly hear the others crunching, sound traveling through the negligible atmosphere making them seem dozens of meters away.

“Let’s not get too scattered,” Gretyl said.

I passed an old glacier-rounded boulder bigger than the main trench dome. Ancient ice floes had sculpted the crustal basalt into a rounded gnome with its arms splayed across the ground, flat head resting on its arms in sleep… pretended sleep.

Somehow, red rabbits never became superstitious about the Up. It was too orange and red and brown, too obviously dead, to appeal to our morbid instincts.

“If they’re smart and somebody’s anticipating us, there may be pickets out this far to keep track of the periphery of the university,” Sean said over the radio.

“Or if somebody’s tattled,” Gretyl added. I was starting to like Gretyl. Despite having an unpleasant voice and an unaltered, shrewlike face, Gretyl seemed to have a balanced perspective. I wondered why she had kept that face. Maybe it was a family face, something to be proud of where she came from, like English royalty’s unaltered features, mandated by law. The long nose of King Henry of England .

Damn.

Focus gone.

I decided it didn’t matter. Maybe focusing on keeping a focus was a bad thing.

The sun hung above the ridge now, torch-white with the merest pink tinge. Around it whirled the thinnest of opal hazes, high silicate and ice clouds laced against the brightening orange of day. The rock shadows started to fill in, making each step a little easier. Sometimes wind hollows hid behind boulders, waiting for unwary feet.

Gretyl’s group had spread out. I walked near the front, a few steps to her right.

“Picket,” said Garlin Smith on my right, raising his arm. He had been my classmate in mass psych, quiet and tall, what ignorant Earth folks thought a Martian should look like.

We all followed Garlin’s pointing finger to the east and saw a lone figure standing on a rise about two hundred meters away. It carried a rifle.

“Armed,” Gretyl said under her breath. “I don’t believe it.”

The figure wore a full pressure suit — a professional job, the type worn by areologists, farm inspectors, Statist police. It reached up to tap its helmet. It hadn’t seen us yet, apparently, but it was picking up the jumbled buzz of our coded signals.

“Keep going,” Gretyl said. “We haven’t come this far to be scared off by a single picket.”

“If it is a picket,” Sean commented, listening to our chat. “Don’t assume anything.”

“It has to be a picket,” Gretyl said.

“All right,” Sean said with measured restraint.

The figure caught sight of us about four minutes after we first noticed it. We were separated by a hundred meters. It looked like a normal male physique from that distance.

My breath quickened. I tried to slow it.

“Report,” Sean demanded.

“Armed male in full pressure suit. He sees us. Not reacting yet,” Gretyl said.

We didn’t deviate from our path. We would pass within fifty meters of the picket.

The helmeted head turned, watching us. He held up a hand. “Hey, what is this?” a masculine voice asked. “What in hell are you doing up here? Do you folks have ID?”

“We’re from UMS,” Gretyl said. We didn’t slow our pace.

“What are you doing up here?” the picket repeated.

“Surveying, what’s it look like?” Gretyl responded. We carried no instruments. “What are you doing up here?”

“Don’t bunny with me,” he said. “You know there’s been trouble. Just tell me what department you’re from and… have you been using code?”

“No,” Gretyl said.

We had closed another twenty yards. He started to hike down the rise to inspect us.

“What in hell are you wearing?”

“Red suits,” Gretyl answered.

“Shit, it’s skinseal. It’s against the law to wear that stuff except in emergencies. How many of you are there?”

“Forty-five,” Gretyl lied.

“I’ve been told to keep intruders off university property,” he said. “I’ll need to see IDs. You should have UMS passes to even be up here.”

“Is that a gun?” Gretyl asked, faking a lilt of surprise.

“Hey, get over here, all of you.”

“Why do you need a gun?"

“Unauthorized intruders. Stop now.”

“We’re from the Areology Department, and we’ve only got a few hours up here… Didn’t you get a waiver from Professor Sunder?”

“No, dammit, stop right now.”

“Listen, friend, who do you answer to?”

“UMS is secure property. You’d better give me your student ID numbers now.”

“Fap off,” Gretyl said.

The picket raised his rifle, a long-barreled, slender automatic flechette. My anger and fear were almost indistinguishable. Dauble and Connor must have lost their minds. No student on Mars had ever been shot by police, not in fifty-three years of settlement. Hadn’t they ever heard of Tienanmen or Kent State ?

“Use it,” Gretyl said. “You’ll be all over the Triple for shooting areology students on a field trip. Great for your career. Really spin you in with our families, too. What kind of work you looking for, rabbit?”

Our receivers jabbered with the picket’s own coded outgoing message. More jabber returned.

The man lowered his rifle and followed us. “Are you armed?” he asked.

“Where would students get guns?” Gretyl asked. “Who in hell is giving you orders to scare us?”

“Listen, this is serious. I need your IDs now.”

“We’ve got his code,” Sean said. “He’s been told to block you however he can.”

“Great,” Gretyl said.

“Who are you talking to? Stop using code,” the picket demanded.

“Maybe they’re not clueing you, rabbit,” Gretyl taunted.

Gretyl’s bravado, her talent for delay and confusion, astonished me. Perhaps she and Sean and a few of the others had been training for this. I wished I knew more about revolution.

The word came to me like a small blow on my back. This was a kind of revolution. “Jesus,” I said with my transmitter off.

“What’s he doing?” Sean asked.

“He’s following us,” Gretyl said. “He doesn’t seem to want to shoot.”

“Not with flechettes, sure enough,” Sean said. “What a banner that would be!” I filled in the details involuntarily:

More code whined in our ears like angry insects.

We marched over another rise, the guard following close behind, and saw the low poke-ups of UMS. The UMS warrens extended to the northeast for perhaps a kilometer, half levels above, ten levels deep. The administration chambers--were closest to the surface entrance and the nearby pot. Train guides hovered on slender poles, arcing gently over another rise to link with the station.

Sean’s teams were probably there now.

More guards emerged from the UMS buildings, armed and in full pressure suits.

“All right,” came a gruff female voice. “State your business. Then get the hell out of here or you’ll be arrested.”

Gretyl stepped forward, a scrawny little red devil with a black masked head. “We want an audience with Chancellor Connor. We are students who have been illegally voided and whose contracts have been flagrantly broken. We demand — ”

“Who in hell do you think you are? A bunch of fapping rodents?” The woman’s voice scared me. She sounded outraged, on the edge of something drastic. I couldn’t tell which of the suited figures she was, or if she was outside at all. “You’ve crossed regional property. Goddamned Gobacks should know what that means.”

“I’m not going to argue,” Gretyl said. “We demand to speak with — ”

“You’re talking to her, you ignorant shithead! I’m right here.” The foremost figure raised an arm and shook a gloved fist. “And I’m in no mood to negotiate with Trespassers and Gobacks.”

“We’re here to deliver a petition.” Gretyl removed a metal cylinder from her belt and extended it. One of the guards started forward, but Connor grabbed his elbow and shook it once, firmly. He backed away and folded his arms.

“Politics of confrontation,” Connor said, voice harsh as old razors. “Agitprop and civil disobedience. You’d think you were on Earth. Politics doesn’t work that way here. I have a mandate to protect this university and keep order.”

“You refuse to meet with us and discuss our demands?”

“I’m meeting with you now. Nobody demands anything of lawful authority except through legal channels. Who’s behind you?”

I looked over my shoulder, misunderstanding.

“There’s no conspiracy,” Gretyl said.

“Lies, my dear. Genuine lies.”

“Under Martian contract law, we have the right to meet with you and discuss why we have been voided and our contracts broken.”

“State law superseded BM law last month.”

“Actually, it doesn’t. If you want to check with your lawyers — ” Gretyl began. I cringed. We were bickering and time was running out.

“You have one minute to turn around and go back to where you came from, or we’ll arrest you,” Connor said. “Let the legals sort it out. Do your families know where you are? How about your advocates? Do they know and approve?”

Gretyl’s words bristled. “I can’t believe you are being so stubborn. I’m asking for the last time — ”

“Right. Arrest them, my authority, statute two-five-one, Syria-Sinai district books.”

Some of the students began to talk, asking worried questions. “Quiet!” Gretyl shouted. She turned to Connor. “Is this your last answer?”

“You poor dumb rodents,” Connor said. She swiveled to enter the open lock door. Connor behaved even more rudely than she had been portrayed to us in the briefings, supremely confident, intractable and ready to provoke an incident. Guards moved forward. I turned and saw three guards behind us, also closing. We had to submit.

Gretyl stepped away from the first guard. Another flanked her on the right, coming between us, and she stepped back. There were twenty of us and ten guards.

“Let them take you,” Gretyl said. “Let them arrest you.” Then why was she resisting?

A guard took my arm and applied sticky rope to my skinsealed wrist. “You’re lucky we’re bringing you in,” he said, grinning. “You wouldn’t last another hour out here.”

Two of the guards devoted themselves exclusively to Gretyl. They advanced with hands and sticky ropes held out. She backed away, held up her arm as if waving to them, and touched her mask.

Time got stiff.

Gretyl turned to look at the rest of us. Her eyes looked scared. My heart sank. Don’t do anything just to impress Sean, I wanted to shout to her.

“Tell them what you saw here,” Gretyl said. “Freedom conquers!” Her fingers plucked at and then slipped beneath the seam of the mask. A guard grabbed at her arm but he wasn’t quick enough.

Gretyl ripped away the mask and sprang to one side, sending it flying with a wide toss. Her long-nosed face flashed pale and narrow against the pink sky. She squeezed her eyes shut and clamped her mouth instinctively. Her arms reached out, fingers extended, as if she were a tightrope walker and might lose her balance.

Simultaneously, I heard small thumps and felt the ground vibrate.

Connor hadn’t had time to enter the poke-up airlock. “Get her inside! Get her inside!” she screeched, pushing through her associates.

The guards stood still as statues for what seemed like minutes, then reached for Gretyl and dragged her as fast as they could to the airlock. She struggled in their arms. I saw her face pinking, blood vessels near the surface rupturing as the plasma boiled. Vacuum rose.

Gretyl opened her eyes and reached up with one hand to grab at her chin. She pulled her own jaw open. The air in her lungs rushed out, moisture freezing in a cloud in the still air.

“They’ve blown track,” someone shouted.

“Get her INSIDE!”

Gretyl looked at the sky through rime-clouded eyes.

The guard in front of me jerked the sticky rope forward and I fell into the dirt. For an instant it seemed he might kick me. I looked up and saw narrow grim eyes behind the helmet visor, mouth open, face slack. He stopped and blinked, waiting for orders.

I twisted my head around to see how my companions were being treated. Several lay in the dirt. The guards systematically pushed us down and planted boots on our backs. When all nineteen lay flat, the guards stood back. The door to the lock opened again and someone stepped out, not Connor.

“They’re under arrest,” a man’s voice said over the radio. “Get them inside. Strip that stuff off and put them in a dorm. Delouse them.”

There have never been lice on Mars.

They separated us quickly. Three guards pulled five of us away from the airlock and marched us through chilly tunnels to the old dorms, seldom used now. The new dorms had been equipped with more modern conveniences, but these were maintained for an emergency or future overload of students.

“Can you get this off by yourself?” the tallest of the three asked, gesturing at our skinseal. She removed her helmet beneath the dimmed lights of the hall, lips downturned, eyes miserable.

“What did he mean, delouse?” another guard asked, a young, muscular male with West Indian features and accent.

The guards were all fresh Martians. That made sense. The new United Mars state would be their sponsor, their BM and family.

“You can’t just hold us here,” I said. “What happened to Gretyl?” My four companions turned on the guards, pointing fingers and shouting. We all demanded our rights — communication, freedom, advocates.

It became an open rebellion until the third guard pulled a flechette from his pack. He was the shortest, a slim man with plain, short-cut brown hair and perfect, saintly features. His eyes narrowed, very cold. I thought, Here’s a Statist sympathizer. The others were merely hired hands.

“Blow it down, right now,” he demanded.

“You injured Gretyl!” I shouted. “We need to know what happened to her!”

“Sabotage is treason. We could shoot you in self-defense.”

He raised the pistol. All of us backed away, including the two other guards.

“That wouldn’t be smart,” I said.

“Not for you.” The slim fellow gave us a cold thin smile and pushed us down the hall.

We entered a stripped-down double room, immediately sprawling on the bare cot and chairs, another small gesture of useless defiance.

“You’re going to be here for a while, so get comfortable.”

I didn’t like him pushing his pistol and didn’t want to provoke him any further. We peeled off our skinseal — it was a blessed relief to be free of it, actually. The West Indian tossed the shreds into dust bags. Enough smear floated loose to make us sneeze.

As if meeting for the first time, the five of us nodded and made introductions where necessary. We knew each other only slightly; one had been a classmate of mine, Felicia Overgard, about a year younger and two steps behind. I did not know Oliver Peskin well, a step higher and an agro major, and I had only met Tom Callin and Chao Ming Jung in the trench dome.

The slim fellow averted his eyes. Bizarre, waving a gun at us but ashamed of our bare flesh. He thrust the gun at the vapor sacks in the washroom. “I don’t know if you have lice, but you smell pretty rank.”

The vapor bags hadn’t been refilled or filtered in some time and we didn’t smell much better after the showers. Water was inadequate to get rid of smear, and we carried itchy patches of red and orange all over. We’d have welts by tomorrow.

Three hours passed and we learned nothing. The guards stayed in their suits to avoid the dust. They had removed any identifiers and would not tell us their names. The sympathizer grew more and more grim as the hours crawled, and then ramped up to nervous, fidgeting with his gun. He whistled and pantomimed breaking it down and reassembling it. Finally, his slate chimed and he answered.

After a couple of brief acknowledgments, he sent the female guard out of the room. I wondered what they would do next, why they didn’t want the woman there.

Surely they weren’t that stupid.

Conversation with my companions became thin and quiet. Fear had worn off — we no longer thought we were going to be shot — but the numbing sense of isolation that replaced it was no better. We settled into shivering silence.

The rooms were kept at minimum heat and we still didn’t have any clothes. The three men suffered worse than Felicia and I.

“It’s cold in here,” I said to the sympathizer. He agreed but did nothing.

“It’s cold enough to make us sick,” said Oliver.

“All right,” said the sympathizer.

“We should find them some clothes,” said the West Indian.

“No,” said the sympathizer.

“Why not?” Chao asked. Felicia had given up covering herself with her hands.

“You caused a hell of a lot of trouble. Why make it any easier on you?”

“They’re human, man,” the West Indian said. He was not very old, twelve or thirteen, and he had to be a recent immigrant. His West Indies accent was still obvious.

The sympathizer squinted and shook his head dubiously.

We’ve won, I thought. With fools like this, the Statists don’t have a chance. I couldn’t quite convince myself, however.

We spent ten hours in that dorm room, cold and naked, skin itching furiously.

I fell asleep and dreamed of trees too tall to fit into any dome, rooted unprotected in the red dirt of Mars: redwoods in red flopsand, lofting a hundred meters, tended by naked children. I had had the dream before and it left me for a moment with an intense feeling of well-being. Then I remembered I was a prisoner.

The West Indian prodded my shoulder. I rolled on the thinly carpeted floor. He averted his eyes from my nakedness and drew his lips tightly together. “I want you to know I am not all in this,” he said. “My heart, I mean. I am truly a Martian, and this is my first work here, you know?”

I looked around. The sympathizer was out of the room. “Get us some clothes,” I said.

“You blew up the train lines and these people, they are very angry. I just tell you, don’t blame me when the shit sprays. People go up and down the halls — the tunnels. I look out, there is so much going on. They are afraid, I think.”

What did they have to be afraid of? Had the LitVids grabbed Gretyl’s injury or death and put our cause on the sly spin?

“Can you send a message to my parents?”

“The fellow Rick has gone,” the West Indian said, shaking his head. “He meets with others, and he leaves me here.”

“What happened to Gretyl?”

He shook his head again. “I hear nothing about her. What I saw, it made me sick. Everybody is so crazy. Why did she do it?”

“To make a point,” I said.

“Not worth losing your life,” the West Indian said, frowning deeply. “This is small history, petty people. On Earth — ”

My temper flared. “Look, we’ve only been here a hundred Earth years, and our history is small stuff by Earth standards, but you’re a Martian now, remember? This is corruption and dirty politics — and if you ask me, it’s directly connected with Earth, and the hell with all of you!”

You really sound committed, I thought. Abuse could do wonders.

I awakened the others with my outburst. Felicia sat up. “He isn’t armed,” she observed. Oliver and Chao stood warily and brushed dust off their backsides, muscles tensed as if they were giving thought to jumping the man.

The West Indian looked, if possible, even more abjectly miserable. “Do not try something,” he said, standing his ground with arms out, shaking his head.

The door opened and the sympathizer returned. He and the West Indian exchanged glances and the West Indian tilted and shook his head, saying, “Oh, man.” Behind the sympathizer came a fellow with short black hair. He wore a tight-fitting, expensive, and fashionable green longsuit.

“We’re kept here against our will — ” Oliver complained immediately.

“Under arrest,” the man in the fashionable green suit said jovially.

“For more than a day, and we demand to be released,” Oliver finished, folding his arms. The man in the suit smiled at this literally naked presumption.

“I’m Achmed Crown Niger ,” he said. His voice was high Mars, imitative of the flat English of Earth, an accent rarely heard in the regional BMs. I presumed he would be from Lai Qila or some other independent station, perhaps a Muslim. “I represent the state interests in the university. I’m going from room to room getting names. I’ll need your family names, BM connections, and the names of people you’ll want to talk to in the next hour.”

“What happened to Gretyl?” I asked.

Achmed Crown Niger raised his eyebrows. “She’s alive. She has acute facial rose and her eyes and lungs need to be rebuilt. But we have other things to talk about. Under district book laws, you are all charged with criminal Trespass and sabotage — ”

“What happened to the others?” I pursued.

He ignored me. “That’s serious stuff. You’re going to need advocates.” He turned to the sympathizer and barked, “Damn it, get these people something to wear.” He looked back at us and his ingratiating smile returned. “It’s tough being legal in front of naked people.”

Thirty armed men and women, as many LitVid agents, Chancellor Connor, and Governor Dauble herself stood in the dining hall, Connor and Dauble and their entourage well away from the offending students. We clustered in bathrobes near the serving gates, the twenty-eight who had gone out with Sean and Gretyl, criminals caught in the act of sabotage. Those left behind in the trench domes had been collected as well. Dauble and Connor were about to celebrate their victory on LitVid across the Triple.

Medias and Pressians, my father called them: the hordes of LitVid reporters that seemed rise out of the ground at the merest hint of a stink. On Mars reporters were a hearty breed; they learned early to get around the tight lips of BM families. Ten of the quickest and hardiest — several familiar to me — stood with arbeiter attendants near the Statist cluster, ear loops recording all they saw, images edited hot for transmission to the satcoms.

Diane stood in a group across the hall. She waved to me surreptitiously. I did not see Sean. Charles was five or six meters from me in our pack and did not appear injured. He saw me and nodded. Some from his group had sustained bruises and even broken bones. Blue boneknits graced three.

We said nothing, stood meek and pitiful. This was our time to be victims of the oppressive state.

Dauble came forward flanked by two advisors. A louder curled on her shoulder like a thin snake. “Folks, this has gone much too far. Chancellor Connor has been courteous enough to supply the families of these students — ”

“Banned students!” Oliver Peskin shouted next to me. Others took up the cry, and another chorus followed on with, “Contract rights! Obligations!”

Dauble listened, face fixed in gentle disapproval. The cries died down.

“To supply all of their families with information on their whereabouts, and their status as arrested saboteurs,” she finished.

“Where’s Gretyl?” I shouted, hardly aware I’d opened my mouth.

“Where’s Sean?” someone else called. “Where’s Gretyl?”

“Family advocates are flying in now. The train service has been cut, thanks to these students, and our ability to up-link on broadband has been severely curtailed. These acts of sabotage — “

“Illegal voiding!” another student shouted.

“Constitute high felonies under the district book and United Martian codes — ”

“Where’s SEAN? Where’s GRETYL?” Oliver shouted, hair awry, flinging up his hand, fingers splayed.

Guards moved in, shoving through us none too gently, and grabbed him. Connor stepped forward and raised her arm. Achmed Crown Niger ordered the guards to release him. Oliver shrugged their arms away and smiled back at us triumphantly.

Dauble seemed unaffected by the confusion. ‘These acts will be fully prosecuted.”

“Where’s SEAN? Where’s GRETYL?” several students yelled again.

“Sean’s dead! Gretyl’s dead!” shouted one high, shrill voice. The effect was electric.

“Who says? Who knows?” others called. The students cried out and milled like sheep.

“Nobody has been killed,” Dauble said, her composure suddenly less solid.

“Bring SEAN!”

Dauble conferred with her advisors, then turned back to us. “Sean Dickinson is in the university infirmary with self-inflicted wounds. Everything possible is being done to help him. Gretyl Laughton is in the infirmary as well, with injuries from self-exposure.”

The reporters hadn’t heard this yet; their interest was immediate, and all focused on Dauble.

“How were the students injured?” asked one reporter, her pickup pointed at Dauble.

“There have been several small injuries — ”

“Inflicted by the guards?”

“No,” Connor said.

“Is it true the guards have been armed all along? Even before the sabotage?” another reporter asked.

“We anticipated trouble from the beginning,” Dauble said. “These students have proven us correct.”

“But the guards aren’t authorized police or regulars — how do you justify that under district charter?”

“Justify all of it!” Diane shouted.

“I don’t understand your attitude,” Dauble said to us after a few moments of careful consideration in the full gaze of hot LitVid. “You sabotage life-support equipment — ”

“That’s a lie!” a student shouted.

“Disrupt the lawful conduct of this university, and now you resort to attempted suicide. What kind of Martians are you? Do your parents approve of this treachery?”

Dauble screwed her face into an expression between parental exasperation and deep concern. “What in the hell is wrong with you? Who raised you — thugs?"

The meeting came to an abrupt end. Dauble and her entourage departed, followed by the reporters. When several reporters tried to talk to us, they were unceremoniously ejected from the dining hall.

How very, very stupid, I thought.

I felt a bit faint from hunger; we hadn’t eaten in twenty hours. A few university staff, clearly uncomfortable, served us bowls of quick paste from trays. The nutritional nana was tasteless but still seemed heaven-sent. We had been provided with sleeping pads and blankets and were told winds were up and dust was blowing, grounding shuttles. No advocates or parents had yet come in to see us.

While being fed, we had been divided into groups of six, each assigned two guards. The guards actively discouraged talk between the groups, moving us farther and farther apart until we spread out through the hall. Oliver, considered a loudmouth activist, was prodded into a selected group of other loudmouths that included Diane. Charles sat with five others across the hall, about twenty meters away.

When we still tried to talk, the dining hall sound system blared out loud pioneer music, old-fashioned soul-stirring crap I had enjoyed as a kid, but found bitterly inappropriate now.

When I was free to speak with the Medias and Pressians, I thought, what a story I’d tell… I had seen and done things in the past few days that my entire life had not prepared me for, and I had felt emotions unknown to me: righteous anger, political confraternity and solidarity, deep fear.

I worried for Sean. All our information came through Achmed Crown Niger , who visited every few hours to hand out scraps of generally useless news. I took a real dislike to him: professional, collected, he was every gram the guvvie man. I focused on his pale, fine-featured face for a time, blaming him for all our troubles. He must have advised the chancellor and governor… He must have outlined their strategy, maybe even planned the banning and voiding of students…

I thought dreamily about a possible life with Sean, if he paid any attention to me after his recovery.

Nothing to do. Nothing to think. The lights in the dining hall went out. The music stopped.

I slept on the floor, nestled like a puppy against Felicia’s back.

Someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes from a light doze. Charles leaned over me, his face thinner and older, but his smile the same: too calm, somehow, like a young Buddha. His cheeks had pinked as if smirched with poorly applied makeup: a mild case of vacuum rose. Most of the students around us still slept.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

I sat up and looked around. The lights were still dim, but it was obvious the guards had gone.

“Tired,” I said. I swallowed hard. My throat was parched and I could feel the oxidant welts itching fiercely. “Where’s our food and water?”

“I don’t think we’re going to get any unless we go for it ourselves.”

I stood and stretched my arms. “Are you all right?” I asked, squinting at him, reaching up to his cheeks.

“My mask leaked. I’m fine. My eyes are okay. You look strong,” Charles said.

“I feel shitty,” I said. “Where are the guards?”

“Probably trying to get out of here any way they can,.”

“Why?”

He lifted his hands. “I don’t know. They backed out about an hour ago.”

Oliver Peskin and Diane walked over and we squatted on the floor in whispered confab. Felicia stirred and poked Chao in the ribs.

“What happened to Sean?” Diane asked Charles.

“He was planting a charge when it went off,” Charles said. ‘They say he set it off on purpose.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Felicia said, face screwed up in disgust.

“Gretyl pulled her mask off,” I said.

“Insane,” Charles said.

“She had her reasons,” Chao said.

“Anyway,” Diane went on. “We need leaders.”

“We’re not going to be here much longer,” Oliver said.

“Oliver’s right. We’re not guarded. Something’s changed,” Charles said.

“We have to stick together,” Diane insisted.

“If something’s changed, it has to have changed in our favor,” Oliver said. “It couldn’t get any worse.”

“We still need leaders,” I said. “We should wake people up now and see what the group thinks.”

“What if we’ve won?” Felicia asked. “What do we do?”

“Find out how much we’ve won, and why,” Charles said.

We explored the tunnels around the dining hall, venturing back to the old dorms, all quite empty now. We encountered a few arbeiters about their maintenance business, but no humans. After an hour, we begin to worry — the situation was spooky.

Fanning out, we began a systematic exploration of the upper levels of the entire university, reporting to each other on local links. Charles volunteered to join me. We took the north tunnels, closest to emergency external shafts and farthest from the administration chambers. The tunnels were dark but warm; the air smelled stale, but it was breathable. Our feet made hollow scuffing echoes in the deserted halls. The university seemed to be in an emergency power-down.

Charles walked a step ahead. I watched him closely, wondering why he wanted to be so friendly when I had given him so little encouragement.

We didn’t say much, simply stating the obvious, signaling to each other with whistles after splitting to try separate tunnels, nodding cordially when we rejoined and moved on. Gradually we moved south again, expecting to meet up with other students.

We explored a dark corridor connecting the old dorm branch with UMS’s newer tunnels. A bright light flashed ahead. We stood our ground. A woman in an ill-fitting pressure suit shined her light directly into our faces.

“University staff?” she asked.

“Hell, no. Who are you?” Charles asked.

“I’m an advocate,” the woman said. “Pardon the stolen suit. I flew in through the storm about half an hour ago. Landed during a dust lull and found a few of these abandoned near the locks. We were told there was no air in here.”

“Who told you that?”

“The last man out, and he went in a hurry, too. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “Where is everybody?”

The advocate lifted her face plate and sniffed noisily. “Sorry. My nose hates flopsand. The university was evacuated seven hours ago. Bomb threat. They said a bunch of Gobacks had dumped air and planted charges in the administration chambers. Everybody left in ground vehicles. They took them overland by tractor to an intact train line.”

“You’re brave to come this far,” Charles said. “You don’t think there is a bomb, do you?”

The woman removed her helmet and smiled wolfishly. “Probably not. They didn’t tell us anybody was here. They must not like you. How many are here?”

“Ninety.”

“They voided the reporters before they evacuated. I saw you on LitVid. Press conference didn’t go well. So where are the rest of you?”

We led her to the dining hall. All the far-flung explorers were called in.

The advocate stood in the middle of the assembly, asking and answering questions. “I presume I’m the first advocate to get here. First off, my name is Maria Sanchez Ochoa. I’m an independent employed by Grigio BM from Tharsis.”

Felicia stepped forward. “That’s my family,” she said. Two others came forward as well.

“Good to see you,” Maria Sanchez Ochoa said. “The family’s worried. I’d like to get your names and report that you’re all safe.”

“What’s happened?” Diane asked. “I’m very confused.” Others joined in.

“What happened to Sean and Gretyl?” I asked, interrupting the babble.

“University security handed them over to Sinai district police early yesterday morning. Both were injured, but I don’t know to what extent. The university claimed they were injured by their own hands.”

“They’re alive?” I continued.

“I presume so. They’re at Time’s River Canyon Hospital .” She started recording names, lifting her slate and letting each speak and be recognized in turn.

I looked to my right and saw Charles standing beside me. He smiled, and I returned his smile and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Will someone take this outside and shoot it up to a satcom? None of the cables or repeaters are working, thanks to you folks.” Ochoa gave her slate to a student, who left the dining area to get to the glass roof of the administration upper levels.

“Now, some background, since I doubt you’ve heard much news recently.”

“Nothing useful,” Oliver said.

“Right. I hate to tell you this, but you didn’t do a thing for your cause by acting like a bunch of Parisian Communards. The Statist government planted its own bombs months ago, political and legal, far away from UMS, and they exploded just two days ago. We have a bad situation here, folks, and that explains some of the delay in getting to you. The constitutional accord is off. The Statists have resigned, and the old BM Charter government has been called back into session.”

The battle was over. But we were small potatoes.

Ochoa concluded by saying, “You folks have wrecked university property, you’ve violated laws in every Martian book I can think of, and you’ve put yourselves in a great deal of danger. What has it gotten you?

“Fortunately, it probably won’t get you any time in jail. I’ve heard that former Statist politicos are shipping out by dozens — and that probably includes Connor and Dauble. Nobody in their right mind is going to charge you under Statist law.”

“What did they do?” Charles asked.

“Nobody’s sure about all that they’ve done, but it looks like the government invited Earth participation in Mars politics, sought kickbacks from Belter BMs to let them mine Hellas — ”

Gasps from the assembly. We had thought we were radical.

“And planned to nationalize all BM holdings by year’s end.”

We met these pronouncements with stunned silence.

We stayed in the old dorms while security crews from Gorrie Mars BM checked out the entire university grounds. New rails were manufactured, trains came in, and most of us went home. I stayed, as did Oliver, Felicia, and Charles. I was beginning to think that Charles wanted to be near me.

I met my family in the station two days after our release, Father and Mother and my older brother Stan. My parents looked pale and shaken by both fear and anger. My father told me, in no uncertain terms, that I had violated his most sacred principles in joining the radicals. I tried to explain my reasons, but didn’t get through to him, and no wonder: they weren’t entirely clear to me.

Stan, perpetually amused by the attitudes and actions of his younger sister, simply stood back with a calm smile. That smile reminded me of Charles.

Charles, Oliver, Felicia and I bought our tickets at the autobox and walked across the UMS depot platform. We all felt more than a little like outlaws, or at least pariahs.

It was late morning and a few dozen interim university administrators had come in on the same train we would be taking out. Dressed in formal grays and browns, they stood under the glass skylights shuffling their feet, clutching their small bags and waiting for their security escort, glancing at us suspiciously.

Rail staff didn’t know we were part of the group responsible for breaking the UMS line, but they suspected. All credit to the railway that it honored charter and did not refuse service.

The four of us sat in the rearmost car, fastening ourselves into the narrow seats. The rest of the train was empty.

In 2171, five hundred thousand kilometers of maglev train tracks spread over Mars, thousands more being added by arbeiters each year. The trains were the best way to travel: sitting in comfort and silence as the silver millipedes flew centimeters above their thick black rails, rhythmically boosting every three or four hundred meters and reaching speeds of several hundred kiphs. I loved watching vast stretches of boulder-strewn flatlands rush by, seeing fans of dust topped by thin curling puffs as static blowers in the train’s nose cleared the tracks ahead.

I did not much enjoy the train ride to Time’s River Canyon Hospital , however.

We didn’t have much to say. We had been elected by the scattered remnants of the protest group to visit Sean and Gretyl.

We accelerated out of the UMS station just before noon , pressed into our seats, absorbing the soothing rumble of the carriage. Within a few minutes, we were up to three hundred kiphs, and the great plain below our ports became an ochre blur. In a window seat, I stared at the land and asked myself where I really was, and who.

Charles had taken the seat beside me, but mercifully, said little. Since my father’s stern lecture, I had felt empty or worse. The days of having nothing to do but sign releases and talk to temp security had worn me down to a negative.

Oliver tried to break the gloom by suggesting we play a word game. Felicia shook her head. Charles glanced at me, read my lack of interest, and said, “Maybe later.” Oliver shrugged and held up his slate to speck the latest LitVid.

I dozed off for a few minutes. Charles pressed my shoulder gently. We were slowing. “You keep waking me up,” I said.

“You keep napping off in the boring parts,” he said.

“You are so tapping pleasant, you know?” I said.

“Sorry.” His face fell.

“And why are you…” I was about to say following me but I could hardly support that accusation with much evidence. The train had slowed and was now sliding into Time’s River Depot. Outside, the sky was deep brown, black at zenith. The Milky Way dropped between high canyon walls as if seeking to fill the ancient flood channel.

“I think you’re interesting,” Charles said, unharnessing and stepping into the aisle.

I shook my head and led the way to the forward lock.

“We’re stressed,” I murmured.

“It’s okay,” Charles said.

Felicia looked at us with a bemused smile.

In the hospital waiting room, an earnest young public defender thrust a slateful of release forms at us. “Which government are you sending these to?” Oliver asked. The man’s uniform had conspicuous outlines of thread where patches had been removed.

“Whoever,” he answered. “You’re from UMS, right? Friends and colleagues of the patients?”

“Fellow students,” Felicia said.

“Right. Now listen. I have to say this, in case one of you is going to shoot off to a LitVid. ‘The Time’s River District neither condones nor condemns the actions taken by these patients. We follow historical Martian charter and treat any and all patients, regardless of legal circumstance or political belief. Any statements they make do not represent — ’ ”

“Jesus,” Felicia said.

“ ‘ — the policy or attitudes of this hospital, nor the policy of Time’s River District.’ End of sermon.” The public defender stepped back and waved us through.

I was shocked by what we saw when we entered Sean’s room. He had been tilted into a corner at forty-five degrees, wrapped in white surgical nano and tied to a steel recovery board. Monitors guided his reconstruction through fluid and optic fibers. Only now did we realize how badly he had been injured.

As we entered his room, he turned his head and stared at us impassively through distant green-gray eyes. We made our awkward openings, and he responded with a casual, “How’s the outside world?”

“In an uproar,” Oliver said. Sean glanced at me as if I were only there in part, not a fully developed human being, but a ghost of mild interest. I specked the moments of passionate speech when he had riveted the crowded students and compared it to this lackluster shell and was immensely saddened.

“Good,” Sean said, measuring the word with silent lips before repeating it aloud. He looked at a projected paleoscape of Mars on the wall opposite: soaring aqueduct bridges, long gleaming pipes suspended from tree-like pedestals and fruited with clusters of green globes, some thirty or forty meters across… A convincing mural of our world before the planet sucked in its water, shed its atmosphere, and withered.

“The Council’s taken over everything again,” I said. “The syndics of all the BMs are meeting to patch things together.”

Sean did not react.

“Nobody’s told us how you were hurt,” Felicia said. We looked at her, astonished at this untruth. Ochoa had checked into all the security reports, including those filed by university guards, and pieced together the story.

“The charges,” Sean said, hesitating not a moment, and I thought, Whatever Felicia is up to, he’ll tell the truth… and why expect him not to?

“The charges went off prematurely, before I had a chance to get out of the way. I set the charges alone. Of course.”

“Of course,” Oliver said.

Charles stayed in the rear, hands folded before him like a small boy at a funeral.

“Blew me out of my skinseal. I kept my helmet on, oddly enough. Exposed my guts. Everything boiled. I remember quite a lot, strangely. Watching my blood boil. Somebody had the presence of mind to throw a patch over me. It wrapped me up and slowed me down and they pulled me into the infirmary about an hour later. I don’t remember much after that.”

“Jesus,” Felicia said, in exactly the same tone she had used for the public defender in the waiting room.

“We did it to them, didn’t we? Got the ball rolling,” Sean said.

“Actually — ” Oliver began, but Felicia, with a tender expression, broke in.

“We did it,” she said. Oliver raised his eyebrows.

“I’m going to be okay. About half of me will need replacing. I don’t know who’s paying for it. My family, I suppose. I’ve been thinking.”

“Yeah?” Felicia said.

“I know what set the charge off,” Sean said. “Somebody broke the timer before I planted it. I’d like one or all of you to find out who.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. “You think somebody did it deliberately?” I asked.

Sean nodded. “We checked the equipment a hundred times and everything worked.”

“Who would have done something like that?” Oliver asked, horrified.

“Somebody,” Sean said. “Keep the students together. This isn’t over yet.” He turned to face me, suddenly focusing. “Take a message to Gretyl. Tell her she was a goddamned fool and I love her madly.” He bit into the words goddamned fool as if they were a savory cake that gave him great satisfaction. I had never seen such a join of pain and bitter pride.

I nodded.

“Tell her she and I will take the reins again and guide this mess home right. Tell her just that.”

“Guide the mess home right,” I repeated, still under his spell.

“We have a larger purpose,” Sean said. “We have to break this planet out of its goddamned business-as-usual, corrupt, bow-down-to-the-Triple, struggle-along mentality. We can do that. We can make our own party. It’s a beginning.” His eyes fixed on each of us in turn, as if to brand us. Felicia held out her splayed fingers and Sean lifted his free arm to awkwardly press his hand against hers. Oliver did the same. Charles stood back; too much for him. I was about to raise my hand and match Sean’s. But Sean saw my hesitation, my change of expression when Charles stepped back, and he dropped his hand before I could decide.

“Heart and mind, heart and mind,” Sean said softly. “You are… Casseia, right? Casseia Majumdar?”

“Yes.”

“How did your family fare in all this?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“They’re fixed to prosper. The Gobacks will do well in the next government. It was funny, Connor thinking we were Gobacks. Are you a Goback, Casseia?”

I shook my head, throat tight. His tone was so stiff and distant, so reproving.

“Show it to me, Casseia. Heart and mind.”

“I don’t think you have any right to question my loyalty because of my family,” I said.

Sean’s gaze went cold. “If you’re not dedicated, you could turn on us… just like whoever broke the timer.”

“Gretyl handled the charge,” Charles said. “Nobody else touched it. Certainly not Casseia.”

“We all slept, didn’t we?” Sean said. “But it’s irrelevant, really. That part’s over.”

He closed his eyes and licked his lips. A cup came up from the wallmount arbeiter and a stream of liquid poured into his mouth. He sucked it up with the expertise of days in the hospital.

“What do you mean?” Felicia asked in a little voice.

“I’ll have to pick all over again. Most of you went home, didn’t you?”

“Some did,” Felicia said. “We stayed.”

“We needed students to occupy and hold, to take the administration chambers and dictate terms. We could work from the university as a base, claim it as a forfeit for illegal voiding, claim it for damages… If I had been there, that’s what we would have done.”

I felt like crying. The injustice of Sean’s veiled accusations, mixed with my very real infatuation and guilt at not serving the cause better, turned my stomach.

“Go talk to Gretyl. And you two…” He pointed to Charles and me. “Think it over. Who are you? Where do you want to be in ten years?”

Gretyl was less severely injured, but looked worse. Her head had been wrapped in a bulky breather, leaving only a gap for her eyes. She had been laid back at forty-five degrees on a steel recovery plate as well, and tubes ran from mazes of nano clumps on her chest and neck. An arbeiter had discreetly draped the rest of her with a white sheet for our visit. She watched us enter, and her silky artificial voice said, “How’s Sean? You’ve been to see him?”

“He’s fine,” Oliver said. I was too unhappy to talk.

“We haven’t been allowed to visit. This hospital shits protocol. What’s being said outside? Did we get any attention?”

Felicia explained as gently as possible that we really hadn’t accomplished much. She was ready to be a little harder with Gretyl than with Sean; perhaps she was infatuated with Sean as well. I had a sudden insight into people and revolutions, and did not like what I saw.

“Sean has a plan to change that,” Gretyl said.

“I’m sure he does,” Oliver said.

“What’s on at UMS?”

“They’re moving in a new administration. All the Statist appointees have resigned or been put on leave.”

“Sounds like they’re being punished.”

“It’s routine. All appointments are being reviewed,” Oliver said.

Gretyl sighed — an artificial note of great beauty — and extended her hand. Felicia squeezed it. Charles and I remained in the background. “He thinks the charge that blew up was tampered with,” Oliver said.

“It may have been,” Gretyl said. “It must have been.”

“But only you and he handled it,” Charles said.

Gretyl sighed again. “It was just a standard Excavex two-kilo tube. We didn’t pay a lot of money. The people who stole it for us may have tampered with it. They could have done something to make it go off. That’s possible.”

“We don’t know that,” Oliver said.

“Listen, friends, if we haven’t attracted any attention yet, it’s because — ” She stopped and her eyes tracked the room zipzip, then narrowed.

“I have new eyes,” she said. “Do you like the color? You’d better go now. We’ll talk later, after I’m released.”

On our way out of the hospital, in the tunnel connecting us to Time’s River Station’s main tube, a hungry-looking, poorly-dressed and very young male LitVid agent tried to interview us. He followed us for thirty meters, glancing at his slate between what he thought were pointed questions. We were too glum and too smart to give any answers, but despite our reticence, we ended up in a ten-second flash on a side channel for Mars Tharsis local.

Sean, on the other hand, was interviewed the next day for an hour by an agent for New Mars Committee Scan, and that was picked up and broadcast by General Solar to the Triple. He told our story to the planets, and by and large, what he told was not what I remembered.

Nobody else was interviewed.

My sadness grew; my fresh young idealism waned rapidly, replaced by no wisdom to speak of, nothing emotionally concrete.

I thought about Sean’s words to us, his accusations, his pointed suspicion of me, his interview spreading distortions around the Triple. Now, I would say that he lied, but it’s possible Sean Dickinson even then was too good a rabbler to respect the truth. And Gretyl, I think, was about to pass on some sound advice about political need dictating how we see — and use — history.

When we returned to our dorms at UMS, we found notices posted and doors locked. Diane met me and explained that UMS had been closed for the foreseeable future due to “curriculum revisions.” Flashing icons beneath the ID plates told us we could enter our quarters once and remove our belongings. Train fare to our homes or any other destination would not be provided. Our slates received bulletins on when and where the public hearings would be held to determine the university’s future course.

We were arguably worse off than we had been with Dauble and Connor.

Charles helped Diane and me pull our belongings from the room and stack them in the tunnel. There weren’t many — I had sent most of my effects home after being voided. I helped Charles remove his goods, about ten kilos of equipment and research materials.

We ate a quick lunch in the train station. We didn’t have much to say. Diane, Oliver and Felicia departed on the northbound, and Charles saw me to the eastbound.

As I lugged my bag into the airlock, he held out his hand, and we shook firmly. “Will I see you again?” he asked.

“Why not?” I said. “When our lives are straightened out.”

He held onto my hand a little longer and I gently removed it. “I’d like to see you before that,” he said. “For me, at least, that might be a long way off.”

“All right,” I said, squeezing through the door. I didn’t commit myself to when. I was in no mood to establish a relationship.

My father forgave me. Mother secretly admired all that I had done, I think — and they personally footed the bill for expensive autoclasses, to keep me up-to-date on my studies. They could have charged it to the BM education expenses, as part of the larger Goback revival. Father was a firm believer in BM rule, but too honorable to squeeze BM-appropriated guvvie funds, or take the victor’s advantage.

When next I saw Connor, it was on General Solar LitVid. She was on the long dive to Earth, issuing pronouncements from the WHTCIPS (Western Hemisphere Transport Coalition Interplanetary Ship) Barrier Reef, returning, she was at pains to make Martians understand, to a kind of hero’s welcome. Dauble was with her but said nothing, since day by day the awful truth of her failed Statist administration was coming out.

It so happened that there was a Majumdar BM advocate on that very ship, and he took it upon himself to represent all the BMs and other interests hoping to settle with Connor and Dauble. He served them papers, day after day after day, throughout the voyage…

By the time both of them got to Earth, ten months later, they would be poor as Jackson ’s Lode, born on Mars, exiled to Earth, doomed to dodging Triple suits for the rest of their days.

What was happening on Mars was an excellent example of politics in action in a “young” culture, my special area of study with respect to Earth history, and I should have been fascinated, but in fact I ignored much of the daily news.

My youthful ideals had been trodden on none too delicately, and I didn’t know what to make of it. Before I could speck out the eventual course of my education and decide how to serve my family, I had to re-establish who I was. My mother supported my youthful indecision; my father gave in to my mother. I had some time away from commitments.

When UM restarted classes, I switched campuses and majors, going to Durrey Station, the third-largest town on Mars and home of UM’s second-largest branch. I studied high humanities — text lit from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, philosophy before quantum mechanics, and the most practical subject in my list, morals and ethics as a business art. Four hapless souls shared my major, studying things most pioneering, practical Martians could not have given a damn about.

I needed a rest. So I decided to have fun.

I hadn’t thought about Charles for months. I did not know he had gone to Durrey Station as well. When classes started, we did not run into each other immediately. I saw him in Shinktown over student break.

Seven hundred and ninety students fled UM Durrey at Solstice and either went to work on their farms, if from the local, more sober and well-established families of Mariner Valley, or took refuge in Shinktown. Some, already married, spread out to their half-built warrens, soon to become new stations, and did what married people do.

My family kept no farms and required little of me in the way of overt filial piety. They loved me but let me choose my own paths.

Shinktown was a not very charming maze of shops, small and discreet hotels, game rooms, and gyms, seventeen kilometers from Durrey Station, where students went to get away from their studies, their obligations to family and town; to blow it all out and kick red.

Mars has never been a planet of prudes. Still, its attitudes toward sex befitted a frontier culture. The goals of sex are procreation and the establishment of strong connections between individuals and families; sex leads to (or should lead to) love and lasting relationships; sex without love may not be sinful, but it is almost certainly wasteful. To the ideal Martian man or woman, as portrayed in popular LitVids, sex was never a matter of just scratching an itch; it was devilishly complicated, fraught with significance and drama for individual and family, a potential liaison (one seldom married within one’s BM) and the beginning of a new entity, the stronger and dedicated dyad of perfectly matched partners.

That was the myth and I admit I found it attractive. I still do. It’s been said that a romantic is someone who never accepts the evidence of her eyes and ears.

In this age, few were physically unattractive. There was no need and little inclination among most Martians to let nature take its uncertain course. That particular question had been hammered into a viable public policy for most citizens of the Triple seventy Martian years and more ago. I was attractive enough, my genetic heritage requiring little adjustment if any — I’d never asked my mother and father, really — and men were not reluctant to talk to me.

But I had never taken a lover, mostly because I found young men either far too earnest or far too frivolous or, most commonly, far too dull. What I wanted for my first (and perhaps only) love was not physical splendor alone, but something deeply significant, something that would make Mars itself — if not the entire Triple — sigh with envy when my imagined lover and I published our memoirs, in ripe old age…

I was no more a prude than any other Martian. I did not enjoy going to bed alone. I often wished I could lower my standards just enough to learn more about men; handsome men, of course, men with a little grit, supremely self-confident. For that sort of experimentation, beauty and physical splendor would be more important than brains, but if one could have both — wit and beauty and prowess -

So fevered my dreams.

Shinktown was a place of temptations for a young Martian, and that was why so many of us went there. I enjoyed myself at the dances, flirted and kissed often enough, but shied from the more intimate meetings I knew I could have. The one continuing truth of male and female relations — that the man attempts and the woman chooses — was in my favor. I could attract, test, play the doubtless cruel and (I thought) entirely fair game of sampling the herd.

In the middle of the break, on an early spring evening, a local university club held a small mixer following a jai alai game in the arena. I’d attended the game and was enjoying a buzz of frustration at lithe male bodies leaping and slamming the heavy little ball, uneasy with a mix of strong Shinktown double-ferment tea and a little wine, and I hoped to dance it off and flirt and then go home and think.

I spotted Charles first, from across the room, while dancing with a Durrey third-form. Charles was talking to (“chatting up” I said to myself) a tall, big-eyed exotique who seemed to me way out of his league. When the dance ended, I edged through the crowd and bumped into him by accident from behind. He turned from the exotique, saw me, and to my dismay, his face lit up like a child’s. He fell all over himself to disentangle from the big-eyed other.

I had thought about the UMS action for months and wanted to talk about it, and Charles seemed perfect to fulfill that function.

“We could get dinner,” Charles suggested as we strolled off the dance floor.

“I’ve already eaten,” I said.

“Then a snack.”

“I wanted to talk about last summer.”

“Perfect opportunity, over a late dessert.”

I frowned as if the suggestion were somehow improper, then gave in. Charles took my arm — that seemed safe enough — and we found a small, quiet autocafe in an outer tunnel arc. The arc branched north of Shinktown quarters for permanent residents and offered little convenience shops, most tended by arbeiters. We passed through the central quadrangle, a hectare of tailored green surrounded by six stories of stacked balconies. The quadrangle architecture tried to imitate the worst of old Earth, retrograde, oppressive. The shop arc, however, was comparatively stylish and benign.

We sat in the cafe and sipped Valley coffee while waiting for our cakes to arrive. Charles said little at first, his nerves evident. He smiled broadly at my own few words, eager to be accommodating.

Tiring rapidly of this verbjam, I leaned forward. “Why did you come to Shinktown?” I asked.

“Bored and lonely. I’ve been up to my neck in Bell Continuum topoi. You… don’t know what this is, I presume.”

“No,” I said.

“Well, it’s fascinating. It could be important someday, but right now it’s on the fringe. Why did you come?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. For company, I suppose.” I realized, with some concern, that this was my way of being coquettish. My mother would have called it bitchy, and she knew me well enough.

“Looking for a good dance partner? I’m probably not your best choice.”

I waved that off. “Do you remember what Sean Dickinson said?”

He grimaced. “I’d like to forget.”

“What was wrong with him?”

“I’m not much of a student of human nature.” Charles examined his tiny cup. The cakes arrived and Charles slapped palm on the arbeiter. “My treat,” he said. “I’m old-fashioned.”

I let that pass as well. “I think he was monstrous,” I said.

“I’m not sure I’d go that far.”

My lips wrapped around the word again, savoring it. “Monstrous. A political monster.”

“He really stung you, didn’t he? Remember, he was hurt.”

“I’ve tried to understand the whole situation, why we didn’t accomplish anything. Why I was willing to follow Sean and Gretyl almost anywhere…”

“Follow them? Or the cause?”

“I believed — believe in the cause, but I was following them” I said. “I’m trying to understand why.”

“They seemed to know what they were doing.”

We talked for an hour, going in circles, getting no closer to understanding what had happened to us. Charles seemed to accept it as a youthful escapade, but I’d never allowed myself the luxury of such japes. Failure gave me a deep sensation of guilt, of time wasted and opportunities missed.

When we finished our cakes, it seemed natural that we should go someplace quiet and continue talking. Charles suggested the quad. I shook my head and explained that I thought it looked like an insula. Charles was not a student of history. I said, “An insula. An apartment building in ancient Rome .”

“The city?” Charles asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “The city.”

His next suggestion, preceded by a moment of perplexed reflection, was that we should go to his room. “I could order tea or wine.”

“I’ve had enough of both,” I said. “Can we get some mineral water?”

“Probably,” Charles said. “Durrey sits on a pretty fine aquifer. This whole area lies on pre-Tharsis karst.”

We took a small cab to the opposite arc, hotels and temp quarters for Shinktown’s real source of income, the students.

I don’t remember anticipating much of anything as we entered Charles’s room. There was nothing distinguished about the decor — inexpensive, clean, maintained by arbeiters, with no nano fixtures; pleasant shades of beige, soft green, and gray. The bed could hold only one person comfortably. I sat on the bed’s corner. It occurred to me suddenly that by going this far, Charles might expect something more. We hadn’t even kissed yet, however, and the agreement had been that we come here to talk.

Still, I wondered how I would react if Charles made a move.

“I’ll order the water,” he said. He took two steps beside the desk, unsure whether to seat himself on the swing-out chair or the edge of the bed beside me. “Gassed or plain?”

“Plain,” I said.

He set his slate on the desk port and placed an order. “They’re slow. Should take about five minutes. Old arbeiters,” he said.

“Creaky,” I said.

He smiled, sat on the chair, and looked around. “Not much luxury,” he said. “Can’t afford more.” The one chair, a small net and com desk, single drop-down bed with its thin blanket, vapor bag behind a narrow door, sink and toilet folded into the wall behind a curtain — all squeezed into three meters by four.

I casually wondered how many people had had sex in this room, and under what circumstances.

“We could spend years trying to figure out Sean and Gretyl,” Charles said. “I don’t want you to think I’ve forgotten what happened.”

“Oh, no,” I said.

“But I’ve got too much else to ponder, really.” He used the word in a kind of self-parody, to deflate the burden it might carry. “I can’t worry about the mistakes we made.”

“Did we make mistakes?” I asked. I smoothed some wrinkles in the thin blanket.

“I think so.”

“What mistakes?” I led him on, angry again but hiding it.

Charles finally pulled out the chair and sat with his elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him. “We should choose our leaders more carefully,” he said.

“Do you think Sean was a bad leader?”

“You said he was ‘monstrous,’ ” Charles reminded me.

“Things went wrong for all of us,” I said. “If they had gone better, everything might have turned out differently.”

“You mean, if Connor and Dauble hadn’t hung themselves, we might have provided the noose.”

“It seems likely.”

“I suppose that’s what Sean and Gretyl were trying to do,” Charles said.

“All of us,” I added.

“Right. But what would we have done after that? What did Sean really want to accomplish?”

“In the long ran?” I asked.

“Right,” Charles said. He was revealing a capacity I hadn’t seen before. I was curious to see how far this new depth extended. “I think they wanted anarchy.”

I frowned abruptly.

He looked at me and his face stiffened. “But I didn’t really — ”

“Why would they want anarchy?”

“Sean wants to be a leader. But he can never be a consensus leader.”

“Why not?”

“He has the appeal of a LitVid image,” Charles said. How could he not see how much he was irritating me? I felt a perversity again; I wanted him to anger me, so I could deny him what he had come here to gain, that is, my favors.

“Shallow?”

“I’m sorry, this is upsetting you,” Charles said softly, kneading his hands. “I know you liked Sean. It makes me… I didn’t want to bring you here to — ”

The door chimed. Charles opened it and an arbeiter entered, carrying a bottle of Durrey Region Prime Drinking Water, Mineral. Charles handed me a glass and sat again.

“I really don’t want to talk politics,” he said. “I’m not very good at it.”

“We came here to talk about what went wrong,” I persisted. “I’m curious to hear you out.”

“You disagree with me.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But I want to hear what you have to say.”

Charles’s misery became obvious in the set of his jaw, drawn in defensively toward his neck, and the way he clenched his hands. “All right,” he said. I could sense him giving up, assuming I was out of his reach, and that added to my irritation. Such presumption!

“What kind of leader would Sean be?”

“A tyrant,” Charles said softly. “Not a very good one. I don’t think he has what it takes. Not enough charm at the right time, and he can’t keep his feelings under control.”

My anger evaporated. It was the strangest feeling; I agreed with Charles. That was the monstrousness I was trying to understand.

“You’re a better judge of human nature than you think,” I said with a sigh. I leaned back on the bed.

He shrugged sadly. “But I’ve fapped up,” he said.

“How?”

“I want to know you better. I feel something really special when I see you.”

Intrigued, I was about to continue with my infernal questioning — How? What do you mean? — when Charles stood up. “But it’s useless. You haven’t liked me from the start.”

I gaped at him.

“You think I’m awkward, I’m not in the least like Sean, and that was who you’d set your sights on… And now I seem to be putting him down.”

“Sean doesn’t appeal to me,” I said, eyes downcast in what I hoped was demure honesty. “Certainly not after what he said.”

“I’m sorry,” Charles said.

“Why are you always apologizing? Sit down, please.”

Neither of us had touched our mineral water.

Charles sat. He lifted his glass. “You know, this water has been sitting for a billion years, locked in limestone… Old life. That’s what I’d really like to be doing. Besides getting the physics grants and starting research, I mean. Going Up and exploring the old sea beds. Not talking politics. I need someone to come with me and keep me company. I thought maybe you’d like to do that.” Charles looked up, then rushed his proposal out breathlessly. “Klein BM has an old vineyard about twenty kilometers from here. I could borrow a tractor, show you the — ”

“A winery?” I asked, startled.

“Failed. Converted to a water station. Not much more than a trench dome, but there are good fossil beds. Maybe the old discarded vintage has mellowed by now and we could try to gag it down.”

“Are you asking?” I felt a sudden warmth so immediate and unexpected that it brought moisture to my eyes. “Charles, you surprise me.” I surprised myself. Then, eyes downcast again, “What are you expecting?”

“You might like me better away from this place. I don’t fit into Shinktown, and I don’t know why I came here. I’m glad I did, of course, because you’re here, but…”

“An old winery. And… going Up again?”

“In proper pressure suits. I’ve done it often enough. I’m pretty safe to be with.“ He pointed his finger Up. ”I’m no LitVid idol, Casseia. I can’t sweep you off your feet.“

I pretended not to hear that. “I’ve never gone fossiling,” I said. “It’s a lovely idea.”

Charles swallowed and quickly decided to press on. “We could leave now. Spend a few days. Wouldn’t cost much — my BM isn’t rich, but we’d borrow equipment nobody’s using now. No problem with the oxygen budget. We can bring hydrogen back for a net gain. I can call and tell the station to warm up for us.”

This was something slightly wicked and hugely unexpected and quite lovely. Charles would never pressure me to go one step farther than I wanted. It was perfect.

“I’ll try not to bore you with physics,” he said.

“I can take it,” I said. “What makes you think I was ever interested in Sean, romantically?” ,

Wisely, he didn’t answer, and immediately set about making late-night preparations.

Martians saw the surface of their world most often through the windows of a train. Perhaps nine or ten times in a life, a Martian would go Up and walk the surface in a pressure suit — usually in crowds and under close supervision, tourists on their own planet.

Call it fear, call it reason, most Martians preferred tunnels, and dubbed themselves rabbits, quite comfortably; red rabbits, to distinguish from the gray rabbits on Earth’s moon.

I think I was more nervous sitting in the tractor beside Charles than I had been in my skinseal months earlier. I trusted Charles not to lose us in the ravines and ancient glacier tongues; he radiated self-confidence. What unnerved me was the proximity to emotions I had safely kept locked away behind philosophy.

I will not explain my turnaround. I was becoming attracted to Charles, but the process was slow. As he drove, I sneaked looks at him and studied his lean features, his long, straight nose, slow-blinking eyes large and brown and observant, upper lip delicately sensuous, lower lip a trifle weak, chin prominent, neck corded and scrawny — a heady mix of features I found attractive and features I wasn’t sure I approved of. Unaesthetic, not perfection. Long fingers with square nails, broad bony shoulders, chest slightly sunken…

I knit my brows and turned my attention to the landscape. I was not inclined to physical science, but no Martian can escape the past; we are told tales in our infant beds.

Mars was dead; once, it had been alive. On the lowland plains, beneath the ubiquitous flopsands and viscous smear lay a thick layer of calcareous rock, limestone, the death litter of unaccounted tiny living things on the floor of an ancient sea that had once covered this entire region and, indeed, sixty percent of northern Mars.

The seas, half a billion Martian years before, had fallen victim to Mars’s aging and cooling. The interior flows of Mars slowed and stabilized just as Mars began to develop — and push aside — its continents, thus cutting short the migration of its four young crustal plates, ending the lives of chains of gas-belching volcanoes. The atmosphere began its long flight into space. Within six hundred million Martian years, life itself retreated, evolving to more hardy forms, leaving behind fossil sea beds and karsts and, last of all, the Mother Ecos and the magnificent aqueduct bridges. (“Ecos” is singular; “ecoi” plural.)

All around us, ridges of yellow-white limestone poked from the red-ochre flopsand. Rusted, broken boulders scattered from impact craters topped this mix like chocolate sprinkles on rhubarb sauce over vanilla ice cream. Against the pink sky, the effect was severe and heart-achingly beautiful, a chastening reminder that even planets are mortal.

“Like it?” Charles asked. We hadn’t talked much since leaving Durrey in the borrowed Klein tractor.

“It’s magnificent,” I said.

“Wait till we get to the open karsts — like prairie dog holes. Sure signs of aquifers, but it takes an expert to know how deep, and whether they’re whited.” Whited aquifers carried high concentrations of arsenic, which made the water a little more expensive to mine. “Whited seas had entirely different life forms. That’s probably where the mothers came from.”

I knew little about the mother cysts — single-organism repositories of the post-Tharsis Omega Ecos, a world’s life in a patient nutshell, parents of the aqueduct bridges. Their fossils had been discovered only in the past few years, and I hadn’t paid much attention to news about them. “Have you ever seen a mother?” Charles asked.

“Only in pictures.”

“They’re magnificent. Bigger than a tractor, heavy shells a foot thick — buried in the sands, waiting for one of the ancient wet cycles to come around again… The last of their kind.” His eyes shone and his mouth curved up in an awed half-smile. His enthusiasm distanced me for a moment. “Some might have lasted tens of millions of years. But eventually the wets never came.” He shook his head and his lips turned down sadly, as if he were talking about family tragedy. “Some hunters think we’ll find a live one someday. The holy grail of fossil hunters.”

“Is that possible?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are there any fossil mothers where we’re going?”

He shook his head. “They’re very rare. And they’re not found in karsts. Most have been found in the sulci.”

“Oh.”

“But we can look.” He smiled a lovely little boy’s smile, open and trusting.

The Klein BM winery, a noble experiment that hadn’t panned out, lay buried in the lee of a desiccated frost-heave plateau twenty kilometers west of Durrey Station. Now it was maintained by arbeiters, and fitfully at that, judging from the buildup of static flopsands on the exposed entrance. A gate carried a bright green sign, “Trés Haut Médoc.” Charles urged the tractor beneath the sign. The garage opened slowly and balkily, gears jammed with dust, and Charles parked the tractor in its dark enclosure.

We sealed our suits and climbed down from the cabin. Charles palmed the lock port and turned to face me. “I haven’t been here since the codes were changed. Hope I’ve been logged on the old general Klein net.”

“You didn’t check?” I asked, alarmed.

“Joking,” he said. The lock opened, and we stepped in.

Over the years, the arbeiters had repaired themselves into ugly lumps. They reminded me of dutiful little hunchbacks, moving obsequiously out of our way as we explored the narrow tunnels leading to the main living quarters. “I’ve never seen arbeiters this old,” I said.

“Waste not, want not. Klein’s a thrifty family. They took the best machines with them and left a skeleton crew, just enough to tend the water.”

“Poor things,” I said dubiously.

“Voila,” Charles announced, opening the door to the main quarters. Beyond lay a madman’s idea of order, air mattresses piled into a kind of shelter in one corner, sheets covering a table as if it were a bed, decayed equipment lovingly stacked in the middle of the floor for human attention, smelling of iodine. The machines had been bored. A large arbeiter, about a meter tall and half as wide, a big barrel of a machine with prominent arms, stood proudly in the middle of its domain. “Welcome,” it greeted in a scratchy voice. “There have been no guests at this estate for four years. How may we serve you?”

Charles laughed.

“Don’t,” I said. “You’ll hurt its feelings.”

The arbeiter hummed constantly, a sign of imminent collapse. “This unit will require replacements, if any are available,” it told us after a moment of introspective quiet.

“You’ll have to make do,” Charles said. “What we need is a place fit for habitation, by two humans… separate quarters, as soon as possible.”

“This is not adequate?” the arbeiter asked with mechanical dismay.

“Close, but it needs a little rearrangement.”

We couldn’t help giggling.

The arbeiter considered us with that peculiar way older machines have of seeming balky and sentient when in fact they are merely slow. “Arrangements will be made. I beg your pardon, but this unit will require replacement parts and nano recharge, if that is possible.”

Four hours later, with the living quarters in reasonable shape and our provisions for several days stored and logged in with the arbeiters, Charles and I stopped our rushing about and faced each other. Charles glanced away first, pretending to critically examine the interior furnishings. “Looks like a bunkhouse,” he said.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Well, it’s not luxury.”

“I didn’t expect it to be.”

“I came here once when I was ten, with my dad,” Charles said, rubbing his hands nervously on his pants. “A kind of getaway for a couple of days while traveling from Amnesia to Jefferson , through Durrey… Klein holdings intrude into the old Erskine BM lands here. I don’t know how that happened.”

Another moment of uneasy silence. Clearly, Charles did not know how to begin, nor what was expected; neither did I, but as the female in this pairing, it was not my responsibility to initiate, and I did not want to try.

“Shall we see the winery?” he inquired suddenly, holding out his hand.

I took the hand and we began our formal tour of Trés Haut Médoc.

Charles was disarmingly nervous. Disarming, because I had to say little and do nothing but follow him; he gave a gentle, constant commentary on things Martian, most of which I knew. His voice was soothing even as he ran through technical details. In time, I listened more to the tone than the content, enjoying the masculine music of fact laid upon fact, an architecture to shield us for the moment against being alone together.

Ninety percent or more of any Martian station lay underground. Pressurization requirements and protection against radiation flux through the thin atmosphere made this the most economical method of construction. Some attempts had been made in the first ten years to push high-rises and multi-story uplooks through the dirt, but Mars had been settled on a shoestring. Buried or bermed construction was much cheaper. Heat exchangers, sensors, pokeups, entrances and exits, a few low buildings, broke the surface, but even now we remained, by and large, troglodytes.

Half of the aquifers on Mars were solid — mineral aquifers — and half liquid. Solid aquifers came in many varieties. Some were permafrosts and heaves, which produced hummocky terrain. Some ice domes on Mars were ten kilometers across, but nearly all heaves had long since lost the water that produced them. The evaporated water either re-condensed at the poles, or was lost across the ages to space. The thin atmosphere was nearly moisture-free.

Trés Haut Médoc sat half a kilometer above a liquid flow, probably the same flow that supplied Durrey. Water seeped through the limestone and pooled in deeper fissures and caves extending as much as ten kilometers below the karst.

Our first stop was the pumping station. The pump, a massive cluster of steel-blue cylinders and spheres melded together like an abstract sculpture, had been working steadily for fifteen Martian years. It extracted its own fuel, deuterium, from the water it pulled out of the ground.

“We hooked this up to the Durrey pipes about nineteen years ago, Earth years,” Charles explained, walking around the pump. “Just after the winery shut down and the station was automated and evacuated. A source of revenue to offset our failure.” Our footsteps echoed hollow on the frosted stone floor. Air whispered through wall-mounted vents, cool and tangy-musty. “It’s the station’s only reason to exist now. Durrey wants it, pays for it, so we keep the pump going. While I’m here, I’ll justify our visit by filing a report…”

“And get some replacement arbeiters,” I suggested.

“Maybe. The folks who set up the winery were a California family… Or were they Australian? I forget now.”

“Big difference,” I suggested.

“Not really. I know a lot of Australians and Californians now. Except for accent, they’re pretty alike. My own family is from New Zealand , actually. How about yours?”

“I’m not sure. German/Indian, I think.”

“That explains your lovely skin,” Charles said.

“I don’t pay much attention to heritage.”

Charles led me into the water-settling chambers. The dark pools sat still as glass in their quarried limestone basins, filling two chambers each a hectare in extent and ten meters deep. Somewhere beneath our feet, transfer pumps thumped faintly, sending the water to Durrey’s buried pipelines. I breathed in the cold moist air, touched the damp limestone walls.

“Like old bones, that rock,” Charles said.

“Right. Sea bottoms.”

“Half our towns and stations couldn’t exist without limestone flats.”

“Why didn’t it get turned into marble or something?” I asked, partly to demonstrate I was not totally ignorant of areology.

Charles shook his head. “No major areological activity for the past billion years. Marble takes heat and pressure to form. Mars is asleep. It can’t do the job any more.”

“Oh.” I had not demonstrated anything except my ignorance. Still, that didn’t bother me; I was giving Charles every chance to show off, just to see who he really was, what kind of man I had chosen to spend a few days with, alone.

We took a bridge over the farthest pool and down a sloping tunnel. The next chamber held row upon row of corrugated mirror-bright stainless-steel tanks wrapped in coils of orange ceramic pipes. Here the musty-tangy smell was almost overpowering. It stimulated something like racial memory, and I thought of cool dank root cellars on warm summer days, filled with sweet-smelling wooden crates of apples and potatoes, hard-packed dirt floors…

“The old vats,” Charles said. “Cuve, they were called. Juice from the grapes — ”

“I can guess,” I interrupted. “I’m something of a wine connoisseur, actually.” That was stretching the truth considerably.

“Oh, really?” Charles asked, genuinely pleased. “Then maybe you can explain more to me. I’ve always wondered why the winery didn’t work out.”

“Where’d they get their grapes?” I asked, adopting an expert air.

“Cuvée in situ. Grew them in the vats, grape cell suspension… Inoculated it, fermented it right where it grew.”

“That’s why it failed,” I said with a sniff. “Worst wine imaginable.” So I had heard, at any rate; I had never tried it myself.

“My folks tell me it was pretty bad. Some of it’s stored around here, I think… Just abandoned.”

“For how long?”

“Twenty years at least.”

“Terrestrial years,” I said.

“Right.”

“I prefer Martian years, myself.”

Charles took my little feints and jabs pretty well, I thought, not getting irritated, yet not backtracking to flatter me, either.

“Shall we look for them?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I remember seeing them when I was a child… somewhere down here.” He led the way. I lagged a few steps and peered into a glass window in the side of one cuve. Empty blackness. The whole place saddened me. How often had Martians attempted to do something the way it had been done on Earth, half inventing something, half following ancient tradition, and failing miserably?

“You know how we make wine now, don’t you?” I asked, catching up with him.

“Pure nano, all artificial, right?”

“Some of it’s not bad, either.”

“Have you ever tasted Earth wine?” Charles asked.

“Good heavens, no,” I said. “My family’s not rich.”

“I tasted some a few years ago. Madeira . Cost a friend four hundred Triple dollars.”

“Lucky man,” I said. “ Madeira used to be aged in the holds of ships, sent around the Horn.” That just about plumbed my knowledge of wine.

“It was pretty good. A little sweet, though.”

We pushed aside a thin fiberglass door and entered a storage area behind the vat room. Hidden behind neatly folded piles of filter cloth, a single lonely drum sat in one corner. Charles stooped beside the drum and peered at its label. “Vintage 2152,” he said. “M.Y. 43. Never bottled, never released.” He glanced up at me with a comic look of fearful anxiety. “Might kill us both.”

“Let’s try it,” I said.

The spigot plug had been turned to the wall. Charles called one of the maintenance arbeiters to bring in a forklift and move the drum. The arbeiter did its work, and we were able to tap the barrel. Charles went off to find glasses, leaving me with my thoughts in the cold, empty room.

I stared at the foamed rock walls, then said, out loud, “What in hell am I doing?” I was far from any station or town, with a young man I knew little about, putting myself into what could be a very compromising situation, going against my better judgment, much less my previous plans for just such an occasion… when I would have tested and picked out a very suitable candidate for a serious relationship, a significant love-matching.

Clearly, I didn’t know my own mind. I liked Charles, he was certainly pleasant, but he was no…

Sean Dickinson.

I frowned and pinched my upper arm as a kind of punishment. If Sean Dickinson were here, I thought, we might already be in bed together… But I could see Sean waking in the morning, glancing at me with disapproval, taciturn after a night of passion. Was that what I wanted? Experience of sex with the added spice of an illusion of romance, with someone I could never have a future with, and therefore no strings attached?

My face heated.

Charles returned with two thick glasses and I pretended to examine the arbeiter for a moment, blinking myself back into control. “Anything wrong?” Charles asked.

I shook my head, smiling falsely. “It just looks so pitiful.” I took one of the glasses.

Charles stretched his neck between nervous shoulders, clearly more unsure about me than I was about him. But he made a brave show, and with a magician’s hocus-pocus gesture, turned the stopcock and poured a thin stream of deep red liquid into his glass.

“It wouldn’t be polite to offer you some first,” he said, and lifted the glass. “It’s my family’s mistake, after all.”

He sniffed the glass, swirled it, smiled at the pretension, and took a sip. I watched his face curiously, wondering how bad it could be.

He showed genuine surprise.

“Well?” I asked.

“Not fatal,” he said. “Not fatal at all. It’s drinkable.”

He poured a glass for me. The wine was rough, demanding a little more throat control to get it down than I really preferred, but it was not nearly as bad as it could have been.

“We’re young,” Charles decided. “We’ll survive. Should we decant a liter or two, have it with dinner?”

“Depends on what dinner is,” I said.

“What we brought with us, and whatever I can scrounge from the emergency reserves.”

“Maybe I can cook,” I said.

“That would be great.”

We ate in the station boss’s dining room on an old metal table and chairs that nobody had seen fit to remove. Ten-year-old music played softly over the louder system, rapid hammer-beat kinjee tunes that might have put my parents in a romantic mood, but did nothing for me. I preferred development, not drugdrum.

I will not say the wine liberated me from my cares, but it did induce calm, and for that I was grateful. The food was tractable — gray paste at least five years old — Martian years — that fortunately shaped itself into something palatable, if not gourmet. Charles was embarrassingly appreciative. I had to bite my tongue not to point out that the paste did most of the work. He was trying to be nice, to make me feel good. My ambivalence was a puzzle to both of us.

The air system in the old warren creaked and groaned as we finished our dinner. Outside, the boss’s station display told us, the surface temp had dropped to minus eighty Celsius and the wind was whining at a steady one hundred kiphs. I wasn’t worried for our safety — we had enough supplies to keep us for a couple of weeks. If we wished to leave, the tractor could get us through anything but a major storm, which wasn’t in the offing, according to satcom weather reports.

We weren’t in any danger, nobody knew where we were, the wine illumined a Charles more and more handsome with every sip, and still my neck ached with tension.

“Tomorrow we’ll go out to the shaved flats in an old melt river canyon,” Charles said, lifting his glass and staring at the wine within as if it were rare vintage. He closed one eye to squint at the color, caught my dubious expression, and laughed. His laugh might have been the first thing I fell in love with — easy and gentle, self-deprecating but not humble, accompanied by a roll of his eyes and a lift of his chin.

“What are shaved flats?” I asked.

“Natural fractures in the limestone. Upper layers separate from lower, maybe because of vibration from the wind, and the upper layer begins to fragment. Soon — well, in a hundred million years — frost forms in the cracks, and the upper layer erodes into sand and dust, which blow away, leaving the next layer down… Shaved, so to speak.“

“Where does the frost come from, this far south?” I asked.

“The shaving stopped about three hundred million years ago. Not enough water frost to matter any more. Some CO₂ in the winter. But that’s where fossils are. This used to be a pretty good area for ancient tests.”

“Tests?”

“Shells. Most no bigger than your finger, but my great uncle found an intact Archimedes snapper about three meters long. Right here, while digging out the tunnels for this station.”

“What’s an Archimedes snapper?” I knew something about old Martian biology, enough to remember the largest creature of the tertiary Tharsis period, but I wanted to listen to Charles some more. His voice was very pretty, actually, and I had come to enjoy hearing him explain things.

“Big screw-shaped jointed worm with razor-sharp spines. Spun through sea-bottom muds chopping up smaller animals, then sent out stomach tendrils to digest the bits and suck them in.”

I grued delicately. Charles appreciated the effect.

“Pretty grim if you were, say, a triple test jelly during mating season,” he added, finishing his glass. He lifted it toward me, inquiring without words if I wanted more.

“But I’m not,” I said. “So why does it sound awful?”

“More wine, awful?” Charles asked.

“I’m not a triple test jelly, so why does an Archimedes snapper sound horrible?”

“Not used to fresh meat,” Charles said.

“I’ve never had meat,” I said. “It’s supposed to… sharpen your drives. Your instincts.”

Charles lifted his glass again toward me. I wondered if he wanted me drunk. That would not be a very sporting desire, a supine woman nearly out of her senses; would that satisfy him, or would he try for all of me, mind as well as body?

“No thank you,” I said. “It looks like blood.”

“Venous blood,” Charles agreed, putting his half-full glass down. “I’ve had enough, too. I’m not used to it.”

“I think it’s time to sleep,” I suggested.

Charles stared at the floor. I focused on his smile and specked an image of Charles and me without blankets, without clothes, in blood-warm rooms, and felt more heat rise that was not due to the wine. I wanted to encourage him, but something still held me back.

If he did not make a move now, he might miss me, and I would not have to decide whether to accept. I wondered how many women had put heavy action on Charles, and how often he had accepted — if ever. It would be awful if we were both inexperienced — wouldn’t it?

“We have a lot to do tomorrow,” Charles said, turning his eyes away. “I’m pleased you decided to come with me. It’s a real boost to my ego.”

“Why?”

“I’d hate to rush anything now,” he said, so softly I could hardly hear.

“Rush what?”

He filled his glass of wine, then frowned and stuck out his tongue. “I don’t know why I did that. I don’t want any more. You’re very tolerant.” His next words came in a rush, accompanied by quick hand gestures as if in a debate. “I’m shy and I’m clumsy and I don’t know what to do, or whether to do anything, and the thing I want most right now is to just talk with you, and find out why I’m so attracted to you. But I think I should be doing something else, too, trying to kiss you or… Of course, I wouldn’t mind that.” He looked squarely at me, distressed. “Would you?”

I had hoped to be guided through this by someone who could educate me.

“Talking is good,” I said.

Charles came forward a little too quickly, and we kissed.

He put his hand on my shoulder, hugged me without squeezing, and then, instinct shoving in, began to get more insistent. I gently pushed him back, then leaned forward and kissed him again to show I wasn’t rejecting him. His face flushed and his eyes unfocused. “Let’s take it easy,” I said.

We slept in separate rooms. Through the wall, I heard Charles pace and mumble. I don’t think he got much sleep that night. Surprisingly, I slept well.

The next morning, I dressed, came into the kitchen and found the main arbeiter frozen in the middle of the floor. I touched it tentatively. A faint recorded voice said, “I am no longer functional. I need to be repaired or replaced.” Then it shut down completely.

I made my own cup of tea and waited for Charles. He came in a few minutes later, trying not to look tired, and I warmed a cup for him.

“Sleep well?” I asked.

He shook his head. “And you?”

“I slept okay. I’m sorry you were upset.”

“You’re not a Shinktown sweet. Not to me.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

“But I don’t know what you expect.”

I took his hand and said, “We are going to spend a wonderful day sightseeing and looking for fossils. We’ll talk more and get to know each other. Isn’t that enough?”

“It’s a start,” Charles said.

We ate breakfast and suited up.

“None of this was scrubbed by glaciers,” Charles said, pointing to the plain with his gloved hand. We both wore full pressure suits in the tractor cab, but our helmet visors were raised. The tractor motors ramped to a low whine as we climbed a bump in the flat expanse. “They swept by about a hundred kilometers east and fifty west. They left a melt river canyon not far from here, though. It cuts down through a couple of billion years.

“We’ll pass through three layers of life descending into the canyon. The topmost layer is about a half a billion years old. The glaciers came about a hundred million years after they died. The middle layer is two billion years old. That’s the Secondary and Tertiary, Pre-shield and Tharsis One Ecos. At the bottom, in the shaved flats, is the silica deposit.”

“The Glass Sea ,” I said. Every Martian was given a Glass Sea fossil at some point in their childhood.

Charles steered us around a basalt-capped turban of limestone. Basalt fragments from an ancient meteor impact lay scattered over the area. I tried to imagine the meteor striking the middle of the shallow ocean, spraying debris for hundreds of kilometers and throwing up a cloud of muddy rain and steam… Devastation for an already fragile ecology. “Makes me twitchy,” I said.

“What does?”

“Time. Age. Makes our lives look so trivial.”

“We are trivial,” Charles said.

I set my face firmly and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Empty time isn’t very…” I searched for the right word. What came to mind were warm, alive, interesting, but these words all seemed to reveal my feminine perspective, and Charles’s knee-jerk response had been decidedly masculine and above-it-all intellectual. “Active. No observers,” I concluded lamely.

“Given that, we’re still here for just an instant, and the changes we make on the landscape will be wiped out in a few thousand years.”

“I disagree,” I continued. “I think we’re going to make a real mark on things. We observe, we plan ahead, we’re organized — ”

“Some of us are,” Charles said, laughing.

“No, I mean it. We can make a big difference. All the flora and fauna on Mars were wiped out because they…” I still couldn’t clearly express what I wanted to say.

“They weren’t organized,” Charles offered.

“Right”

“Wait until you see,” Charles said.

I shivered. “I don’t want to be convinced of my triviality.”

“Let the land speak,” Charles said.

I had never been very comfortable with large ideas — astrophysics, areology, all seemed cavernous and dismal compared to the bright briefness of human history. In my studies I focused on the intricacies of politics and culture, human interaction; Charles I think preferred the wide-open territories of nature without humanity.

“We interpret what we see to suit our own mindset,” I said pompously.

For a moment, his expression — downturned corners of his mouth, narrowed eyes, a little shake of his head — made me regret those words. If I was playing him like a fish on a line, I might have just snapped the line, and I suddenly felt terribly insecure. The touch of my glove on his thick sleeve did not seem adequate. “I still want to go and see,” I said.

Charles let go of the guide stick. The tractor smoothed to a stop and jerked. He half-turned in his seat. “Do I irritate you?” he asked.

“No, why?”

“I feel like you’re testing me. Asking me key questions to see if I’m suitable.”

I bit my lip and looked into my lap, trying for some contrition. “I’m nervous,” I said.

“Well, so am I. Maybe we should just let up a bit and relax.”

“I was just expressing an opinion,” I said, my own temper flaring. “I apologize for being clumsy. I haven’t been here before, I don’t know you very well, I don’t know what — ”

Charles held up his hands. “Let’s forget all of it. I mean, let’s forget everything that stands between us, and just try to be two friends out on a trip. I’ll relax if you will. Okay?”

I came dangerously close to tears at the anger in his tone. I looked out the window but did not see the ancient carved grotesques outside.

“Okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know how to be different,” I said. “I’m not good at masks.”

“I’m not either, and I don’t like trying. If I’m not the right person for you, let’s put it all aside and just enjoy the trip.”

“I don’t know what’s making you so angry.”

“I don’t know, either. I’m sorry.”

He pulled the stick forward and we drove in silence for several minutes. “Sometimes I dream about this,” he said. “I dream I’m some sort of native Martian, able to stand naked in the Up and feel everything. Able to travel back in time to when Mars was alive.”

“Coin-eyed, slender, nut-brown or bronze. ‘Dark they were, and golden-eyed.’ ”

“Exactly,” Charles said. “We live on three Marses, don’t we? The Mars they made up back on Earth centuries ago. LitVid Mars. And this.”

The tension seemed to have cleared. My mood shifted wildly. I felt like crying again, but this time with relief. “You’re very tolerant,” I said.

“We’re both difficult,” Charles said. He leaned to one side and bumped helmets with me. Our lips could get no closer, so we settled for that.

“Show me your Mars,” I told him.

The melt river canyon stretched for thirty kilometers, carving a wavering line across the flats. A service path had been carved into the cliffs on both sides, cheaper than a bridge, marring the natural beauty but making the canyon bottom accessible to tractors.

“The areology here is really obvious,” Charles said. “First comes the Glass Sea , then Tharsis One with deep ocean deposits, building up over a billion years, limestone… Then ice sheets and eskers… Then the really big winds at the end of the last glaciation.”

We rolled down the gentle packed tumble slope into the canyon. The walls on each side were layered with iron-rich hematite sands and darker strata of clumped till. “Wind and ice,” I said.

“You got it. Flopsand and jetsand, smear, cling and grind… There’s a pretty thick layer of northern chrome clay.” Charles pointed to a gray-green band on our right, at least a meter deep. He swerved the tractor around a recent boulder fall, squeezed through a space barely large enough to admit us, and we came out twenty meters below the flats. Our treads pushed aside flopsand to reveal paler grades of grind and heavy till.

“We have as many words for sand and dust as the Inuit have for snow,” Charles said.

“Used to be a school quiz,” I said. “ ‘Remember all the grades of dust and sand and name them in alphabetical order.’ I only remember twenty.”

“Here we are,” Charles said, letting the stick go. The tractor slowed and stopped with a soft whine. Outside the cabin, silence. The high wind of the night before had settled and the air was still. A dust-free sky stretched wall-to-wall pitch-black. We might have been on Earth’s moon but for the color of the canyon and the rippled red and yellow bed of the ancient melt river.

Charles enjoyed the silence. His face had a look of relaxed concentration. “There’s a rock kit in the boot. We’ll dig for an hour and return to the tractor.” He hesitated, thinking something over. “Then we’ll head home. I mean, back to the station.”

We checked our gear thoroughly, topped up our air supply from the tractor’s tanks, pumped the cabin pressure into storage, and stepped through the curtain lock with a small puff of ice crystals. The crystals fell like stones to the canyon floor.

“I remember this,” Charles said over the suit radio. “It hasn’t changed. The sand patterns are different, of course, and there have been a few slumps… but it looks real familiar. I had a favorite fossil bed about a hundred meters from here. My father showed it to me.”

Charles portioned out my share of tools to carry, took my gloved hand, and we walked away from the tractor. I saw two deposition layers clearly outlined in a stretch of canyon wall that had not slumped: a meter of brown and gray atop several meters of pale yellow limestone, and below that, half a meter of grays and blacks.

We walked across shaved flats now, covered with sand; the oldest limestones, and beneath, the Glass Sea bottom. I drew in my breath sharply, a kind of hiccup, startled at how this realization affected me. Old Mars, back when it had been a living planet… Alive for a mere billion and a half years.

Where life arose first was still at issue; Martians claimed primacy, and Terrestrials disputed them. But Earth had been a more violent and energetic world, closer to the sun, bombarded by more destructive radiation… Mars, farther away from its youthful star, cooling more rapidly, had condensed its vapor clouds into seas a quarter of a billion years earlier.

I believed — like most loyal Martians — that this was where life had first appeared in the Solar System. My feet pressed thin flopsand five or six centimeters above the graveyard of those early living things.

“Here,” Charles said, taking us into the inky shadow of a precarious overhang. I looked up, worried by the prominence. Charles saw my expression as he stooped and brought out his pick hammer. “It’s okay,” he said. “It was here when I was a kid. Can you shine a light?”

We worked by torch. Charles pried up a slab of dense crumbling limestone. I helped lift the slab away,“ twenty or thirty kilos of rock, piling it to one side. Charles handed me the pick.

“Your turn,” he said. “Under this layer. About a centimeter down.”

I swung the pick gently, then harder, until the layer cracked and I was able to finger and brush away the fragments, clearing a space a couple of hands wide. Charles held the torch.

I peered back through two billion Martian years and saw the jewel box of the past, pressed thin as a coat of paint, opalescent against the dark strata of those siliceous oceans.

Round, cubic, pyramidal, elongated, every shape imaginable, surrounded by glorious feathery filters, long stalks terminating in slender, gnarled roots: the ancient Glass Sea creatures appeared like illustrations in an old book, glittering rainbows of diffraction as the torch moved. I specked them waving in the soup-thick seas, sieving and eating their smaller cousins.

“Sometimes they’d lift from their stalks and float free,” Charles said. I knew that, but I didn’t mind him telling me. “The biggest colonies were maybe a klick wide, clustered floats, raising purple fans out of the water to soak up sunlight…”

I reached down with my gloved hand to touch them. They had been glued firmly against their deathbed; they were tough, even across the eons.

“They’re gorgeous,” I said.

“The first examples of a Foster co-genotypic bauplan,” Charles said. “These are pretty common specimens. No speciation, all working from one genetic blueprint, making a few hundred different forms. All one creature, really. Some folks think Mars never had more than nine or ten species living at a time. Couldn’t call them species, actually — co-genotypic phyla is more like it. No surprise this kind of biology would give rise to the mother cysts.”

He took a deep breath and stood. “I’m going to make a pretty important decision here. I’m trusting you.”

I looked up from the Glass Sea , puzzled. “What?”

“I’d like to show you something, if you’re interested. A short walk, another couple of hundred meters. A billion and a half years up. Earth years. First and last.”

“Sounds mysterious,” I said. “You hiding a mother deposit here?”

He shook his head. “It’s on a secure registry, and we license it to scholars only. Father took me there. Made me swear to keep it secret.”

“Maybe we should skip it,” I said, afraid of leading Charles into violating family confidences.

“It’s okay,” he said. “Father would have approved.”

“Would have?”

“He died on the Jefferson .”

“Oh.” The interplanetary passenger ship Jefferson had suffered engine failure boosting from around the Moon five Martian years before. Seventy people had died.

Charles had made a judgment on behalf of his dead father. I could not refuse. I stood and hefted my bag of tools.

The canyon snaked south for almost a hundred meters before veering west. At the bend, we took a rest and Charles chipped idly at a sheet of hard clay. “We’ve got about an hour more,” he said. “We need fifteen minutes to get to where we’re going, and that means we can only spend about ten minutes there.”

“Should be enough,” I said, and immediately felt like kicking myself.

“I could spend a year there and it wouldn’t be enough,” Charles said.

We climbed a gentle slope forty or fifty meters and abruptly came upon a deep fissure. The fissure cut across the canyon diagonally, its edges windworn smooth with age.

“The whole flatland is fragile,” Charles said. “Quake, meteor strike… Something shook it, and it cracked. This is about six hundred million years old.”

“It’s magnificent.”

He lifted his glove and pointed to a narrow path from the canyon floor, across the near wall of the fissure. “It’s stable,” he said. “Just don’t slip on the gravel.”

I hesitated before following Charles. The ledge was irregular, uneven, no wider than half a meter. I pictured a slip, a fall, a rip or prick in my suit.

Charles looked at me over his shoulder, already well down the ledge. “Come on,” he said. “It’s not dangerous if you’re careful.”

“I’m not a rock climber,” I said. “I’m a rabbit, remember?”

“This is easy. It’s worth it, believe me.”

I chose each step with nervous deliberation, mumbling to myself below the microphone pickup. We descended into the crevice. Suddenly, I couldn’t see Charles. I couldn’t hear him on radio, either. We were out of line of sight and he was not getting through to a satcom transponder. I called his name several times, clinging to the wall, each moment closer to panic and fury.

I was looking back over my left shoulder, creeping to my right, when my hand fell into emptiness. I stopped with a low moan, trying to keep my balance on the ledge, waving for a grip, and felt a gloved hand take hold of my arm.

I turned and saw Charles right beside me. “Sorry,” he said. “I forgot we wouldn’t be able to talk through the rock. You’re fine. Just step in…”

We stood in the entrance to a cave. I hugged Charles tightly, saying nothing until my hammering heart had settled.

The cavern stabbed deep into the fissure wall, ending in black obscurity. Its ceiling rose five or six meters above our heads. The fissure’s opposite wall reflected enough afternoon sunlight into the cavern that we could see each other clearly. Charles lifted the torch and handed it to me. “It’s the last gasp,” he said.

“What?” I still hadn’t recovered my wits.

“We’ve gone from alpha to omega.”

I scowled at him for his deliberate mystery, but he wasn’t looking at me.

Gradually, I realized the cavern was not areological. The glass-smooth walls reflected the backwash of light with an oily green sheen. Gossamer, web-like filaments hard as rock stretched across the interior and flashed in my wavering torch beam. Shards of filament littered the floor like lost fairy knives. I stood in the silence, absorbing the obvious: the tunnel had once been part of something alive.

“It’s an aqueduct bridge,” Charles said. “Omega and Mother Ecos.”

This wasn’t a cavern at all, but part of a colossal pipeline, a fossil fragment of Mars’s largest and last living things. I had never heard of an aqueduct bridge surviving intact.

“This section grew into the fissure about half a billion years ago. Loess and flopsand filled the branch because it ran counter to the prevailing winds. Cling and jetsand covered the aqueduct, but didn’t stop it from pumping water to the south. When the Ecos failed and the water stopped, this part died along with all the other pipes, but it was protected. Come on.”

Charles urged me deeper. We stepped around and under the internal supports for the vast organic pipe. Water once carried by this aqueduct had fed billions of hectares of green and purple lands, a natural irrigation system greater than anything humans had ever built.

These had been the true canals of Mars, but they had died long before they could have been seen by Schiaparelli or Percival Lowell.

I swallowed a lump in my throat. “It’s beautiful,” I said as we walked deeper. “Is it safe?”

“It’s been here for five hundred million years,” Charles said. “The walls are almost pure silica, built up in layers half a meter thick. I doubt it will fall on us now.”

Light ghosted ahead. Charles paused for me to pick my way through a lattice of thick green-black filaments, then extended his arm for me to go first. My breath sounded harsh in the confines of the helmet.

“It’s easier up ahead. Sandy floor, good walking.”

The pipe opened onto a murky chamber. For a moment, I couldn’t get any clear notion of size, but high above, a hole opened to black sky and I saw stars. The glow that diffused across the chamber came from a patch of golden sunlight gliding clockslow across the rippled sand floor.

“It’s a storage tank,” Charles said. “And a pumping station. Kind of like Trés Haut Médoc.”

“It’s immense,” I said.

“About fifty meters across. Not quite a sphere. The hole probably eroded through a few hundred years ago.”

“Earth years.”

“Right,” he said, grinning.

I looked at the concentric ripples in the sand, imagining the puff and blow of the winds coming through the ceiling breach. I nudged loose dust and flopsand with my boot. This went beyond confidence. Charles had guided me into genuine privilege, vouchsafed to very few. “I can’t believe it.”

“What?” Charles asked expectantly, pleased with himself.

I shrugged, unable to explain.

“I suppose eventually we’ll bring in LitVid, maybe even open it to tourists,” he said. “My father wanted it kept in the family for a few decades, but I don’t think any of my aunts or uncles or the Klein BM managers agreed. They’ve kept it closed all these years in his memory, I suspect, but they think that’s long enough, and there is the resource disclosure treaty to consider.”

“Why did he want it closed?”

“He wanted to bring Klein kids here for a history lesson. Exclusively. Give them a sense of deep time.”

Charles walked to the spot of sun and stood there, arms folded, his suit and helmet dazzling white and gold against the dull blue-green shadows beyond. He looked wonderfully arrogant, at home with eternity.

That sense of deep time Charles’s father had coveted for his BM’s children stole over me and brought on a bright, sparkling shock unlike anything I had ever experienced. My eyes adjusted to the gloom. Delicate traceries lined the glassy walls of the buried bubble. I remembered the paleoscape mural in Sean’s hospital room. The natural cathedrals of Mars. All broken and flat now… except here.

I tried to imagine the godly calm of a planet where an immense, soap-bubble structure like this could remain undisturbed over hundreds of millions of years.

“Have you shown anybody else?” I asked.

“No,” Charles said.

“I’m the first?”

“You’re the first.”

“Why?”

“Because I thought you’d love it,” he said.

“Charles, I don’t have half the experience or the… awareness necessary to appreciate this.”

“I think you do.”

“There must be hundreds of others — ”

“You asked to see my Mars,” Charles said. “No one’s ever asked before.”

I could only shake my head. I was unprepared to understand such a gift, much less appreciate it, but Charles had given it with the sweetest of intentions, and there was no sense resisting. “Thank you,” I said. “You overwhelm me.”

“I love you,” he said, turning his helmet. His face lay in shadow. All I could see were his eyes glittering.

“You can’t,” I answered, shaking my head.

“Look at this,” Charles said, lifting his arms like a priest beneath a cathedral dome. His voice quavered. “I work on my instincts. We don’t have much time to make important decisions. We’re fireflies, a brief glow then gone. I say I love you and I mean it.”

“You don’t give me time to make up my own mind!” I cried.

We fell silent for a moment. “You’re right,” Charles said.

I took a deep breath, sucking back my wash of emotions, clutching my hands to keep them from trembling. “Charles, I never expected any of this. You have to give me room to breathe.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, almost below pickup range for his helmet. “We should go back now.”

I didn’t want to go back. All of my life I would remember this, the sort of romantic moment and scene I had secretly dreamed of, though stretched beyond what I could have possibly imagined; the kind of setting and sweeping, impassioned declarations I had hoped for since such ideas had even glimmered hi me. That it aroused so much conflict baffled me.

Charles was giving me everything he had.

On the way back to the tractor, with ten minutes before we started using reserves, Charles knelt and chipped a square from the Glass Sea bed. He handed it to me. “I know you probably already have some,” he said. “But this is from me.”

Leave it to Charles, I thought, to give me flowers made of stone. I slipped the small slab of rock into my pouch. We climbed into the tractor, pressurized, and helped each other suck dust from our suits with a hose.

Charles seemed almost grim as he took the stick and propelled the tractor forward. We circled and climbed out of the canyon in painful silence.

I made my decision. Charles was passionate and dedicated. He cared about things. We had been through a lot together, and he had proven himself courageous and reliable and sensible. He felt strongly about me.

I would be a fool not to return his feelings. I had already convinced myself that my qualms before had come from cowardice and inexperience. As I looked at him then — he refused to look at me, and his face was flushed — I said, “Thank you, Charles. I’ll treasure this.”

He nodded, intent on dodging a field of boulders.

“In a special place in my heart, I love you, too,” I said. “I really do.”

The stiffness in his face melted then, and I saw how terrified he had been. I laughed and reached out to hug him. “We are so — weird” I said.

He laughed as well and there were tears in his eyes. I was impressed by my power to please.

That evening, as the temperature outside the station dipped to minus eighty, the walls and tunnel linings of the warrens creaked and groaned, and we dragged our beds together in the boss’s sleeping quarters. Charles and I kissed, undressed, and we made love.

I don’t know to this day whether I was his first woman. It didn’t matter then, and it certainly doesn’t matter now. He did not seem inexperienced, but Charles showed an aptitude for catching on quickly, and he excited and pleased me, and I was sure that what I felt was love. It had to be; it was right, it was mutual… and it gave me a great deal of pleasure.

I delighted in his excitement, and after, we talked with an ease and directness impossible before.

“What are you going to do?” I asked him, nested in the crook of his arm. I felt secure.

“When I grow up, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He shook his head and his brows came together. He had thick, expressive eyebrows and long lashes. “I want to understand,” he said.

“Understand what?” I asked, smoothing the silky black hair on his forearm.

“Everything,” he said.

“You think that’s possible?”

“Yeah.”

“What would it be like? Understanding everything — how everything works, physics, I guess you mean.”

“I’d like to know that, too,” he said. I thought he might be joking with me, but lifting my eyes, I saw he was dead serious. “How about you?” he asked, blinking and shivering slightly.

I scowled. “God, I’ve been trying to figure that out for years now. I’m really interested in management — politics, I guess would be the Earth word. Mars is really weak that way.”

“President of Mars,” Charles said solemnly. “I’ll vote for you.”

I cuffed his arm. “Statist,” I said.

Waiting for sleep, I thought this part of my life had a clear direction. For the first time as an adult, I slept with someone and did not feel the inner bite of adolescent loneliness, but instead, a familial sense of belonging, the ease of desire satisfied by a dear friend.

I had a lover. I couldn’t understand why I had felt so much confusion and hesitation.

The next day, we made love again — of course — and after, strolling through the tunnels with mugs of breakfast soup, I helped Charles inspect the station. Every few years, an active station — whether deserted or not — had to be surveyed by humans and the findings submitted to the Binding Multiples Habitat Board. All habitable stations were listed on charts, and had to be ready for emergency use by anybody. Trés Haut Médoc needed new arbeiters and fresh emergency supplies. Emergency medical nano had gone stale. The pumps probably needed an engineering refit to fix deep structural wear that could not be self-repaired.

After finishing diagnostics on the main pumps, still caught up in yesterday’s trip and my deep-time shock, I asked Charles what puzzled him most about the universe.

“It’s a problem of management,” he said, smiling.

“That’s it,” I said huffily. ‘Talk down to my level.”

“Not at all. How does everything know where and what it is? How does everything talk to every other thing, and what or who listens?”

“Sounds spooky,” I said.

“Very spooky,” he agreed.

“You think the universe is a giant brain.”

“Not at all, madam,” he said, letting a diagnostic lead curl itself into his slate. He tucked the slate into his belt. “But it’s stranger than anyone ever imagined. It’s a kind of computational system… nothing but information talking to itself. That much seems clear. I want to know how it talks to itself, and how we can listen in… and maybe add to the conversation. Tell it what to do.”

“You mean, we can persuade the universe to change?”

“Yeah,” he said blandly.

“That’s possible?” I asked.

“I’d bet my life on it,” Charles said. “At least my future. Have you ever wondered why we’re locked in status quo?”

Cultural critics and even prominent thinkers in the Triple had speculated on the lack of major advances in recent decades. There had been progress — on Earth, the escalation of the dataflow revolution — that had produced surface changes, extreme refinements, but there had not been a paradigm shift for almost a century. Some said that a citizen of Earth in 2071 could be transported to 2171 and recognize almost everything she saw… This, after centuries of extraordinary change.

“If we could access the Bell Continuum, the forbidden channels where all the universe does its bookkeeping…” He smiled sheepishly. “We’d break the status quo wide open. It would be the biggest revolution of all time… much bigger than nano. Do you ever watch cartoons?”

“What are those?”

“Animations from the twentieth century. Disney cartoons, Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Tom and Jerry.”

“I’ve seen a few,” I said.

“I used to watch them all the time when I was a kid. They were cheap — public domain — and they fascinated me. Still do. I watched them and tried to understand how a universe like theirs would make sense. I even worked up some math. Observer-biased reality — nobody falls until he knows he’s over the edge of a cliff… Instant regeneration of damaged bodies, no consequences, continuous flows of energy, limited time, inconsistent effects from similar causes. Pretty silly stuff, but it made me think.”

“Is that how our universe works?” I asked.

“Maybe more than we realize! I’m fascinated by concepts of other realities, other ways of doing things. Nothing is fixed, nothing sacred, nothing metaphysically determined-it’s all contingent on process and evolution. That’s perfect. It means we might be able to understand, if we can just relax and shed our preconceptions.”

When we finished the survey, we had no further excuses to stay, and only a few hours before we had to return the tractor to Shrinktown.

Charles seemed dispirited.

“I really don’t want to go back. This place is ideal for being alone.”

“Not exactly ideal,” I said, sliding an arm around his waist. We bumped hips down the tunnel from the pump to the cuvée.

“Nobody bothers us, there’s things to see and places to go …”

“There’s always the wine,” I said.

He looked at me as if I were the most important person in the world. “It’ll be tough going home and not seeing you for a while.”

I hadn’t given much thought to that. “We’re supposed to be responsible adults now.”

“I feel pretty damned responsible,” Charles said. We paused outside the cuvée hatch. “I want to partner with you.”

I was shocked by how fast things were moving. “Lawbond?”

“I’d strike a contract.”

That was the Martian term, but somehow it seemed less romantic — and for that reason barely less dangerous — than saying, “Get married.”

He felt me shiver and held me tighter, as if I might run away. “Pretty damned big and fast,” I said.

“Time,” Charles-said with sepulchral seriousness. He smiled. “I don’t have the patience of rocks. And you are incredible. You are what I need.”

I put my hands on his shoulders and held him at elbow’s length, examining his face, my heart thumping again. “You scare me, Charles Franklin. It isn’t nice to scare people.”

He apologized but did not loosen his grip.

“I don’t think I’m old enough to get married,” I said.

“I don’t expect an answer right away,” Charles said. “I’m just telling you that my intentions are honorable.” He hammed the word to take away its stodgy, formal sense, but didn’t succeed. Honorable was something that might concern my father, possibly my mother, but I wasn’t sure it concerned me.

Again, confusion, inner contradictions coming to the surface. But I wasn’t about to let them spoil what we had here. I touched my finger to his lips. “Patience,” I said, as lovingly as possible. “Whether we’re rock or not. This is big stuff for mere people.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m pushing again.”

“I wouldn’t have known how good a lover you are,” I said, “if you hadn’t been a little pushy.”

I napped on the trip back to Shrinktown. The tractor found its way home like a faithful horse. Charles nudged me two hours before our arrival and I came awake apologizing. I didn’t want him to feel neglected. I turned to watch the short rooster tail of dust behind, then faced Charles in the driver’s seat. “Thank you,” I said.

“For what?”

“For being pushy.” I was about to say, “For making a woman out of me,” but the humor might not have been obvious, and I didn’t want him to think I was being flippant about what had happened.

“I’m good at that,” he said.

“You’re good at a lot of things.”

I had promised my family I would spend time at Ylla, my home station, before returning to school. There was a week left for that, but I had to go to Durrey to catch the main loop trains north. Charles would stay in Shrinktown a few more days.

We parked the tractor in the motor pool garage and kissed passionately, then walked to the Shrinktown station, promising to get together when school resumed.

When I got back to Durrey, Diane Johara — again my roommate — opened the door and smiled expectantly at me. “How was he?” she asked. “Who?”

“Charles Franklin.”

I had told her I was going on a trip Up but hadn’t given any specifics. “Have you been snooping?” I asked.

“Not at all. While I was out at the family farm, our room took messages. One of them is from a Charles at Shrinktown depot. Where’s your slate?”

I grimaced, remembering I had left my slate in the tractor by accident. Maybe that was why Charles was calling. “I’ve misplaced it,” I said.

Diane lifted an eyebrow. “I looked at the list when we got back. The same Charles we suffered with at UMS, I assume.”

“We went fossil-hunting,” I said.

“For three days …?”

“Your nose is sharp, Diane,” I said.

She followed me into my curtained area. I pulled the cot from the wall and flopped my case on the blanket.

“He seemed very nice,” Diane said.

“You want gory details?” I asked, exasperated.

Diane shrugged. “Confession is good for the soul.”

“You must have had a boring time at the farm.”

“The farm is always a dusting bore. Nothing but brothers and married cousins. But a great swimming hole. You should come with me sometime. Might meet someone you like. You’d be good for our family, Casseia.”

“What makes you think I’d transfer my contract?”

“We have so much to offer,” she said brightly.

“You’re a top pain, Diane.” I unpacked quickly and folded everything into drawers. The thought of being alone for the rest of the vacation seemed bleak.

“Any good males in your family?” she asked. “I’d transfer contracts… for someone like Charles.”

A few months before, I would have stuck my tongue out at her, or thrown a pillow. Somehow that seemed undignified. I had a lover — was a lover — and that demanded maturity in some ways even more than being in the UMS action did.

“All right. I went with Charles to a family station,” I admitted. “He’s nice.”

“He’s pretty,” Diane said wistfully. “I’m happy for you, Casseia.”

I rolled up my bag. “Can I listen to my messages in private?”

“Now you can,” Diane said.

The message from Charles made my heart pound. He was still pushing.

An hour after arriving at Shrinktown, Charles had recorded, “You left your slate in my bag. I’m sending it to your home station now. I just wanted to make sure you understand that I’m serious. I love you and I don’t think I’ll ever find another woman like you. I know you need time. But I know we can share our dreams. I miss you already.”

He was more impressed with me than I was. I sat on the edge of the cot, scared out of my wits.

I lay awake that night, aroused by the floating memories of Charles. It had been so confusing and so wonderful, but I knew I was too young to get married. Some did lawbond at my age: those who had morphed their futures since second form, who knew what they wanted and how to get it.

If I told Charles I did not wish to marry now, he would smile and say, “You have all the time you need.” And that wasn’t the answer I wanted to hear. The truth was, what needed to mature in me was my whole approach to mixing the inner life with the outer. What if Charles was not ideally suited for me? Why settle for something less than the best?

I shook my head bitterly, feeling so very selfish and even treasonous. Charles had given me everything. How could I refuse?

How could I think such thoughts and yet still profess, even to myself, that I loved him?

I sent a text message back, not trusting my voice: The time at Trés Haut Médoc was lovely. I’ll treasure it always. I can’t talk about going lawbond because I am much less sure of myself than you seem to be. I want to see you as soon as possible. We need to get together with our friends and do all sorts of things before we can even think about commitment, don’t you agree?

I signed off with Love, Casseia Majumdar. I had signed letters to distant relatives that way. Not I love you, a strong declaration, but simply, tersely, Love. Charles would be hurt by that. It hurt me to write it and not change it…

But I sent the message. I left a farewell message on the room for Diane, who was staying at Durrey to study in privacy.

Then I boarded the train to North Solis . I leaned my head against the double-paned glass and looked out at nighttime Mars, at Phobos like, a dull searchlight above the glooming hills west of Durrey.

I am frightened, I told myself. I can never again be what I was. I can never be to another what I was to Charles. Something has ended and I am afraid.

I made the trip across Claritas Fossae back to Jiddah Pla-num and Ylla, the bosom of my family, greeting my parents and brother with affection, falsely trying to convey a jaunty air of self-assurance, everything’s fine here, I’m just the same as always. But I’m a lover now, Father. Mom, I’ve had a man, and it was wonderful… I mean, he was wonderful, and I think I’m in love, but it’s going very fast, and God I wish I could talk to you, really talk…

Charles did not respond for three days.

Perhaps he had plumbed the depths of my character and decided he had made a serious mistake. Perhaps he had seen through to my basic immaturity and insincerity and decided to write me off as a Shinktown sweet after all.

My slate was delivered by postal arbeiter, but I had already ordered another, not trusting the room to record all my messages. I could not concentrate on planning my next octant’s curriculum. I was a nervous wreck.

I hated the suspense and uncertainty. I had felt I was in control and had lost that control and now it was my turn to be played on the line like a fish. Irritation turned to numb sadness. But I did not call him.

At the end of three days, as I undressed for a very lonely bed, Charles called me direct.

I robed and took his call in my room. His image came clear as life over my bed. He looked exhausted and sounded devastated and his face was ghostly pale. “I’m really sorry I’ve been out of touch,” he said. “I wish we could talk in person. It’s been a nightmare here.”

“What’s wrong?‘ I asked.

“Our BM has had all of its Earth contracts severed. I had to fly to McAuliff Valley for a family meeting. I’m there now. God, I’m sorry, you must have thought — ”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I didn’t hear anything on the nets.”

“It’s not public yet. Don’t tell anybody, Casseia. I think we’re being voided because our Lunar branch is starting up major prochine operations in Lagrange. Earth doesn’t like it. The Greater East-West Alliance, actually, but it might as well be the whole Earth.”

GEWA — pronounced Jee-wah, an economic union of Asia , North America , India and Pakistan , the Philippines , and parts of the Malay Archipelago — had been causing problems for a number of BMs, including Majumdar.

“Is it really that bad?”

“We can’t ship any goods to Earth, and we can’t exchange process data with GEWA signatories.”

“How does that affect you?” I asked.

“We’re looking at an across-the-board loss for the next five Earth years. My scholarship is down the tubes,” Charles said. “I had hoped to join the Trans-Mars Physics Co-op for my fifth-form studies. If Klein can’t ante up, I can’t pay my share, and I don’t even go to fifth form.”

“Damn,” I said. “I know how much that means — ”

“It puts everything on hold, Casseia. What you said… about taking time to think things through…” His voice shook and he worked to control it. “Casseia, I can’t possibly go lawbond, I don’t have any prospects for scholarship — ”

“It’s okay,” I said.

“I feel like an idiot. Everything was going so well, maybe, I thought, maybe we can — ”

“Yeah.” I hurt for him.

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be.”

“I love you so much.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I want to see you. As soon as I’m free here — we have some family decisions to make, consensus on BM direction, response, and so on — ”

“Serious. I know.”

“I want to get together. At Durrey, when we go back, or at Ylla, wherever. No pressure, just… see you.”

“I want to see you, too.”

He reaffirmed that he loved me, and we mumbled our way through farewells. His image faded and I took a deep breath and got a drink of water.

Charles was in trouble and that took pressure off me, and I felt guilty relief. I knew I had to talk to someone, soon, but my Mother and Father certainly would not do…

I called Diane.

She answered with vid off, then switched it on. She wore a ragged blue robe she had treasured since girlhood. She had caked her hair with Vivid, a mud-colored treatment she was addicted to. It rolled slowly on her scalp. “I know, I know, I’m ugly,” she said. “What’s up?”

I told her about Charles’s situation. I told her he had asked me to lawbond and that we couldn’t now. That I was and had been very confused.

She whistled and dropped onto her cot. “Lightspeed kind of guy, isn’t he?” she asked, narrowing her eyes. Talking remote was never the same as being in the same room, especially for a good heartfelt, but Diane’s manner cut the distance. “You told him to go slow, I hope.”

“I don’t think he can. He sounds so in love.”

“That’s either wonderful, or he’s grit. How do you feel?”

“He is so sincere and… he’s so sweet, I feel guilty not dropping my tanks and digging in.”

“Well, he’s your first, and that’s sweet alone. But you’re not telling Aunt Di how you feel. Do you love him?”

“I’m worried I’m going to hurt him.”

“Ah. I mean, uh-oh.”

“You sound experienced” I said testily, knotting my fingers.

“I wish I were. Casseia, stop pacing and relax. You’re giving me an ache.”

I sat.

“You went with him to Trés Haut Médoc. He wasn’t just climbing into your suit. You must have seen something special in him. Do you love him?”

“Yes,” I said.

“But you don’t want to lawbond.”

“Not right away.”

“Ever?”

I shook my head, neither yes nor no. “Don’t tell me I’m a fool not to, because he’s pretty and kind. I know that already.”

“No such, Casseia. Although I’m a bit envious. He is smart, he was good — I assume — ”

“He was very good,” I cried.

“And he’s willing to wait; So wait.”

I pressed my lips together and stared at her. “What if I decide not to lawbond? Would that be fair? He’d have wasted time on me…”

“God, Casseia, I hope no sophisticated Terrie ever hears this. We Martians are such serious folk. Love is never wasted. Do you want to dump him now and try someone else?”

“No!” I said angrily.

“Hey, it is an option. Nobody’s forcing you to do anything. Don’t forget that.”

Talking with her simply dropped me deeper. “I feel really terrible now,” I said. “I’d better go.”

“Not on your life. Why are you so charged about this?”

“Because if I love him, I should feel differently. I should feel all one way, not three ways. I should be happy and giving.”

“You’re ten years old, Casseia. Young love is never perfect.”

“He uses Earth years,” I lamented.

“Ah, a fault! What other faults does he have?”

“He’s so smart. I can’t understand anything about his work.”

“Take a course. He doesn’t want you for a lab assistant or fraulein arbeiter, does he?”

“When I’m away from him, I don’t know what to feel.”

Diane wrinkled her face is disgust. “All right, we’re running in circles. Who’s waiting in a side tunnel?”

“Nobody,” I said.

“You know how men react to you. You’re attractive. Charles isn’t the only slim and randy buck on Mars. You can afford to relax a bit. What do you know about him? You know his family isn’t rich… his BM is in trouble with Earth… he wants to be a physicist and understand everything. He’s pretty he’s gentle, he’s rugged on the Up… God, Casseia, I’m going to hit you if you just void him!”

I shook my hanging head. “I’ve got to go, Diane.”

“Sorry I’m not helping.”

“It’s okay.”

“Do you love him, Casseia?” she asked again, eyes sharp.

“No!” I fumbled to hit the vid off. I missed.

“Don’t cut me now, roomie,” Diane said. “You don’t love him at all?”

“I can’t. Not now. Not one hundred per.”

“You’re positive?”

I nodded.

“Could you come to love him, someday?”

I stared at her blankly. “He’s very persuasive,” I said.

“One hundred per?”

“Probably not. No. I don’t think so.”

“Be kind, then. Tell him honestly how you feel right now.”

“I will.”

She looked away for a moment, then brought up her slate. “You know me,” she said. “Always squirreling. Well, I have something interesting here, if you want to know about it.”

“What?” I asked.

“Charles may be ragged on the Up and good in bed, but he has plans, Casseia. Have you checked up on your friend?”

“No.”

“I always make sure I know as much as possible about my male friends. Men can be so tortuous.”

I wondered what she was going to throw at me now, and my shoulders tensed: that he was actually a Statist, that he had been spying for Caroline Connor in the trench domes.

“This doesn’t toss any sand on how nice a guy he is, but our good Charles wants to be a real physicist, Casseia. He’s applied to be a subject for enhancement research.”

“So? It’s the pro thing. Even Majumdar accepts it.”

“Yeah. And on Earth, everybody does it. But Charles has applied to be hooked to a Quantum Logic thinker.”

I fell silent for a moment. “Where d-did you learn that?”

“Open records, medically oriented research applications, UMS. He put in the request early last summer, before the trench domes.”

My insides sank. “Oh, God,” I said.

“Hey, we don’t know much about such a link.”

“Nobody can even talk to a QL thinker!” I said.

“I didn’t want to puddle your dust, Casseia, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Oh.”

“When will you be back?”

I mumbled an answer and cut the vid. My head seemed filled with foam. I didn’t know whether to be angry or to cry.

On Mars, we had escaped most of the ferment of enhancements and transforms and nanomorphing commonplace on Earth. We were used to low-level enhancements, genetic correction, and therapy for serious mental disorders, but most Martians eschewed the extreme possibilities. Some weren’t available off Earth; some just didn’t suit our pragmatic, pioneer tastes. I think the cultural consensus was that Mars would let Earth and, to a lesser extent, the Moon try the radical treatments, and Mars would sit the revolution out for a decade or two and await the results.

If what Diane had learned was true — and I couldn’t think of any reason to doubt her — Charles seemed ready to zip right to the cutting edge.

What had been youthful ambivalence before ramped to near-panic now. How could I maintain any kind of normal relationship with Charles when he would spend much of his mental life listening to the vagaries of Quantum Logic? Why would he want that in the first place?

The answer was clear — to make him a better physicist. Quantum Logic reflected the way the universe operated at a deep level. Human logic — and the mathematical neural logic of most thinkers — worked best on the slippery surface of reality.

What I knew of these topics, I had picked from school studies and mass LitVid, where physically and mentally enhanced heroes dominated Terrie youth programming. But in truth, I understood very little about Quantum Logic or QL thinkers.

One last question chased me through the rest of the day, through dinner with my parents and brother, through the BM social hour and tea dance later in the evening, into a sleepless bed: Why didn’t Charles tell me?

He hadn’t given me everything, after all.

Early the next morning, my mother and I planned my education through the next few years. I wasn’t in the mood, but it had to be done, so I put on as brave and cheerful a face as I could manage. Father and Stan had gone to an inter-BM conference on off-Mars asset control; our branch of the family had traditionally served the Majumdar BM by directing the family’s involvement in Triple finances, and Stan was following that road. I was still interested in management and political theory, even more now that I had spend a few months away from such courses. The UMS action, and my time with Charles, had sharpened my resolve.

Mother was a patient woman, too patient I thought, but I was grateful to have her sympathy now. She had never approved of political process; my grandmother had left the Moon in protest when it had reshaped its constitution, and her daughter had retained a typical Lunar sense of rugged individualism.

Both Mother and I knew what I owed to the family: that beginning in another year or so, I would become useful to the BM, or get lawbonded, transfer, and become useful to another BM. Political studies did not seem particularly useful to anybody at this time.

Still, if I wanted to study state theory and large-scale govmanagement, she would go along… after voicing a quiet, polite protest.

That took about five minutes, and I sat stolidly, hearing her through. She discussed the difficulties of politics in BM-centered economies; she told me that the best and most lasting contributions could be made within one’s own BM, or as a BM-elected representative to the Council, and even that was something of a chore and not a privilege.

She made her points, a restrained but heartfelt version of Grandmother’s Lunar cry of “Cut the politics!” and I said in reply, “It’s the only thing that really interests me, Mother. Somebody has to study the process; the BMs have to interact with each other and with the Triple. That’s just common sense.”

She leaned her head to one side and gave me what Father called her enigma look, which I had seen many times before, and never been able to describe. A loving, suffering, patiently expectant expression, I can say now after decades of thought, but that still doesn’t do it justice. This time, it might have meant, “Yes, and it’s the world’s third-oldest profession, but I wouldn’t want my daughter doing it.”

“You’re not going to change your mind, are you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then let’s do it right,” she said.

We sat in the dining room, poring over prospectuses as they flitted around us in stylish picts and texts, symbols and previews of various curriculums vying to draw us in deeper. Mother sighed and shook her head. “None of these are very enticing,” she said. “All entry-level stuff.”

“A few look interesting.”

“You say you’re serious about this?”

“Yes.”

“Then Martian political theory won’t be enough. It’s small grit compared to Terrie boulders.”

“But Terrie eds are expensive — ”

“And probably biased toward Earth history and practices, God forbid,” she added. “But they’re still the best for what you seem to want.”

“I don’t want to ask for something nobody else in the family has gotten.”

“Why not?” she asked brightly, enjoying the chance to seem perverse.

“It doesn’t seem right.”

“Nobody in our branch of Majumdar has gone out for govmanagement. Finance, economics, but never system-wide politics.”

“I’m a freak,” I said.

She shook her head. “Recognizably my daughter, however. I’ll clear for it if you really want it.”

“Mother, we couldn’t afford more than a year — ”

“I’m not talking about autocourse eds,” she said. “If you aim for the stars, pick the bright ones. The least you should settle for is a Majumdar scholarship and apprenticeship.”

I hadn’t even dreamed of such a thing. “Apprenticed to whom?”

She made a wry face. “Who in our family knows the most about politics, particularly Earth politics? Your third uncle.”

“Bithras?”

“If your father and the BM pedagogues approve. I couldn’t get that for you by myself; I’m still a bit of an outsider at that level. I’m not sure your father could pull enough strings and call in enough favors. We’ve only met Bithras three times since you were born — and he’s never met you — ”

“What would I do?”

“Inter-BM affairs, and of course Triple affairs. Attend the Council meetings, I assume, and study the Charter and the business law books.”

“It would be perfect,” I mused.

“Next best thing to a real government to study. We tend to neglect that kind of management at the station level, and for that I’m thankful.”

“But I’d still need Terrie autocourses to fill out my currie.”

She smiled cagily. “Of course.” She touched my nose lightly with her finger. “But they wouldn’t go on our tab. All educational costs for apprenticeship are billed to the high family budget.”

“You’ve been giving this some thought behind my back,” I accused.

“I’ve put up with your eccentricities,” she said with a lift of her chin and stretch of her neck, “because we try to encourage independent thinking in our young folks. We hope they’ll experiment. But I honestly never thought I’d see a daughter of mine go into politics — ”

“Govmanagement,” I amended.

“For a career,” she said. “I’m put off by it, of course, and I’m also intrigued. After a few years studying the Council, what can you teach me when we argue?”

“We never argue,” I said, hugging her.

“Never,” she affirmed. “But your father thinks we do.”

I let her go and stood back. With this much resolved, I needed to solve another problem. “Mother, I’d like to ask somebody to visit Ylla. Somebody from Durrey. He needs a vacation — he’s had some pretty bad news — ”

“Charles Franklin from Klein,” my mother said.

I hadn’t mentioned him.

She smiled and gave me another enigma looL “His mother called to see if you were worthy of her son.”

My shock must have showed. “How could she?” And behind that question, How could he talk about me with his parents?

“Her only child is very important to her.”

“But we’re adults!”

“She seemed nice and she didn’t ask any leading questions. She thinks Charles is a wonderful young man, of course, and from what she tells me, I don’t disagree. I assume you think he’s wonderful. Is he?”

I sputtered, trying to express my indignation. She put a finger to my lips. “It’s traditional for us to drive you crazy,” she said. “Think of it as revenge for when you were two years old. Charles is welcome any time.”

Mars supported four million citizens and about half a million prospective citizens, a little less the population of the old United States in 1800.

Some prospective citizens were Eloi emigrating from Earth, starting fresh on Mars, where going for Ten Cubed — a life span of at least one thousand Earth years — was not just accepted, but ignored. Earth forbade life spans artificially extended much over two hundred years, forcing the Eloi to emigrate elsewhere or reverse their treatments. Mars accepted a hefty fee from Earth for taking in each and every Eloi — though it was not widely advertised.

Some immigrating to Mars were pioneers pure and simple, heading out from Earth or Moon to find a simpler and more basic existence. They must have found Mars a disappointment — we had long since spun beyond the era of foamed rock insulation and narrow tunnels between trench domes.

I met Charles at the Kowloon depot, ten kilometers from our home warrens at Ylla. As Charles took his bag from the arbeiter, I spotted Sean Dickinson in a train window. Even with less than five million humans (and perhaps three hundred legally recognized thinkers) spread out over a land area equal to Earth’s, Mars was positively cozy. You couldn’t help running into people you knew, wherever you went. Sean and I exchanged cordial nods. I pointedly embraced Charles. Sean watched us impassively as the train slid out of the depot.

“I am incredibly glad to see you,” Charles said.

I made a warm sound and squeezed his hand. “That was Sean,” I said. “Did you see him?”

“Sat with him,” Charles said. “He seems more cheerful than when we last met. He told me to apologize for making stupid accusations against you. He’s going south. I didn’t ask where.”

“That’s nice,” I said, and my face warmed. “Welcome to Jiddah Planum. Accountants, investment analysts, small engineering firms. No fossils to speak of, even Glass Sea .”

“You’re here, and that’s enough,” Charles said. We crossed the walkways to the lounge and booked tickets for the return. Ylla dug into the northern outskirts of Jiddah Planum. Smaller, slower trains fanned from Kowloon to Jiddah and Ylla and even smaller stations east.

Charles’s face seemed thinner. We had been apart for just over a week, yet he had changed drastically in both feature and mood. He held me close as we boarded our train, and fell back into his seat with a sigh. “God, it is good to see you,” he said. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

“I told you in my letters,” I said.

“Tell me in person. I worried, just getting letters.”

“Letters require much more effort,” I said.

“Tell me.”

I told him about applying for a Majumdar apprenticeship. He approved without reservation. “Brave and noble Casseia,” he said. “Go right to the top in the face of tradition.”

“Just my father,” I said. “My mother’s actually pretty neutral about politics.”

“We’re none of us going to be neutral for long,” Charles said. “Klein is wounded. Others are going to be hit next.”

“By Earth? By GEWA?”

He shrugged and looked out the window at the dull ochre prairies and shallow, kilometer-wide valleys and ditches called fossas. “We’re some sort of threat. Nobody seems to know what sort, but they’re using obvious muscle on us. We’re going to the Charter Council next week to ask for solidarity and relief.”

“Relief?” I was incredulous; Martian BMs rarely asked for relief. So much had to be conceded with competing BMs to get inter-family guarantees.

“We’re in big trouble, as I said. I hope Majumdar misses all this.”

“What will you do if you get the Council to call for solidarity? That’s the step before appealing for unified action by all the BMs — ”

“Shh,” he said, holding up a finger. “Don’t use that word, united.” He smiled, but the smile was not convincing.

“How did you get time off to come here?”

“I’ve done my share and more in the planning phase. I have three days before I return.”

“The next eighth at Durrey starts in four days,” I said.

“I’ll have to miss it.”

“You’re quitting school?”

“Family emergency sabbatical,” he said. “I’ll be on call until the crisis passes.”

“That could put you a year behind…”

“Martian year,” Charles said, patting my arm. “I’ll make it. Just my luck to be in a vulnerable BM. If you’re going into high-level govmanagement, maybe we can transfer your contract…”

Suddenly that wasn’t funny. I turned away, unable to hide my irritation, and Charles was dismayed. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m not being disrespectful. I really wanted to come here and persuade you to… and you said… I know, Casseia, I’m sorry.”

“Never mind.” He was missing the cause of my anger, couldn’t possibly understand — not yet. “We have a lot to talk about, Charles.”

“So serious,” he said. He closed his eyes and leaned against the headrest. “This isn’t going to be a vacation?”

“Of course it is,” I said. That wasn’t quite a lie.

Charles arrived in the middle of a most unusual paucity — most of my blood relations and relations by marriage, who normally trooped through Ylla and our warrens like a herd of friendly cats, had trooped elsewhere, spreading out across Mars on errands or vacations. We would have a rare time of privacy, and neither Charles nor I would have to suffer the staring eyes of curious urchins, impolite questions from my aunts, hints of liaisons from my elder cousins. Even my brother was away. Ylla Station would be empty and quiet, and for this I was supremely grateful.

Ylla occupied sixty hectares of an almost featureless prairie of little interest but for aquifers and solid ice lenses. Prospectors had mapped out a chain of stations along the Athene Aquifer in the first decade of the Mars expansion, thirty years ago; three of a possible six had been built, Ylla the first. It had originally been known as Where’s Ylla.

The lack of sentient Martians had disappointed few. Martian settlers landing on their new home, and taking station assignments, quickly became hard-bitten and practical; it was no picnic. Keeping a station open and staying alive was tough enough in those decades without having to deal with unhappy natives. Still, I had played Ylla as a girl, and my brother had played the defensive Mr. Ttt with his gun of golden bees, stalking human astronauts…

I related much of this nervously to Charles as the small train whined over the ditches and onto the main prairie, trying to keep an appearance of calm when in fact I was miserable. I had asked Charles to come to Ylla to ask him a question I now thought rude and unnecessary; rude, because he would have mentioned his desire to be enhanced had he wished to, and unnecessary, because I was determined to end our brief relationship. But I couldn’t simply tell him on the train.

And I couldn’t tell him at dinner. My parents of course went all-out with this meal, celebrating the first time I had brought a young man to our station.

Father was particularly interested in Charles, asking endless questions about the Terrie embargoes on Klein. Charles answered politely and to the best of his knowledge; there was no reason to keep any of this secret from someone as highly placed as Father.

My parents generally eschewed nano food, preferring garden growth and syn products. We ate potato and syn cheese pie and fruit salad and for desert, my father’s syn prime cheesecake with hot tea. After dinner, we sat in the memory room, small and tightly decorated as most old Mars station rooms are, with the inevitable living shadow box from Earth, the self-cycling fish tank, the small, antique wall-mount projectors for LitVid.

I loved my parents, and what they felt was important to me, but their immediate and natural affection for Charles was distressing. Charles fit right in. He and my father leaned forward in their chairs, almost knocking heads, talking about the possibility of hard financial times ahead, like old friends.

Inevitably, Father asked him what he planned to do with himself.

“A lot of things,” Charles answered. “I’m much too ambitious for a Martian.”

Mother offered him more tea. “We don’t see any reason why Martians shouldn’t be ambitious,” she said, lips pursed as if mildly chiding.

“It’s simply impractical to do what I want to do, here, at this time,” Charles said. He shook his head and grinned awkwardly. “I’m not very practical.”

“Why?” Father asked.

He has come all this way to be with me, I thought, and he spends this time talking with my parents… about what he is going to do in physics.

“Mars doesn’t have the research tools necessary, not yet, perhaps not for decades,” Charles said. “There are only two thinkers on the planet dedicated to physics, and a few dozen barely adequate computers tied up in universities with long waiting lists. I’m too young to get on any of the lists. My work is too primitive. But…” He stopped, hands held in mid-air, parallel to each other, emphasizing his point with a little jerking gesture. “The work I hope to do would take all of Earth’s resources.”

“Then why not go to Earth?” my father asked.

“Why not?” I put in. “It would be a marvelous experience.”

“No chance,” Charles said. “My grades aren’t perfect, my psych evaluations aren’t promising, to work on Earth they make outsiders pass rigid tests… We have to be ten times better than any Terrie.”

My father smelled a young man with ambitions but insufficient drive. “You have to do what you have to do,” he said gruffly.

Instantly I was on Charles’s side, saying abruptly, “Charles knows what to do. He knows more than most Terrestrials.”

My father lifted an eyebrow at the vehemence of my defense. Charles took my hand in appreciation.

“Worse scholars than you have filtered through,” Father said. “You just have to know how to handle people.”

“I don’t know anything about handling people,” Charles said. “I’ve never known anything but how to be straight with them.”

He looked at me as if that were a trait I might admire, and though I thought it disingenuous, not admirable, I smiled. Concern passed from his face in a flash, replaced by adoration. His brown eyes even crossed a little, like a puppy’s. I turned away, not wanting to have such an effect on him. I wanted to be away from my parents, alone with Charles, to express my affection but tell him this was not the time. I felt horrible and a little queasy.

“Casseia would go to Earth in a moment if the opportunity arose,” my mother said. “Wouldn’t you?” She grinned at me proudly.

I stared at the fish tank, sealed decades ago on Earth, lovingly tended by my father and given to my mother on the day of their nuptials. “Nobody’s offered,” I said.

“You’re good, though,” Charles said. “You can jump the hurdles. You have a way with people.”

“Our sentiments exactly,” Father said, smiling proudly. “She just needs a little self-confidence. Support from people other than her parents.”

Father took me aside while Mother and Charles talked. “You’re not happy, Casseia,” he said. “I see it, your mother sees it — Charles must see it. Why?”

I shook my head. “This is going all wrong,” I said. “You like him.”

“Why shouldn’t we?”

“I asked him here… to talk with him. And I can’t be alone with him to talk…”

Father smiled. “You can be alone later.”

“That isn’t why I’m unhappy. You’re examining him as if I’m going to lawbond him.”

My father narrowed one eye and stared at me like a prospector examining a vein in rock. “He meets my approval so far.”

“He’s a friend, and he’s here to talk. I’m not asking for your approval.”

“We’re embarrassing you?”

“I just have some important things to talk about with him, and this is taking so much time.”

“Sorry,” Father said. “I’ll try to keep the inquisition short.”

We returned to the memory room. Slowly, my father pried Mother away from the conversation and suggested they inspect the tea garden. When they were gone, Charles settled back contentedly, well-fed and relaxed. “They’re good people,” he said. “I can see where you come from.”

He could have said anything and it would have irritated me. This irritated me more. “I’m my own woman,” I said.

He lifted his hands helplessly and sighed. “Casseia, you’re going to tell me something. Tell me now. You’re driving me muddy.“

“Why didn’t you say you applied for a link?”

He frowned. “Pardon?”

“You’ve applied to link with a QL thinker.”

“Of course,” he said, face blank. “So has a third of my physics fourth form.”

“I know what a QL thinker is, Charles. I’ve heard what it can do to people…”

“It doesn’t make them into monsters.”

“It doesn’t do them any good as human beings,” I said.

“Is that what’s going wrong between us?”

“No.”

“Something is going wrong, though.”

“What kind of life would there be for someone…” I was getting myself into a mire and couldn’t find a solid path out.

“Married to a QL?” He seemed to think that was funny. “It was a whim, Casseia. It’s been talked about on Earth. Some of our senior physicists think it could help break tough conceptual problems. It would be temporary.”

“You didn’t tell me,” I said.

He tried to skirt the issue. “I’ll never get the chance now,” Charles said.

“But you didn’t tell me.”

“Is that what’s upsetting you?”

“You didn’t trust me enough to tell me.” I couldn’t believe we were getting stuck in the wrong topic… all to avoid the words I knew would be hurtful, words I actually had no clear reason for saying.

Here was Charles directly in front of me. Part of me — an energetic and substantial part — wanted to apologize to him, to take him to the tea garden and make love with him again. I would not allow that. I had reached my decision and I would follow through, no matter how painful for both of us.

“I have a lot of growing to do,” I said.

“So do I. We — ”

“But not together.”

His mouth went slack and his eyes half-lidded. He looked down, closed his mouth, and said, “All right.”

“We’re both too young. I’ve enjoyed our time together.”

“You invited me to meet your parents before telling me this? That’s hardly fair. You’ve wasted their time.”

“They like you as much as I do,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you in a place I was familiar with, because this isn’t easy for me to say. I do love you.”

“Um hm.” He wouldn’t look at me directly. He kept searching the walls as if for a way to escape. “You wanted me to tell you about future plans that might never have happened, to get you upset over something… probably impossible. And you’re disappointed.”

“No.” I thrust my jaw forward, pushing ahead despite the confusion, only now understanding the core of my response. “I’m telling you straight. Later, perhaps, when we’ve achieved something, when our minds are settled, when we know what we want to do — ”

“I’ve known that since I was a boy,” Charles said.

“Then you should have picked somebody more like you. I don’t know what I’m going to do, or where it’s going to take me.”

Charles nodded. “I pushed too hard,” he said.

“Damn it, stop that,” I said. “You sound like a…”

“What?”

“Never mind.” I just looked at him, eyes wide, trying to show the real affection I felt for him by the way my eyes tracked the points on his very fine face.

“You’re not happy, are you?” he asked.

“We can’t grow up in a couple of months,” I said.

He held up his hands. “I want to be with you, make love with you, reach out to you… watch you when you go to sleep.” I found that a particularly frightening picture: domestic coziness. Not what I imagined I needed at all. Youth is a time for adventure, for many changes, not for commitment and life spent on a fixed path. “You could teach me so much about politics and the way people work together. I need that. I think so far into the abstract I get lost. You could balance me.”

“I wonder if I’ll ever be ready for that,” I said. “It might be better if we stayed friends.”

“We must always be friends,” he said.

“Just friends, for now,” I added gently.

“Wise Casseia,” he said after a few seconds of silence. “I apologize for being so clumsy.”

“Not at all,” I said. “It’s charming, really.”

“Charming. Not convincing.”

“I don’t know what I want, Charles,” I said. “I have to find out for myself.”

“Do you believe in me?” he asked. “If you do, you’d know life with me will never be dull.”

I gave him a glance partly puzzled, partly irritated.

“I’m going to do important things. I don’t know how long it will take me, Casseia, but I have glimmers even now. Places where I can contribute. The work I do on my own — I don’t show it at the university — it’s pretty good stuff. Not seminal, not yet, but pretty good, and it’s only the warm-up.”

I saw now, for the first time, another side of Charles, and I did not like it. His face wrinkled into a determined frown.

“You don’t have to convince me you’re smart,” I said peevishly.

He took my shoulders, hands light but insistent. “It isn’t just being smart,” he said. “It’s as if I can see into the future. I’ll be doing really fine work, great work, and I sometimes think, whoever my partner is, she helps me do that work. I have to choose my partner, my friend, my lover, very carefully, because it isn’t going to be easy.”

I could have finished the conversation then with a handshake and a firm good-bye. I did not like this aspect of Charles. He was not half as smart as my father, I thought, yet he was full of himself, a raging egotist, full of such big ideas. “I have my own work to do,” I said, “I need to be more than just somebody’s partner, just a support for their work.”

“Of course,” he said, a little too quickly.

“I have to follow my own path, not just glue myself to someone and be dragged along,” I said.

“Oh, of course.” His face wrinkled again.

Charles, please don’t cry, damn it, I thought.

“There’s so much inside,” he said. “I feel so strongly. I can’t express myself adequately, and if I can’t do that, I certainly can’t convince you. But I’ve never met a woman like you.”

You haven’t met many women, I thought, not very kindly.

“Wherever you go, whatever we end up doing, I’ll be waiting for you,” he said.

I took his hand then, feeling this was an appropriate if not perfect way to get out of a tough situation. “I really feel strongly about you, Charles,” I said. “I’ll always care for you.”

“You don’t want to get married, something I can’t do now anyway, and you knew that… So you don’t want me to consider you a steady partner, or anything else, either. You don’t want to see me again.”

“I want the freedom to choose,” I said. “I don’t have that now.”

“I’m in your way.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Casseia, I have never been so embarrassed and ashamed.”

I stared at him without comprehending.

“You have a lot to learn about men.”

“Of course.”

“About people.”

“No doubt.”

“And you don’t want to learn it from me. What did I do to you to make this end so soon?”

“Nothing!” I cried. I wouldn’t be able to control myself much longer. It was agony to realize that after this, Charles would have to stay the night; there were no trains to the Kowloon depot at this hour. We would have to face each other in the morning, with my parents about.

“I would like to live alone, on my own, and make my own life and see what I’m capable of,” I said, half-mumbling. My eyes filled with tears and I lifted my head to keep them from spilling down my cheeks. “Don’t wait for me. That isn’t freedom.

He shook his head rapidly. “I did something wrong.”

“No!” I shouted.

We hadn’t left the memory room. I took his arm and led him to the warren hub, then opened the door to the tea garden tunnel. I pushed him through, teeth clenched.

The tea garden lay in a cylinder-shaped cell ten meters below the surface. Dense green bushes thrust from walls, ceiling, and floor toward a rippling sheet of portable sun. The leaves rustled in the circulating air. I held his arm and stopped at the south end of the cell.

“I’m the one who’s done something wrong,” I said. “It’s me, not you.”

“It felt so obvious. So true,” Charles said.

“Maybe it would have been, three years from now, or five. But we’ve missed the timing. Who knows what we’ll be doing then.”

Charles sat on a bench. I sat beside him, wiping my eyes quickly with a sleeve. Only a few years ago I had given up playing with dolls and burying myself in LitVids about girlhood in Terrie Victorian times. How could this have come so fast?

“On Earth,” Charles said, “they teach their kids all about sex and courtship and marriage.”

“We’re old-fashioned here,” I said.

“We make mistakes out of ignorance.”

“I’m ignorant, all right,” I said. Our voices had returned to a normal tone of conversation. We might hafe been discussing a tea competition. Martians dearly love their tea; I prefer pekoe. And you?

“I won’t apologize any more,” he said, and he took my hand. I squeezed his fingers. “I meant what I said. And I tell you now… whenever you’re ready, wherever we may be, I’ll be there for you. I won’t go away. I chose you, Casseia and I won’t be happy with anyone else. Until then, I’ll be a friend. I won’t expect anything from you.”

I wanted to jump up and scream, Charles, that is just so dumb, you don’t get what I’m saying… But I didn’t. Suddenly, I saw Charles very clearly as an arrow shot straight to the mark, with no time to lie or even to relax and play; a straight and honest man who would in fact be a wonderful and loving husband.

But not for me. My course could not follow his. I might never hit my mark, and I doubted our two marks would ever be the same.

I realized that I would miss him, and the pain became more intense than I could bear.

I left the tea garden. My father showed Charles the guest room.

After, Father came to my room. The door was sealed and I had turned the com off, but I heard his knock through the steel and foam. I let him in and he sat on the edge of my cot. “What is going on?” he asked.

I cried steadily and silently.

“Has he hurt you?”

“God, no,” I said.

“Have you hurt him?”

“Yes.”

Father shook his head and curled his lip before assuming a flat expression. “I won’t ask anything more. You’re my daughter. But I’m going to tell you something and you can take it for what it’s worth. Charles seems to be in love with you, and you’ve done something to attract that love…”

“Please,” I said.

“I took him to the guest room and he looked at me like a lost puppy.”

I turned away, heartsick.

“Did you invite him here to meet with us?”

“No.”

“He thought that was your reason.”

“No.”

“All right.” He lifted one knee and folded his hands on it, very masculine, very fatherly. “I’ve wondered for years what I would do if anybody hurt you — how I’d react when you started courting. You know how much I love you. Maybe I was naive, but I never gave much thought to the effect you might have on others. We’ve raised you well…”

“Please, Father.”

He took a deep breath. “I’m going to tell you something about your mother and me that you don’t know. Just think of it as fulfilling a duty to my sex. Women can hurt men terribly.”

“I know that.” I hated the whine in my voice.

“Hear me out. Some women think men are pretty hard characters and should get as good as they give. But I don’t approve of your carelessly hurting men, any more than I’d approve if Stan started hurting women.”

I shook my head helplessly. I just wanted to be alone.

“Family history. Take it for what it’s worth. Your mother spent a year choosing between me and another man. She said she loved us both and couldn’t make up her mind. I couldn’t stand the thought of sharing her, but I couldn’t let go, either. Eventually, she drifted away from the other man, and told me I was the one, but… it hurt a lot, and I’m still not over it, thirteen years later. I wish I could be gallant and understanding and forgiving, but I still can’t hear his name without cringing. Life isn’t simple for people like us. We’d like to think our lives are our own, but they’re not, Casseia. They’re not. I wish to God they were.”

I could not believe Father was telling me such things. I certainly did not want to hear them. Mother and Father had always been in absolute love, would always be in love; I was not the product of whims and unstable emotions, not the product of something so chaotic as what was happening between Charles and me.

For a few seconds I could hardly talk. “Please go,” I said, sobbing uncontrollably, and he did, with a muttered apology.

The next morning, after a breakfast that lasted forever, I accompanied Charles to Kowloon depot. We kissed almost as brother and sister, too much in pain to say anything. We held hands for a moment, staring at each other with self-conscious drama. Then Charles got on the train and I turned and ran.

The forces were building.

Klein asked for but did not receive guarantees of solidarity, and there was a split in the BM Charter Council. Earth and GEWA asked more Martian BMs to sign more stringent agreements favorable to Earth. There were more embargoes against bigger BMs, and some folded into each other, facing pernicious exhaustion of funds — bankruptcy. Even the largest unaffected BMs realized that the systems of independent families was headed for a breakdown; that solidarity in the face of outside pressure would soon not be a choice, but a necessity.

The first time around, my application for a syndic apprenticeship was turned down. I switched from Durrey back to UMS and resumed studies at the much-reduced govmanagement school. I applied for the apprenticeship again six months later, and was rejected again.

Bithras Majumdar, syndic of Majumdar BM and my third uncle, had been summoned to Earth in late 2172, M.Y. 53, to testify before the Senate of the United States of the Western Hemisphere . Bithras’s testimony could have been transmitted and saved us all a lot of money. Politicians and syndics seldom do much unrehearsed talking in public. But the arrogance of Earth was legendary.

GEWA — the Greater East-West Alliance — had emerged as the greatest economic and political power on Earth. Within GEWA, the United States had kept its position as first among equals. Still, it was generally accepted on Mars that GEWA was using the United States to express its strong disappointment with Mars’s lack of progress toward unification. Thus, the United States wanted to hold direct talks with, and take direct testimony from, an influential Martian.

It seemed in a perverse way all very romantic and adventurous; and if everybody had been practical, I probably would never have been offered the chance to go to Earth. Even the most dedicated red rabbit looked upon Earth with awe. Whatever our opinions of her heavy-handed politics, her feverish love of overwhelming technology, her smothering welter of biological experiment, her incredible worldliness, on Earth you could walk naked in the open air, and that was something we all wanted to try at least once.

So, having failed twice, I applied again, and this time, I believe — though she never confessed — that my mother pulled strings. My application went further than it had ever gone, my level of interviewing rose several ranks — and finally I was led to understand that I was being seriously considered.

The last time Charles and I saw each other, in that decade, was in 2173. While waiting for a decision on my application, I served a quarter as a Council page at Ulysses and worked in the office of Bette Irvine Sharpe, mediator for Greater Tharsis. Working for Sharpe was great experience; being given that job, my mother thought, was a sign of high BM favor.

I attended a barn dance held to raise funds for Tharsis Research University , newly established and already the bright spot for Martian theoretical science, as well as the center of Martian thinker research.

Charles was there, in the company of a young woman whose looks I did not approve of. We saw each other under the beribboned transparent dome erected for the occasion on a fallow rope field.

I wore a deliberately provocative gown, emphasizing what did not need emphasizing. Charles wore university drab, a green turtleneck and dark gray pants. Charles managed to separate from the clutches of his friend, and we faced each other over a table covered with fresh, newly-designed vegetables. He told me I looked wonderful. I complimented his clothes, not honestly; they were dreadful. He seemed calm, but I was nervous. I still felt guilt over what had happened between us; guilt, and something else. Being near him made me uncomfortable, but I still thought of him as a friend.

“I’ve applied for a syndic apprenticeship. I’d like to go to Earth,” I said. “There’s a good chance I’ll get it. I might go to Earth with my Uncle Bithras.”

Charles said he was pleased for me, but added glumly, “If you get it, you’ll be gone for two years. A Martian year.”

“It’ll flash,” I said.

He looked dubious. “I told you I’d always be willing to be your partner,” he said.

“You haven’t exactly been waiting,” I said, a sudden wash of anger and embarrassment coloring my face, sharpening my tone.

Charles was quicker on his feet now and more experienced with people. “You haven’t been very encouraging.”

“You never called,” I said.

He shook his head. “You were the one who said good-bye, remember? I have a few tatters of pride. If you changed your mind, I figured you would call me.”

“That’s pretty arrogant,” I said. “Relationships are mutual.”

He braced himself to say something he didn’t want to say and looked away. “Your world has grown too large for me. Waiting doesn’t seem practical.”

I just stared at him.

“You’ve matured, you’re becoming everything I knew you would be. I wish you all the best. I will love you always.”

He bowed, turned, and walked away, leaving me totally flustered. I had approached him as an old friend, and he had brought up this uncomfortable thing that I thought we had both left behind, just as I told him about what promised to be the greatest accomplishment of my young life. Such pure emotional blackmail deserved my deepest contempt.

I walked briskly across the tarp-covered field and palmed into a rest kiosk. There I stood by a gently flowing resink and stared into the single round mirror, angrily asking why I felt so terrible, so sad. “Good riddance,” I tried to convince myself.

I never disliked Charles, never found in him anything I did not admire. Yet even now, with a century of living between me and her, I can’t bring myself to call that young woman a fool.

I tell all this as trivial prelude to things neither Charles nor I could imagine. I look back now and see the relentless roll of events, building across the next seven Martian years to the greatest event in human history.

Trivial pain, trivial lives. The shiver of specks of dust ramping to the storm.