Moving Mars

Part Three

After a Martian year away from home, I returned to deep disappointment, the suspension of my apprenticeship, a furor at Majumdar, and Bithras’s resignation. The Majumdar suit against Mind Design Incorporated did indeed turn into a scandal, but it wasn’t enough to save my third uncle from disgrace. Mind Design passed blame to the Intra-Earth Computer Safety Bureau, which they said was responsible for injecting certain obscure safeguards into neural net designs. The suit dragged on for years and satisfied nobody, but it spurred fresh interest in Martian-grown thinkers.

Martian thinker designers — the best Mars had to offer at the time — claimed they could deactivate the evolvons. Mars would be safe from Terrie “eavesdropping.” Alice was soon cleansed and redeemed, and that pleased me. The concern faded. It shouldn’t have.

One benefit of the scandal was that we heard no more about Mars’s threat to Earth’s security. Indeed, a good many Terrie pressures on Mars subsided. But the scandal was not the sole reason. Earth for a time seemed content with a few stopgaps.

Cailetet broke from the Council and negotiated directly with Earth. We could draw our own conclusions. Stan, lawbonded and transferred to Jane’s BM, did not know what Cailetet had done, or what agreements had been reached — and I would not ask Charles, who ostensibly still worked for Cailetet. My letter to him requesting information still embarrassed me.

Father told me that Triple dollars smelling of Earth were flooding steadily into Cailetet, but not to the Olympians. Funding for the requested QL thinkers had never gone through.

Cailetet continued to refuse Majumdar BM’s offer to join the project. Cailetet revealed little, except to say that the Olympians had been working on improved communications; nothing terribly strategic. And they had failed, losing their funding.

My mother died in a pressure failure at Jiddah. Even now, writing that, I shrink; losing a parent is perhaps the most final declaration of lone responsibility. Losing my mother, however, was an uprooting, a tearing of all my connections.

My father’s grief, silent and private, consumed him like an inner flame. I could not have predicted this new man who inhabited my father’s body. I thought perhaps we would become closer, but that did not happen.

Visiting him was not easy. He saw my mother in me. My visits, those first few months, hurt too much for him to bear.

Like most Martians, he refused grief therapy and so did Stan and I. Our pain was tribute to the dead.

I had to make my own plans, find my own life, rebuild in the time left to my youth. I was thirteen Martian years old and could find only the most mundane employment at Majumdar, or work for my father at Ylla, which I did not want to do.

It was time to seek alliances elsewhere.

My vegetable love grew and blossomed in the Martian spring.

The best fossil finds on Mars had been discovered while I traveled to and from Earth. In the Lycus and Cyane Sulci, spread across a broad band north of the old shield volcano Olympus Mons, canyons twist and shove across a thousand kilometers like the imprint of a nest of huge and restless worms. The Mother Ecos once flourished here, surviving for tens of millions of years while the rest of Mars died.

One of the chief diggers was Kiqui Jordan-Erzul. He had an assistant named Ilya Rabinovitch.

I met Ilya at a BM Grange in Rubicon City , below Alba Patera. He had just finished excavating his twelfth mother cyst. I had heard of his work.

The Grange was uniquely Martian. Held at a different station in each district every quarter, Granges combined courting, dancing, lectures and presentations, and BM business in a holiday atmosphere. BMs could swap informal clues about Triple business, negotiate and strike deals without pressure, and prospect for new family members.

Ilya delivered a vivid report on his fossil finds at Cyane Sulci. Memories of my visit with Charles to the sites near Trés Haut Médoc drew me into conversation with Ilya after his talk.

He was small — a centimeter shorter than me — beautifully made, with dark and lively eyes and a quick refreshing smile. Physically, he reminded me of Sean Dickinson, but his personality could not have been more opposite. He loved dancing, and he loved talking publicly and privately about ancient Mars. During a lull between an exhausting series of Patera reels, he sat with me in a tea lounge under a projected night sky and described the Mother Ecos in loving detail, pouring intimate descriptions of the ancient landscape into my sympathetic ear, as if he had lived in those times.

“To dig is to marry Mars,” he said, expecting either a blank stare or a move to another part of the lounge. Instead, I asked him to tell me more.

After the dances, we spent a few hours walking alone around a well-head reservoir. With little warning other than a slow approach and a warning smile, he kissed me and told me he had an irrational attraction. I had heard similar lines before, but coming from Ilya, the technique seemed fresh.

“Oh,” I said, noncommittal, but smiling encouragement.

“I’ve known you for a long time,” he said. Then he winced and glanced at me with his head turned half aside. “Does that sound stupid?”

“Maybe we were Martians once,” I suggested lightly. I’ve always been intrigued by the beginning of a courtship, curiously detached and relaxed, wondering how far the mating dance could possibly go. I had given my signals; I was receptive, and the work was now up to him. “Maybe we knew each other a billion years ago.”

He laughed, drew back, and stretched, and we listened to the liquid tones of falling and circulating waters. Arbeiters ignored us, rolling along their ramps checking flow and purity. Ilya seemed as relaxed as I was, immensely self-assured without appearing arrogant.

“You went to Earth a couple of years ago, didn’t you?”

“Just over a year ago,” I said.

“Earth years, I meant.”

He was involved with fossils; he used Earth years instead of Martian. I wryly considered that history might be repeating itself. “Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“Intense,” I said.

“I’d love to be involved in an Earth dig. They’re still finding major fossils in China and Australia .”

“I don’t think I’ll go back for a while,” I said.

“You didn’t enjoy yourself, did you?”

“Parts of it were lovely,” I said.

“Disappointed in love?” he asked. I laughed. His smile thinned; like most men, he didn’t enjoy being laughed at.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Disappointed by politics.”

His smile returned. “Babe in the woods?”

“Embryo in the savage jungle,” I said ruefully.

The next day, the third day of the Grange, we met again, gravitating with delicious half-conscious intent. He bought me lunch and we walked through glass tubes on the Up, looking across Rubicon Valley . He prodded gently, asking more questions.

For the first time, with a persistent ache that had me close to tears — tears of old pain and relief at finally speaking — I told someone in detail how I personally felt about Earth and what had happened there. I told about feeling betrayed and ignorant and powerless, about Earth’s overwhelming culture.

We finished our lunch and checked into a private space, nothing said, nothing suggested; Ilya led me. I talked some more, and then I leaned on him and he put an arm around my shoulders.

“They treated you pretty shabbily,” he said. “You deserve better.”

Of course, that was what I wanted to hear; but he meant it with utmost sincerity. And gauging what I was prepared for, and not prepared for, he did not press his suit too strongly.

I had rented guest lodgings at Rubicon City for the duration of the Grange. He suggested I stay afterward with his family, Erzul BM, at Olympus Station. I didn’t have time — I had planned to leave early and get back to Jiddah to work on a Majumdar project report. But I promised we’d get together soon.

I wasn’t about to let this relationship lapse. My feelings toward Ilya began simply and directly. He was the sweetest, most intuitive, and most straightforward man I had ever met. I wanted to continue talking with him for hours, days, months, and much longer. Making love seemed a natural extension of talking things through; lying naked together, warmed by our exertion, limbs casually locked, giggling at jokes, aghast at the state of the BMs and the Council that bowed low before Earth…

When I was with him, I felt an extraordinary peace and wholeness. Here was someone who could help me sort things out. Here was a partner.

Erzul’s Olympus Station felt very different from Ylla, or any other station I had visited on Mars. Erzul BM had begun in 2130 as a joint venture between poor American Hispanic, Hispaniolan, and Asian families on Earth. Trying to finance passage to Mars, they had eventually drawn in Polynesians and Filipinos. When they arrived on Mars, they occupied a ready-built trench dome in the western shadow of the Olympus Rupes. Within five Martian years, they had established liaisons with seven other BMs, including the ethnic-Russian Rabinovitch. Erzul had quickly prospered.

A small, prosperous mining and soil engineering BM, respected and unaligned, Erzul had kept all of its contracts on Mars. Now, with ninety mining claims in four districts, they were still small, but efficient and well-regarded, known for their trustworthiness and friendly dealings.

When I arrived at Olympus Station, I checked in to a guest room — Ilya gave me this much freedom, a way out if I didn’t get along with his family — and toured the BM museum, a boring collection of old drilling and digging equipment enlivened by large murals of Polynesian and Hispaniolan myth. He left me before a portrait of Pele, Little Mother of Volcanoes, a passionate and bitchy-looking female of considerable beauty, and returned a few minutes later. A formidable woman accompanied him, taller than Ilya and twice as broad.

“Casseia, I’d like you to meet our syndic, Ti Sandra.”

Ti Sandra looked me over with a little frown, lower lip poked out. An impressively large woman, two meters high and big-boned, with an enormous smile, deep-set warm eyes and a soft-spoken alto voice, Ti Sandra Erzul carried herself with stately bearing. Very dark, thick black hair in a halo around her head, a firmly friendly face with prominent and assertive features, she might have been a warrior queen in a fantasy sim… But her easy manner, her girlish pride in bright clothes, dissipated whatever threat her physical presence might have implied. “Are you a banker?” she asked.

I laughed. “No,” I said.

“Good. I don’t think Ilya would get along with a banker. He’d always be asking for research money.” She smiled sunnily, her deep warm eyes crinkling almost shut, and pulled a loop of flowers from a bag Ilya carried. She spread her large, strong arms wide and said, “You are always welcome. You have such a lovely name, and Ilya is a good judge. He is like my son, except that we are not too far apart in age — five years, you know!”

We ate a huge dinner in the syndic’s quarters that evening, joined by twenty family members, and I met Ti Sandra’s husband, Paul Crossley, a quiet, thoughtful man ten years older than Ti Sandra. Paul stood no taller than Ilya. Ti Sandra towered over her husband, but only in size. They flirted like newlyweds.

The gathering’s lively informality charmed me. They chatted in Spanish, French, Creole, Russian, Tagalog, Hawaiian, and for my benefit, English. Their curiosity about me was boundless.

“Why don’t you speak Hindi?” Kiqui Jordan-Erzul asked.

“I never learned,” I said. “My family speaks English…”

“All of them?”

“Some of the older members speak other languages. My mother and father spoke only English when I was young.”

“English is a cramped language. You should speak Creole. All music.”

“Not much good for science,” Ilya said. “Russian’s best for science.”

Kiqui snorted. Another “digger,” Oleg Schovinski, said he thought German might be best for science.

“German!” Kiqui snorted again. “Good for metaphysics. Not the best for science.”

“What kind of tea do you brew in Ylla?” asked Kiqui’s wife, Therese.

Ti Sandra was much loved in Erzul. Young and old looked on her as matriarch, even though she was less than twenty Martian years old. After dinner, she carried a huge bowl of fresh fruit around the table, offering everybody dessert, then stood before the group. “All right now, all of you put down your beers and listen.”

“Lawbond! Lawbond!” several chanted.

“You be quiet. You have no manners. I am pleased to bring you a friend of Ilya’s. You’ve talked with her, impressed her with our savoir-faire, and she’s impressed me, and I’m very pleased to say that she is going to marry our little digger-after-useless-things.”

Ilya’s face reddened with embarrassment.

Ti Sandra held up her hands above the raucous cheering. “She’s from Majumdar but she isn’t a banker, so you be good to her and don’t ask for more loans.”

More cheers.

“Her name is Casseia. Stand up, Cassie.” I stood and it was my turn to blush. The cheers nearly brought down the insulation.

Kiqui toasted our health and asked if I was interested in fossils.

“I love them,” I said, and that was true; I loved them because of their connection to Ilya.

“That’s good, because Ilya’s the only man I know who gets depressed when he hasn’t dug for a week,” Kiqui said. “He’s my kind of assistant.”

“She hasn’t decided what arrangements to make, but we’ll be happy either way,” Ti Sandra said.

“We’ve decided, actually,” Ilya said.

“What?” the crowd asked as one.

“I’ve offered to transfer to Majumdar,” Ilya said.

“Very good,” Ti Sandra said, but her expression betrayed her.

“But Casseia tells me she’s ready for a change. She’s transferring to Erzul.”

“If you’ll have me,” I added.

More cheers. Ti Sandra embraced me again. A hug from her was like being folded in the arms of a large, soft tree with a core of iron. “Another daughter,” she said. ‘That’s lovely!“

They crowded around Ilya and me, offering congratulations. Aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, all offered bits of advice and stories about Ilya. Ilya’s face got redder and redder as the stories piled one on top of another. “Please!” he protested. “We haven’t signed any papers yet… Don’t scare her off!”

After dessert, we squatted in a circle around a large rotating table and sampled a variety of drinks and liqueurs. They drank more than any Martians I had met, yet kept their dignity and intelligence at all times.

Ti Sandra took me aside toward the end of the evening, saying she wanted to show me her prize tropical garden. The garden was beautiful, but she did not spend much time with the tour.

“I know a little about you, Casseia. What I’ve heard impressed the hell out of me. We may not look it, but we’re an ambitious little family, you know that?”

“Ilya’s given me some hints.”

“Some of us have been studying the Charter and thinking things through. You’ve had a lot of experience in politics…”

“Not that much. Government and management… from the point of view of one BM.”

“Yes, but you’ve been to Earth. We have a unique opportunity in this BM. Nobody hates us. We go everywhere, meet everybody, we’re friendly… A lot of trust. We think we might have something to offer Mars.”

“I’m sure you do,” I said.

“Shall we talk more later?” Her eyes twinkled, but her face was stern, an expression I would come to know very well in the months ahead. Ti Sandra had bigger plans — and more talents — than I could possibly have imagined then.

Ilya and I honeymooned at Cyane Sulci, a few hundred kilometers east of Lycus Sulci. For transportation, we used Professor Jordan-ErzuFs portable lab, a ten-meter-long cylinder that rolled on seven huge spring-steel tires. The interior was cramped and dusty, with two pull-down cots, rudimentary nano kitchen producing pasty recycled food, sponge-baths only. The air smelled of sizzle and flopsand and we sneezed all the time. I have never been happier or more at ease in my life.

We followed no schedule. I spent dozens of hours in a pressure suit, accompanying my husband across the lava ridges to deep gorges where mother cysts might be found.

Diversity had never completely separated life on Mars; co-genotypic bauplans, creatures having different forms but a common progenitor, had been the rule. On Earth, such manifestations had been limited to different stages of growth in individual animals — caterpillar to butterfly, for example. On Mars, a single reproductive organism, depending on the circumstances, could generate offspring with a wide variety of shapes and functions. Those forms which did not survive, did not return to “check in” with the reproductive organism and were not replicated in the next breeding cycle. New forms could be created from a morphological grab-bag, following rules we could only guess at. The reproducers themselves closed up and died after a few thousand years, laying eggs or cysts — some of which had been fossilized.

The mothers had been the greatest triumph of this strategy. A single mother cyst, blessed with proper conditions, could “bloom” and produce well over ten thousand different varieties of offspring, plant-like and animal-like forms together, designed to interact as an ecos. These would spread across millions of hectares, surviving for thousands of years before running through their carefully marshaled resources. The ecos would shrink, wither, and die; new cysts would be laid, and the waiting would begin again.

Across the ages, the Martian springtimes of flash floods and heavier atmosphere from evaporating carbon dioxide came farther apart, and finally stopped, and the cysts ceased blooming. Mars finally died.

Fossil mother cysts were most often buried a few meters below the lip of a gorge, revealed by landslides. Typically, remains of the mother’s sons and daughters — delicate spongy calcareous bones and shells, even membranes tanned by exposure to ultraviolet before being buried — would lie in compacted layers around the cysts, clueing us to their locations with a darker stain in the soil.

Months before we met, Ilya and Kiqui discovered that the last bloom of a mother ecos had occurred, not five hundred million Earth years past, but a mere quarter billion. The puzzle remained, however: no organic molecules could remain viable across the tens of thousands of years that the cysts had typically lay buried between blooms.

We parked the lab at the end of a finger of comparatively smooth terrain. A few dozen meters beyond our parking place on the finger lay hundreds upon thousands of labyrinthine cracks and arroyos: the sulci. Fifty meters away, within a particularly productive shallow arroyo, stood a specimen storage shed of corrugated metal sheeting draped with plastic tarps.

Hours after we arrived, Ilya introduced me to a cracked cyst in the shed. “Casseia, meet mother,” he said. “Mother, this is Casseia. Mother isn’t feeling well today.” Two meters wide, it lay in a steel cradle in the unpressurized building. He let me run my gloved hands along its dark rocky exterior. As he shined a torch to cast out the gloom, I reached into the interior and felt with gloved fingers the tortuous, sparkling folds of silicate, the embedded parallel lines of zinc clays.

‘These were the last,“ he said. ”The Omega.“

Nobody knew how cysts bloomed. Nobody knew the significance of this purely inorganic structure. The generally accepted theory was that the cysts once contained soft reproductive organs, but no remains of such organs had been found.

I studied the cyst’s interior closely, vainly hoping to see some clue the scientists might have missed. “You’ve found offspring around open cysts — and mothers themselves — but no actual connections between.”

“All we’ve found have been late Omega hatchings,” Ilya said. “They died before their ecos could reach maturity. The remains were close enough to convince.”

I listened to the sound of my own breathing for a moment, the gentle sighs, of the cycler. “Have you ever dug an aqueduct bridge?”

“When I was a student,” Ilya said. “Beautiful things.”

We left the shed and stood under the comparatively clear sky. I was almost used to being Up. The surface of my world was becoming familiar; however hostile, it touched me deeply, its past and present. I had been seeing it through Ilya’s eyes, and Ilya did not judge Mars by any standards but its own.

“Which part of Earth would you like to visit?” I asked.

“The deserts,” he said.

“Not the rain forests?”

He grinned behind his face plate. “Better fossils in dry places.”

We climbed into the lab, destatted and sucked off our dust, and ate soup in the cramped kitchen. We had barely finished our cups when a shrill alarm came from our slates and the lab’s com.

Emergency displays automatically flickered before us. The distinctive masculine voice of Security Mars spoke. “A cyclonic low-pressure system in Arcadia Planitia has produced a force ten pressure surge moving southwest at eight-hundred and thirty kiphs. All stations and teams between Alba Patera in the north and Gordii Dorsum in the south are advised to take emergency precautions.” Graphs of the surge and a low-orbit satellite picture appeared, superimposed on a projected map. The surge resembled a thin curving smudge of charcoal drawn over the terrain. Its numbers were impressive: two thousand kilometers long, following a great-circle contour, absolutely clear atmosphere ahead and murk behind, with a dark pressure curl along its central axis. The surge had already reached a pressure of one third of a bar — almost fifty times normal.

First seen in the twentieth in early Viking photographs, surges were the worst Mars had to offer. Induced by supersonic shock-waves, the high-pressure curls were unique to Mars, with its thin atmosphere, cold days, and even colder nights. Here, the borders between night and day could become weather fronts in themselves. There were no oceans, as on Earth, to liberate heat slowly and mediate between ground and sky… At nightfall, the ground cooled quickly, and the thin air above the ground descended dramatically, only to warm and rise rapidly at daybreak. Most of the time, the worst weather patterns Mars could muster were the thin, high-wind-speed storms familiar to all. These spread across basins and plains, covering everything with dust but producing only slight changes in barometric pressure.

Under the right conditions, however, and in the proper terrain — crossing the plains of the northern lowlands, in mid-morning or late evening — winds generated by the terminator could exceed the speed of sound, compressing the air to as much as a hundred times its normal pressure of four to seven millibars. Passing from the plains to rough terrain, the shock-wave could be given a deft horizontal spin, producing a super-dense rolling curl that picked up huge volumes of fine clay, and sand, and at peak, even pebbles and rocks.

Ilya and I immediately suited and set to work lowering the mobile lab and shooting anchors deep into the soil and rock beneath. We slung cables over the lab from anchor to anchor, then pulled folded plastic foils from the boot in the lab’s round stern, stretching them from the ground and fastening them to the lab’s sides to make a wind ramp. The foil stiffened quickly into the proper shape. It would also function as a shield against debris.

“We’ve got about ten minutes,” I said. We both looked into the arroyo at the slab-sided shed with its precious specimens, a tin shanty that would love to fly.

“There’s a spare tarp and foil,” Ilya said. “We can rig it in six minutes — or we can get inside.”

“Rig it,” I said. He grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

We worked quickly. Surges could be terribly destructive even to a buried station if it was unprepared. The center of a surge’s curl could compress to as much as half a bar, a rolling-pin of tight-packed air moving at well over eight hundred kiphs; and the farther a surge rolled, the tighter it packed, until it blew itself out against a volcano or plateau and spread dust and cyclones over half of Mars.

We stiffened the shed’s foil and kicked the tarp pegs. All was firm. We ran for the lab and sealed the flap behind us. A little excavator clambered up from a fresh-dug trench under the lab’s cylindrical body and fastened itself to its receptacle in the bottom of the lab. We crawled into the trench and spread our personnel foils. The foils undulated, stiffened, and glued themselves to the edges of the trench.

Ilya switched on a torch and shined it in our faces. We lay in the coffin-shaped ditch, with two layers of foil and the ponderous mobile lab over our heads, hands tight-clenched.

Outside: a horrid empty silence. Even the rock was quiet; the surge was still dozens of kilometers away. Ilya removed his slate from his utility belt and instructed the mobile lab’s roof camera to show us what was happening. To the northwest, all was dark gray shot through with streaks of brown.

“Are we cozy?” he asked. Our helmet radios whined faintly, we lay so close together.

“Snug as bunnies in a pot,” I said, teeth clenched.

“I’m sorry I got you into this, Casseia…”

I couldn’t clamp my hand over his mouth, but I made the gesture against his helmet anyway. “Shh,” I said. “Tell me a story.”

Ilya excelled at making up fairy tales on the spur of the moment. “Now?” he asked.

“Please.”

“Long ago,” he began, voice husky, “and long after now, two rabbits dug a hole in the farmer’s garden and ate through all of his water lines…”

I closed my eyes, listening.

Our helmets pressed against the rocks and each other. Before Ilya had finished the story, I laid my hand against the bottom of the ditch, palm flat to pick up vibrations. The line of dust and compressed atmosphere to the west stretched inky-black and very close. It began to obscure the horizon. Only seconds now…

All around, through the rocks, we heard a low grumbling, then a distinct, rhythmic pounding. “There it is,” I said. “Plains buffalo.” We had all seen Terrie Westerns.

Ilya placed his hand over mine. “Freight trains,” he said. “Hundreds of them.”

I began to shiver. “Have you been through one of these?” I asked.

“When I was a kid,” he said. “In a station.”

“Anybody hurt?”

He shook his head. “Small one. Only a quarter of a bar. Made a lot of noise when it went over.”

“What does it sound like when it goes over?”

He was about to tell me when I heard for myself. The sound started out ghostly — the sibilant patient whine of a strong Martian wind, audible through our helmets even in the trench, backed by the staccato of pebbles and dust striking against the foils and tarps. The blackness seemed to leap over the land.

I felt pressure in my ears, thin fingers pushing into my head. I opened my eyes to slits — my eyelids had pressed themselves tight shut instinctively — to see Ilya. He lay on his back, shoulder wedged against the side of the trench, staring up, eyes searching.

“This is going to be a bad one,” he said. “I’ll finish the story later, okay?”

“Okay. But don’t forget.” I shut my eyes again.

For a moment, the surge sounded like huge drums. A thin shriek descended into a monstrous, horrifying bellow. I thought of a ravening god marching over the land, Mars itself, god of war, furious and implacable, searching for things that might be frightened, things that might die.

The pressure suit loosened around me, then clung tight to my skin. A sharp pain in my ears made me screw up my face and groan. The torch fell between us. Ilya grabbed it again, shined it on his face, shook his head, face slick with tears, and held me tightly. I could feel his heart through the suits.

The vibration of the trench walls stopped. We lay for a moment, waiting for it to begin again. I started to get up, pushing against the tarp, frantic to see daylight — but Ilya grabbed my shoulder and pressed me down. I could not hear very well. The torch illuminated his face; he was trying to mouth words to me. Somehow I understood through my fear — rocks and dust would be falling outside. We might be killed by rocks falling from thousands of meters in the wake of the surge, striking at eighty or ninety meters per second. I pressed myself against him, mind racing, grimacing at the pain.

Time passed very slowly. My fear turned to numbness, and the numbness faded into relief. We were not going to die. The worst of the surge had passed over and we were still in the trench — but a new fear hit me, and I had to fight myself to keep from clawing out of Ilya’s embrace. We could be buried under a fresh dune — tons of dust and sand, dozens of meters high. We would never dig out. Our oxygen would be depleted and we would suffocate, this trench would become just what it seemed, a grave… I began to squirm, breath harsh and short, and Ilya struggled to keep his arms around me. “Let me go!” I shouted.

Suddenly, I flinched and stopped thrashing. A light had hit me in the face, not our torch. The lab’s arbeiters were ripping away the foils and tarps, searching for us.

The chief arbeiter appeared on the edge of our trench. A jointed arm had been wrenched loose and the machine was covered with dents and red smears — rock impacts. It had weathered the storm outside, tending the edges of the foil until the last moment. It must have been blown around like a small can.

Ilya pulled me up out of the ditch in deathly silence. The mobile lab was still intact above us; we might be able to get to a station on our own.

We brushed each other down, more for the reassurance of physical contact than any other reason. I felt light-headed, giddy with still being alive. We walked beneath the main foil and tarps, inspecting the lab, then emerged to stand in the open.

The foil on the specimen shed had failed. It was nowhere to be seen.

The sky from horizon to horizon glowered charcoal-gray, almost black. Dust fell in thick snaking curtains, great sheets unrolling, drifting, hiding. We gathered the arbeiters beneath the lab and climbed the steps into the airlock, quickly sucking the gray dust from our suits, then stripped.

Ilya insisted I lie on the narrow fold-down cot. He lay on his cot across from me, then got up and pushed in close beside me. We shivered like frightened children.

We slept for an hour. When we awoke, I felt ecstatic as if from drinking far too much high-powered tea. Everything seemed sharply defined and highly colored. Even the dust in the lab interior smelled sweet and essential. The pain in my ears had subsided to a dull throb. I could still hear, but just barely.

Ilya showed me the lab’s weather record. The surge had topped at two bars.

“That’s impossible,” I said.

He shook his head and smiled, tapping his own ears with a finger. Then he wrote on his slate, “Compressible fluids — a lot to learn.” He added with a rueful grimace, “Some honeymoon. I love you!”

With little ceremony, and not much in the way of clothing left to remove, we celebrated still being alive.

We checked in with the satcoms to tell everybody we had survived and could take care of ourselves. Resources were strained from Arcadia to Mariner Valley — the surge had sheared into three parts crossing the Tharsis volcanoes, and twenty-three stations had been hit by the three-headed monster. There were casualties — seven dead, hundreds injured. Even UMS had suffered damage.

Ilya and I inspected the lab from outside, elevating the tires again and cutting the tie-downs. The foils and tarps had protected it against most of the boulders flung by the surge. Minor damage could be fixed by patches.

We decided to collect what specimens we could from the shed’s remains and drive the lab back to Olympus Station. Replacing our suit tanks and purifiers, we walked west from the lab several dozen meters.

Ilya was somber. My tinnitus had passed but hearing was still difficult — his voice in my com was a barely understandable buzz. “Looks as if we’ve lost the cyst,” he said. The shed itself was nowhere to be found — it might have blown clear to Tharsis by now. But it would undoubtedly have spilled its heavy contents.

I looked up through the thinning curtains of dust. The sky peeking through the gray seemed greenish. I had never seen that color before. I pointed it out to Ilya. He frowned, looked back at the lab, then set his jaw and said we should keep searching.

The air temperature hovered just above zero. It should have been thirty or forty below at this latitude, at this time of the year.

My ecstasy was fading rapidly. “Please,” I muttered. “Enough. I’m not an adventurous woman.”

“What?” Ilya asked.

“It’s hot out here and I don’t know what that means.”

“Neither do I,” Ilya said. “But I don’t think it’s dangerous. There haven’t been any more warnings.”

“Maybe something local is brewing,” I said. “Everyone knows weird weather lives in the sulci.”

He vaulted across a wind-exposed boulder and picked up a pale brown cylindrical rock. “One of our core specimens. Maybe the shed dumped its load here.”

“I think we should go back.”

Ilya stood and frowned deeply, caught between wanting to please me and a powerful need to find something, anything, of the broken cyst and the other specimens. Suddenly, I regretted being such a coward. “But let’s look a little longer.”

“Just a few more minutes,” he agreed. I followed him to the edge of a canyon. A hundred meters below, fine dust drifted like a river through the canyon bottom. Gray dust mixed with, swirls of ochre and red, immiscible fluids, Jovian; I had never seen anything like it. Ilya kneeled and I squatted beside him.

“If they fell down there — ” he said, and shook his head. Our suits were covered with clinging gray dust; the suck and destat in the lab might not be able to remove enough to keep it from getting into the recycling systems, into our skin. I imagined smear rashes itching all night long.

Something fogged the outside of my face-plate. I reached up to wipe it. A muddy streak formed under my touch. I swore and removed a static rag from my waist pack. The rag did not work. I could hardly see.

“The dust is wet,” I said.

“Can’t be. There’s not enough pressure,” Ilya said. He looked at my suit and streaked the muck on my arm with one finger, then examined the finger. “You’re right. You’re wet. Am I?”

His face plate had fogged as well. I touched his helmet. “Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus. Just a few more minutes,” he pleaded. Over the canyon, afternoon sun broke through clouds of dust. Green-tinted rays swept across the rugged furrows of the sulci, casting the landscape in a ghoulish light interrupted by deep shadows.

We backed away from the rubble at the edge of the canyon. Ilya kicked wind-exposed rocks aside and slogged through drifts of familiar red smear and the superfine gray dust. There was no sizzle anywhere. It had been mixed with unradiated clays and flopsand. Years might pass before ultraviolet could convert the surface to crackly sizzle again.

“The surge must have uncovered an ice aquifer nearby. Pebble saltation blasted it,” Ilya said. “This gray stuff must be ice dust, and down here, it’s just warm enough to melt — ”

He stopped and gave out a groan. “Up there,” he said, pointing to the top of a low ridge. A jagged lump of rock about a meter wide presented a flash of crystal in the broken rays of afternoon sun. We climbed.

I looked back over my shoulder at the lab, half a kilometer away. My back muscles tensed with a red rabbit’s instinct to run and hide. The surge was gone, but wet dust was completely outside my experience. We might sink into a depression and drown. I had no idea how our filters and seals would function in water.

Ilya reached the top of the ridge first. He knelt before the exposed lump of rock. “Is it the cyst?” I asked.

He did not answer. I stood behind him and peered at the shiny exposed face. It was indeed part of a cyst — very likely the cyst that had tumbled from the shed. It lay half-buried in a hole filled with gray dust. The intricate patterns of quartz and embedded zinc clays seemed less distinct, blurred; I thought it might be the weird light. But where the fragment of cyst met the pool of dust, a thick gelatinous layer spilled and churned.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Something in suspension,” Ilya suggested. He reached out to touch the gelatinous material. It clung to his glove.

“Snail spit,” I said.

“Genuine grade-A slime,” Ilya agreed, lifting his glove.

“Why doesn’t it dry out?” I asked.

He looked at me, forehead pale, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. I could hear his rapid breathing over the com. “There’s water all around. The gray dust is ice and clays, and the clays are keeping the ice from sublimating. But the temperature is high enough that the ice melts, and the cyst can get at the moisture. It’s the right mix. It has what it wants.”

The slime grew thicker as we watched. Within, white streaks formed little lacework doilies.

“How much do you think this masses?” he asked, measuring the fragment with his arms.

“Maybe a quarter ton,” I said.

“We couldn’t carry it far. The lab might roll close enough, we could get the strongest arbeiter up here…”

I removed my slate and set it for visual record.

“Good thinking,” Ilya said. He put a sample of the slime into a vial, capturing parts of the lacework as well.

“Do you think it’s — ” I began to ask.

“Don’t even say it,” he warned. “Whatever it is, it’s a tricking wonder.” He sounded like a little boy with a new toy.

I looked up at the curtains of gray, the sun dazzling through the clouds. This was as close as Mars could get to rain.

“It’s just a fragment,” Ilya said, trying to rock the piece of cyst in its cradle of pebbles and dust. “What can a fragment make? The whole ecos?”

He passed me the vial. As he took more samples, I stared at the lacework within the captured fluid. It measured no more than two centimeters across, as fine as gossamer. I had no idea what it was — a bit of cellular skeleton, a template for cytoplasm, a seed, an egg, a tiny little baby.

Perhaps a Martian.

Within two days of returning to Olympus Station, we were famous. Journals on LitVid and ex nets across the Triple lauded us for making an epochal discovery — the first viable, non-Terrestrial life discovered in our Solar System. That we had made the discovery on our honeymoon only threw petrol on the celebrity fires.

The discovery was more than a little embarrassing to the Martian science community. Ilya was a fossil hunter and areologist, a digger, hardly trained in biochemistry at all; there was considerable resentment, even skepticism, at first — that we should have been in the right place, at the right time, to witness a cyst bloom…

We spent much of the next two weeks accepting or dodging interviews. Messages flooded in: offers of vast fortunes for a whole cyst (Ilya did not personally own any of the cysts he had found — they belonged to Erzul, of course); requests for information from schoolchildren; offers to turn our story into LitVids and sims.

No one in the general public seemed to care that the plasm from the cyst died before we got it back to Olympus . The “Martian” degenerated in a few hours to simple proteins and monosaccharides, remarkable enough coming from clay and quartz and mineralrrich water, but hardly the stuff of romance.

We had demonstrated two things, however. The cysts might still be viable, and the genetic information for a Martian ecos was contained in the mineral formations within the cyst, locked in the minute intricacies of clay and quartz. There had probably never been extra organs to help ecos reproduction.

But cyst fragments could not reproduce even a portion of an ecos. Whole cysts were necessary.

Biologists could understand some of the process — but not all of it. The trick to reproduction was still elusive. Whole cysts simply did not respond to being doused in water. There was some combination of water, water-soluble minerals, and temperature that triggered the cysts, and the combination had existed in Cyane Sulci, but no attempt to duplicate those conditions in a lab worked.

Back in the sulci, the gray ice dust had long since broken down and soaked into the soil or evaporated; the snake-canyoned landscape offered no immediate clues. The moment had passed, and no cyst, buried or dug up, had germinated successfully.

Perhaps their time was over, after all.

I received a message from Charles.

My reply — brief and polite — went unanswered. I was frankly too busy to worry. My new life held many more satisfactions than my old, chief among them Ilya, who handled the brief nova of our celebrity with high wit. He was not self-impressed.

He answered mail to schoolchildren before he replied to scientists. I helped him frame the replies.

The celebrity glow faded. We declined the sims and LitVid project offers, knowing few if any would have come to fruition, and we did not need the money. Erzul BM was doing well and I was being drawn back into management, and there would soon be little enough time for us to be together.

Being close to death had triggered something deep in me. It took me weeks to sort it out. I was subjected to a string of nightmares — dreams of choking, or ecstatic flight reduced to terror as I plunged into the red soil and smothered… I sometimes woke beside Ilya, tangled in bedclothes, wondering if I would need some sort of therapy. But fear of our close call was not the cause of my nightmares.

I told myself I simply wanted to work at a job that kept me near Ilya and let me live the emotionally rich life of a lawbonded woman, and stay out of the LitVid glare wherever possible (something we had certainly failed at). Looking back, however, I see clearly that my surface wishes and my deep needs did not coincide. The lull after our crisis on Earth was just that — not a permanent state of affairs, but a respite, and no one could know how long it would last. If Mars was going to stand up against Mother Earth, no capable Martian could step aside and live a disengaged private life.

Ti Sandra kept hinting of larger plans.

I had learned on Earth that I had some small ability in politics; my nightmares were caused by the growing in me of a sense of responsibility. That new sense was, certainly nurtured by Ti Sandra, but it was not planted by her.

Ilya would have been happy to have me share his trips and researches for the rest of our days, but I had already resisted…

Not that Ilya himself bored me. I loved him so much I was sometimes afraid. How would I live if I should lose him? I thought of my father after my mother’s death, half his life drained, of his long quiet lapses into reverie when Stan and Stan’s wife Jane and I visited, and his conversations always leading back to Mother…

There were hideous risks in love, but Ilya did not feel them. He focused so intently on his work that a long tractor ride through untraveled territory to reach a possible ancient aquifer (and, coincidentally, fossil site) caused him not a femto of personal worry. To be left alone, helping manage the Erzul businesses, while he went on such trips was more than I could stand. So more and more I distracted myself by taking consulting jobs away from Olympus Station, meeting with syndics and managers from other BMs, trading vague probes of intent with regard to the future shape of Martian economics and politics. Once again, members of the Council were trying to get the syndics to talk about unification. The air was rich with speculation.

Ilya did not worry about me when I was gone. When I accused him of not caring, he told me, “I enjoy your absences!” and when I pouted melodramatically, he said, “Because our reunions ars so fierce.”

And they were.

Legend surrounds many of these people now, but of all of them, Ti Sandra seemed most suited to be legendary, even then.

I saw her frequently in meetings held to vet the family business deals. We worked together well, and her husband Paul, Ilya, and I often dined together. Paul and Ilya could spend hours speculating about ancient Mars, Paul making wild and unfounded assertions — -intelligent life, legends of buried pyramids, underground cities — and Ilya laughingly following a middle course.

Ti Sandra and I talked of a new Mars.

Ti Sandra promoted me to be her assistant — a move which made me very nervous — and then appointed me as ambassador for Erzul to the five largest BMs.

“You’re famous,” she told me over strong jasmine tea in her office at Olympus Station. “You stand for something special about Mars, something our own that we all have in common. You’re well connected, from Majumdar, with close relatives transferred to Cailetet.” She was referring to Stan. “You have management arid political skills. You’ve been to Earth — I never have.”

“It was a disaster,” I reminded her.

“It was a step in a long process,” she rejoined. She spoke precisely, carefully considering her words, keeping direct eye contact. She had never been so serious before. “You seem happily married.”

“Very,” I said.

“And you seem to be able to spend some time apart from Ilya… working separately.”

“I miss him,” I said.

“I will be frank,” Ti Sandra said. “Because of your fame, you can help me… and help Erzul. You might have noticed I am an ambitious woman.”

I laughed. “You might have noticed I’m not,” I said.

“You are very capable. And you do not always know yourself. There is a person inside you who wants out, and who wants to do things that are important. But the right occasion, the proper colleagues, have eluded you… have they not?”

I looked away, nervous at being so analyzed.

“I’ve read the reports from Majumdar about the trip to Earth. You did well. Bithras did not do so badly — but he had his weaknesses, and he stumbled, and that was all it took. If Earth had wanted to make an agreement with him, they would have regardless. So don’t chastise yourself about what happened there.”

“I stopped doing that a long time ago,” I said.

Ti Sandra nodded. “Erzul is ready to do its job, as the circumstances seem right, and time will not wait for cowards to move. We are respected and conservative, Martian through and through. We are in a perfect position to act as catalyst; the district governors are in agreement on compromises with the BMs, we are all worried by overtures from Earth toward Cailetet and other BMs…”

“You want to urge unification?”

She smiled broadly. “We can do it right this time. No back-office deals, advocates arguing only with each other. There should be a constitutional assembly, and all the people should participate… through delegates.”

“Sounds very Earthly,” I said. “BMs aren’t used to airing family disputes.”

“Then we should learn.”

She described my duties. Most important, I would visit the syndics of the largest BMs on an informal basis and sound out their positions, build a base for a better designed and more widely acceptable constitution.

Erzul had nothing to lose by sponsoring a constitutional assembly — with all BMs invited, even those strongly connected to Earth. Earth, she was sure, would bide its time while we worked, exerting its pressures where it thought necessary to make the constitution acceptable…

“But we’ll deal with those fingers when they poke,” she said. She smiled broadly. “Two strong women, a stubborn and willful planet, and much impossible work between here and teatime. Are you with me?”

How could I not be? “We’re crazy as sizzle,” I said.

“Fickle as flop,” she returned.

We laughed and shook hands firmly.

We would have been stupid to believe Erzul would be the only player in the game of arranging a constitutional assembly. Others had been working for some time. And, as always in human politics, some of these players were caught up in old theories, old ideals, old and pernicious doctrines. What political clothing Earth had outgrown was now being taken up by Martians and tried on for size.

The year we worked toward a constitutional assembly was a dangerous time. Elitists — some rehashing the politics of the Statists, others wrapping themselves in even more deeply stained robes of theory — believed fervently that the privileges of this faction or that, arrived at by historic and organic process — without plan — should be fixed in stone tablets, these tablets to be carried down from the mountain and announced to the people. Populists believed the people should dictate their needs to any individual who rose above the herd, and bring them low again — except of course for the leaders of whatever populist government took power, who, as political messiahs, would earn specific privileges themselves.

Religion raised its head, as Christians and Moslems and Hindu factions — long a polite undercurrent in Martian life, even within Majumdar BM — saw historic opportunity, and made a rush to the political high ground.

What we were working toward, of course, was the end of the business families as landholders and exploiters of natural wealth by squatter’s rights. The imposition of the district governors and the weak Council had begun the process, decades before, but finishing it was horribly difficult. Institutions, like any organism, hate to die.

For six long and grueling months, Ti Sandra and I and half a dozen like-minded colleagues from a loose alliance of Erzul, Majumdar, and Yamaguchi, traveled across Mars, attending BM syndic meetings, trying to persuade, to deflect outrageous demands, to assuage wounded political and family pride, to assure that all would suffer equally and benefit hugely.

Some BMs, notably Cailetet, did more than just decline.

Cailetet had long been a peculiar rogue among Martian BMs. Originally a Lunar BM, it had extended a branch to Mars at the beginning of the twenty-second century, and that branch had kept strong ties with Moon and Earth. Cailetet grew faster than many Binding Multiples in those days, infused with cash from the Moon and Earth. Eventually, as the Moon was folded in Earth’s arms, Cailetet became a speaker for Earth’s concerns. For a time, a lot of money flowed from the Triple into Cailetet’s reserves — money with a suspiciously Earthly smell.

Cailetet had absorbed and supported the Olympians, and had touted itself as a research BM, offering the finest facilities on Mars… But that had come to a sharp halt.

Now, it appeared that Earth wanted little more to do with Cailetet Mars. Money coming to the BM from Earth or Moon had slowed to a trickle; investment and development plans were canceled. Cailetet had served some purpose, and was cast aside. Understandably, the syndic and advocates of Cailetet Mars were bitter. They needed to re-establish their prominence, and Mars was the only economic and political territory where expansion was possible.

The syndic of Cailetet Mars died in 2180, just as Ti Sandra and I began our work, and was replaced by a man I knew only slightly, but loathed. He had returned from exile on Earth, had quickly established ties with Cailetet’s most Earth-oriented advocates, and was nominated by them for the syndic’s office a month after his predecessor’s death. The voting had been close, but Cailetet’s members responded to his overtures for the return of power and influence…

His name was Achmed Crown Niger . I had last seen him at the University of Mars Sinai , years before, dangling from the coattails of Governor Freechild Dauble. Dauble had put him in charge of the university during the uprising, actually superior to Chancellor Connor. With the collapse of the Statist movement, he had followed Connor and Dauble to Earth, redeemed himself with service to GEWA and GSHA, and returned to Mars married to a Lunar daughter of Cailetet. Crown Niger had finally, in a very short time, reached this pinnacle.

He was far more brilliant than any of the Statists, and unlike them, he had not a shred of idealism, not a molecule of sentiment.

I had dreaded the meeting for days, but it was unavoidable. Cailetet could be very useful in arranging a constitutional assembly.

When I visited his office at Kipini Station, in the badlands of southern Acidalia Planitia, he did not remember me, and there was no reason he should. I had been just one face among dozens of students arrested and detained at UMS.

Face pale, black hair cut in a bristle around his high forehead, Crown Niger met me at the door to his office, shook my hand, and smiled knowingly. I thought for a moment he recognized me, but as he offered me a seat and a cup of tea, his manner proved he did not.

“Erzul has become quite the center, hasn’t it?” he asked. His voice, smooth and slightly nasal, had acquired more of an Earth accent since I had last seen him. He appeared calm, with a cold sophistication and a relaxed, confident bearing. Nothing would disturb him or surprise him; he had seen it all. “Cailetet is interested in your progress. Tell me more.”

I swallowed, smiled falsely, seated myself. I gave him as much of my direct gaze as was absolutely necessary, no more, and examined his office while I spoke. Well-ordered and spare, a bare steel desk, gray metabolic carpet and walls patterned with a close geometric print, the office said nothing about him, except that decoration and luxury meant little to Achmed Crown Niger .

I concluded my presentation with, “We have agreement from four of the five major Binding Multiples, and twelve smaller BMs, and we’d like to set a date now. Only Cailetet has declined.”

“Cailetet is keeping its options open,” Crown Niger said, tapping his index finger on the top of the desk. He offered more tea, and I accepted. “Frankly, the plan proposed by Persoff BM seems more attractive. A limited number of BMs participate, to eliminate organizational clutter… A central financial authority, allocating district resources, working directly with Earth and the Triple. Very attractive. Not very different from Majumdar’s position before your visit to Earth.”

He seemed curious as to how I might react to that. I smiled wryly and said, “That approach is thin on the rights of individuals once the BMs are dissolved. Some districts would have little say.”

“There are drawbacks,” Crown Niger said. “But then, there are drawbacks in your proposal.”

“We’re organizing a process, not yet making a specific proposal.”

Crown Niger shook his head almost pityingly. “Come and go, Miss Majumdar, the bias toward a constitution modeled along the lines of old Terrestrial democracies… That’s a kind of proposal.”

“We hope to avoid the abuses of government without accountability.”

“Very Federalist. I frankly trust the more powerful institutions on Mars,” Crown Niger said. “They have no reason to lace up hobnailed boots and grind faces all day.”

“We prefer direct accountability.”

“You advocate radical changes. I wonder why so many BMs have agreed to their own deballing.”

The vulgarity irritated me. “Because they’re tired of Martian indecision and weakness,” I said.

“And I concur. Mars needs central planning and authority, just as we propose.”

“No doubt,” I said, “but — ”

“We could talk hours longer, Miss Majumdar. Actually, I’m bound by decisions made by my own advocates. I could arrange meetings between you and them, individually.”

“I’d enjoy the opportunity,” I said.

“Our thinker can arrange the details,” Crown Niger said.

“Fine. I’d like to go off-record now,” I said.

“I do not conduct interviews in this office off-record,” Crown Niger said, unruffled. “I owe Cailetet’s family members that much.”

“There are accusations you may not wish them to hear.”

“They hear everything I hear,” Crown Niger said, putting me in my place.

“Some of the smaller BMs tell us Cailetet withdrew important contracts just after they agreed to send advocates to our assembly.”

“It’s possible,” Crown Niger said. “We have a lot of contracts.”

“The numbers are interesting,” I said. “One hundred percent.”

“Severance following agreement?” He seemed concerned and shook his head wonderingly.

“Can you explain the perfect score?” I asked.

“Not immediately,” Crown Niger said, uninterested.

I left the office empty-handed and chilled to the bone.

By the end of the winter of M.Y. 57, seventy-four out of ninety BMs had agreed to send representatives to a constitutional assembly. Twelve out of fourteen district governors planned to attend personally; the thirteenth and fourteenth would send aides. The momentum was with us. The population’s opinions flowed like some vast amoeba. Mars was ready, Cailetet or no.

I was at the center, and the center was moving.

The constitutional assembly convened in the debating chamber of the University of Mars Sinai , on the 23rd of Aries, the thirteenth month of the Martian year. The Martian calendar would be used, sanctioning for the first time the formal use of eleven additional months, named after constellations.

The debate room was a large amphitheater, capable of holding a thousand people. In the arena, an adjustable circular table could seat as many as one hundred.

Detailed studies of the constitutional assembly have been published elsewhere. I am bound by oath not to give many more details of the process, but I can say that it was difficult. The BMs were reluctant to give up their powers and authority, even while recognizing they must. We all walked a tortuous path, preserving privileges here, removing them elsewhere, listening patiently to anguished appeals, working compromise after compromise, yet never — we hoped — compromising the core of a workable democratic constitution.

The birth cries of the new age were the voices of dozens of women and men, talking until they were hoarse, late into the night and early in the morning, arguing, cajoling, persuading, taking impassioned positions and then abandoning them to take others, wearing each other down, screaming, almost coming to blows, stopping to eat at the round table, relaxing with arms around the shoulders of what minutes before might have seemed sworn enemies, staring in stone-faced silence as views were voted down, smiling and clenching hands in victory, sitting in stymied exhaustion… for days and weeks.

Delegates constantly briefed the members of their BMs about progress, sometimes soliciting input on crucial questions. Ti Sandra sent me to Argyre and Hellas to chair public meetings and answer questions about the assembly. And from all across Mars, suggestions and papers and vid reports poured in, some from individuals, others from ad hoc committees. Mars, once politically moribund, was hardly recognizable.

Above it all, providing a constant sense of urgency, Earth. We knew there were people within the assembly reporting to Earth, even beholden to Earth. We had no illusions that we lay beyond Earth’s power. If the assembly were scuttled, Earth would not be served; but no government that weakened Mars would be accepted, either.

We hoped for the best.

For two days, delegates examined constitutional models, as analyzed by human scholars and thinkers during the 2050s. The Earth Society of Social and Political Patterns had developed a language called Legal Logic, with three thousand base concepts derived from international and interplanetary laws. This language was specially designed for fixed analysis; interpretation became less an art, and more a science.

Using Legal Logic, the delegates spent a week examining the broad flow of the history of nations, studying three-dimensional slices through five- and six-dimensional charts, searching for the most flexible and enduring governmental structure. The slices resembled body scans, but reflected histories, not anatomy. Not surprisingly, the two systems that fared best were democratic, parliamentary — as with the United Kingdom, now part of Eurocon — and federal, as with Canada, Australia, the United States, and Switzerland. We traced the legal histories of these countries, studying extreme deviations from stated principles — expressed as compound statements in Legal Logic — the ensuing crises, and how the systems changed thereafter.

The broad outlines of the proposed Martian constitution were decided next. The most flexible and enduring of our examples was the constitution of the United States of America , but most delegates agreed that major modifications would be necessary to fit Mars’s peculiar circumstances.

For six days, the assembly roughed out the branches of the central Martian government. There would be four branches: the executive, the legislative, the judicial, and the extraplanetary. The latter two would be subsidiary to the legislative, as would the executive in most cases. The role of the executive would be greatly reduced from eighteenth-century models, with the executive largely serving as an advocate for major issues; that is, a debater and persuader. The President would be backed up by a Vice President, who would serve as Speaker to the House of the People.

The legislature or congress would be bicameral, the House of the People and the House of Governors. The House of the People would take representatives from districts based on population; the governors, two for each district, would convene separately. Acting in tandem, they would decide the laws of Mars.

The extraplanetary branch would represent Mars in dealings with the Triple, and would answer directly to the executive, but would be appointed by the legislature. (This later proved unworkable, and was revised severely — but that’s outside the scope of my story…)

The judiciary would be divided into the Administrative Court, overseeing court activities as a whole; Civil Health Court, with its jurisdiction over individual and social behavior; Economic Court, which handled civil contracts, business law, and matters of money; and the Court of Government, which convened only to decide cases of a political nature.

Planetary defense would be designed, instituted, and coordinated by the executive and legislative branches. There was debate over whether Mars could afford, or even needed, standing defense force. That question was put off until ratification. Also delayed was the question of intelligence and internal security — protection for the jurists, legislators, and executives.

The federal government and districts would be empowered to levy taxes on citizens and corporate entities. Districts would be responsible for building, upgrading, and maintaining cities and other infrastructure, but could only apply to the federal government for loans.

All economic transactions from the Triple would pass through a central planetary bank, which would be controlled by the legislature and empowered to regulate the flow of Martian money. All Martian currency would be standardized; BMs would no longer maintain their own credit systems. Financial BMs could apply to convert to branches of the Federal Planetary Bank, but most conform to charters and regulations approved by the legislature.

No district could pass laws contradictory to those of the federal government, nor could any district that ratified the constitution withdraw from the federal union thereafter, for any reason. (I remember Richmond and the statues of dead generals that littered their public places…) Non-ratifying districts and BMs would be left with the old laws and arrangements. The federal government could mandate that districts accept as citizens those who wished to dissociate from the dissident BMs.

A Bill of Rights guaranteed that freedom of expression by humans and thinkers would not be hindered or abridged by any body within the government. There was much debate here, but Ti Sandra guided the assembly through these nettles with a steady hand.

It was assumed that all laws, and the constitution itself, would be recorded in Legal Logic, which would be interpreted by specially designed civic thinkers. Each branch would have its own thinkers, one for the executive, two for the legislature, one for the extraplanetary, and three for the judiciary. The opinions of the thinkers would be taken into account by all branches and made publicly available.

For the time being, however, there were no first-class thinkers being made on Mars — though a number of BMs were rushing to change that. Until Martian thinkers of sufficient power and purity could be grown and installed, no thinkers could be entrusted to make crucial decisions, without oversight. Suspicions still existed that they might be Earth-tainted.

Until the constitution was ratified by the delegates and by the people of Mars, an interim government would take office, consisting of a President and Vice President, selected by the delegates; the district governors, and one representative from each BM acting as a legislature; and the present judiciary. This government would exist for a maximum of twenty-three months.

If no constitution had been popularly ratified by then, a new assembly would convene, and the process would begin all over.

In the last week of the assembly, candidates for the interim offices were nominated. Ti Sandra Erzul received the strongest support of the nominees and was voted in by the delegates. She chose me to be her Vice President.

Among the last issues decided was what the new planetary union would be called. “United Mars” was proposed, but many who had fought the Statists objected. No phrases using “union” or “united” could be found that were acceptable to a majority. Finally, the assembly agreed to the Federal Republic of Mars.

Three designs for flags were rejected. A fourth was tentatively agreed to and a sample was sewn together, by hand, and submitted for final approval: red Mars and two moons in blue field above a diagonal, white below, signifying how much we had to grow.

One by one, the delegates — syndics and advocates and governors, assistants and aides, private citizens — gathered in the debating chamber, signing the instruments of federation, abolishing the Council of BMs, rule by Charter, and relinquishing the independence of a century. Ti Sandra stood beside me at the lectern, hand on my shoulder, smiling broadly.

As each of the signers placed his or her signature on the papers, I began to believe. The crucial first steps had been taken, the majority of BMs supported us, and there had been no extreme interference.

We heard of Cailetet trying to arrange an alternate assembly, but it never came off. A rumor circulated during the hours before the signing that Achmed Crown Niger would send an advocate to begin talks with the interim government, but no advocate arrived.

Ti Sandra’s husband, Paul, accompanied Ilya into the chamber as the ceremony was concluded, and we shook hands and hugged all around. LitVid reporters from across the Triple recorded the signatures, and our embrace.

“Fossil Mars comes to life again,” Ilya whispered in my ear. We followed the crowd to dinner in the same room where I had once been held prisoner by Statist guards. “I’m proud of you,” he added, squeezing my hand.

“You’re talking as if it’s over,” I said ruefully.

“Oh, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I know what happens now. I no longer have a wife. We’ll see each other once a month… by appointment.”

“Not that bad, I hope.”

We sat in the middle of a long refectory table with the district governors and accepted the toasts of the delegates and syndics. Ti Sandra made a brief speech, humble and stirring, ringing with just the right note of new patriotism, and we ate.

I looked at the delegates and syndics, the governors, faces weary but relaxed, talking and nodding as they ate, and knew something I had never known before, at least not so intensely.

Time seemed to slow, and all my attentions focused on these singular seconds: on hands carrying forkfuls of food to questing mouths, on glittering eyes watching the faces of others, the sounds of laughter, protests of dismay at some jesting accusation, protests at credit given too liberally, an earnest woman expressing her own emotions at the signing, frowning ever so slightly as she framed her words; all colleagues, the moment having arrived, their time in history, the organic political process having flowed and carried them along…

I felt for them, in that suspended time, as I had felt before only for family or husband. And for those who stood outside our process, who opposed it, I felt as a mother bird must feel about the egg-stealing snake.

Love and suspicion, mellow accomplishment against gnawing anxiety for what might come…

I turned to look at the corner of the dining hall where I had stood years before with Charles and Diane, Sean and Gretyl, and vowed that sort of injustice would never happen again.

The delegates spread across Mars to bring word to their people about the proposed constitution. In district assemblies from pole to pole, Martians closely examined the document, and studied the charts and Legal Logic analyses.

There were incidents. A delegate was stormed by a mob of dissident water miners in Lowell Crater in Aonia. Three delegate aides were exiled from their families. Lawsuits were filed under the old rules of the Council court system, not yet disbanded; and all the while, Cailetet entrenched its district holdings, gathering dissident BMs under its protective wing, and making overtures to Earth that were, for a time, politely ignored.

Earth was patient.

I saw Ilya perhaps one day in five, and when he was in the field, less often than that.

Ilya had been called to head studies of cyst reproduction at Olympia , working with Professor Jordan-Erzul and Dr. Schovinski. During one memorable day away from my duties, he showed me a broad canyon in Cyane Sulci chosen for a major mother cyst experiment. The finest specimen known would be exposed to the Martian atmosphere, showered with ice and mineral dust, heated by infrared lamps, and then covered with a dome and subjected to a tenth of a bar of pressure. After months of preparation, biologists from Rubicon City were optimistic they would see results.

Whenever we met, we slept away from home, in guest suites, inns, subjected to the creativity of regional cuisine… All through the long months of traveling to district assemblies, training or shuttling from station to station, persuading, cajoling, browbeating, explaining the elements of Mars’s future government.

In the early spring of M.Y. 58, the citizens of Mars voted on ratification. Our patient work and preparation had the desired results: the constitution was ratified, sixty-six percent for, thirty against, four abstaining.

Seven Binding Multiples refused to participate, including Cailetet, leaving three large districts and portions of four others in an uncertain condition, outside of the process for the time being.

The interim government would continue for five more months, as candidates for the new offices were nominated and elected. A capital had to be chosen, or a new one built; the districts would have to submit to an official federal census; the flood of volunteers for appointed government positions had to be dealt with, and plans made for folding the structures of the interim government into the forthcoming elected government; the conflicting laws of different districts and BMs had to be reconciled.

The economic alliances of Earth transmitted their congratulations, and promised to send ambassadors to the new Federal Republic . The Moon and Belt BMs did the same.

For a time, it seemed possible we could simply ignore Cailetet and the other dissidents.

Coming full circle, a celebration dinner was held at the University of Mars one week after ratification. All the governors, the former delegates and syndics and advocates and assistants, as well as new appointees and ambassadors, gathered in the old UMS dining hall, five hundred strong, to celebrate the victory.

Ilya sat patiently beside me as vid after congratulatory vid was played. I held his hand, and he surreptitiously passed me his slate showing results from the first cyst experiment. I scrolled through photos and chemical results. Snail slime? I mouthed.

He grinned. Still growing, he wrote on the slate. Ti Sandra glanced at me as Earth’s new ambassador began his speech, and I devoted my full attention — or at least pretended to. Ilya stroked my thigh, and I was anticipating a long evening alone with him — in yet another inn room — after the dinner.

As the meal ended, an advocate from Yamaguchi — the old affiliations and descriptions still lingered — drew Ti Sandra aside in the tunnel outside the dining hall and whispered in her ear. Ti Sandra nodded and spoke to me in an undertone.

“Tell Ilya to keep your bed warm,” she said. “You’ll be back in a few hours. They tell me it’s important.”

I kissed Ilya. He grasped my hand, worried that something had gone wrong.

Ti Sandra embraced Paul and they exchanged long-suffering grimaces. The district governor of Syria-Sinai, the advocate from Yamaguchi, and two male armed guards, escorted Ti Sandra and me deep into the sciences complex of UMS.

The guards wore the uniforms of Sinai public defense, with hastily applied patches showing the flag of the Republic. Ti Sandra calmly ignored them.

Along the way, we were introduced to a man I recognized as an advocate from Cailetet, Ira Winkleman. Neither Ti Sandra nor I knew precisely what we were being led into. Vague notions of a coup or some show of force from Cailetet flitted through my head. After our heady celebration dinner, the mystery made me a touch queasy.

“We’re away from the main body of university labs,” Winkleman said with an unsteady smile. “This is the first time I’ve been down here myself.” His face was etched with lines of concern; he looked as if he had not slept for days.

We arrived at a heavy steel sliding door. “Friends, beyond this point, only the President, Vice President, and I will pass,” Winkleman announced. “I apologize, but security is very important.”

The governor and the Yamaguchi advocate shook their heads but did not complain. They stood aside as Winkleman palmed the lock face.

“Please have the new President and Vice President present their palms for security coding,” the door requested. “After they have done this, Ira Winkleman will place his palm on the face again to confirm identification.”

We did as told and the door opened. The guards also remained outside. Beyond, a short corridor led to a high-ceilinged laboratory filled with research and test benches, heavy insulated pipes, thick bundles of electrical wiring and fiber conduits, liquid gas cylinders. Much of the equipment had an unmistakable air of disuse, covered with packing, sealant, antioxidant. Only a small corner seemed to have seen much recent activity.

“This project has been under way for about three years,” Winkleman said. “You may have heard of it, Miz Majumdar… At least, I believe you learned about some aspects of it. The scientists and support teams involved unanimously agreed to break with Cailetet about six months ago. I resigned from Cailetet and went with them to Tharsis Research University . Now, we’ve made an agreement with UMS, and we’re moving part of our work here.”

“What is this?” Ti Sandra asked, frowning impatiently.

Winkleman tried not to seem officious. Too nervous, he did not succeed. “We — the Olympians, that is — decided that Cailetet was under too much pressure from Earth. We voted to shut down the project, to pretend to have failed.” He shook his head and closed his eyes in an expression of frustration. “We didn’t want Achmed Crown Niger to have such power.”

He escorted us to the far side of the laboratory, in the section that had seen some use. Here, behind a portable screen, three men and two women sat around a table, drinking tea and eating doughnuts. As we came into view, they stood, brushed crumbs from their clothing, and greeted us respectfully.

Charles Franklin’s face had thinned. His eyes were more intense and searching, and he seemed to have grown in dignity and maturity. His colleagues seemed restless, uneasy in our company — but Charles was calm.

Winkleman introduced us. Charles smiled as we shook hands, and murmured, “We’ve met.”

“Are these the famous Olympians?” Ti Sandra asked.

“There are four more at Tharsis. Besides, we’re not so famous now,” Charles said. “I never did like the name. It was more public relations than anything else — ”

“For a project that was secret,” observed Chinjia Park Amoy, a small dark woman with large eyes. I wondered if she and Charles were lovers. And where was Charles’s wife?

The advocates brought chairs from around the lab, and we sat in a circle beside the table. Only Charles remained standing, and Winkleman gladly relinquished his role as explainer, backing away from the table to sit half in shadow.

Our slates were supplied with briefs on each of them, and as we got acquainted, I made an effort to memorize the important details. They were mathematicians and theoretical physicists, all specialists in the Bell Continuum, in descriptor theory. The senior scientist was Stephen Leander, with a thick head of silver hair and a friendly though prickly manner. Chinjia Park Amoy was a Belter who had immigrated to Mars; she had the Belter’s long arms and legs and thick torso; Tamara Kwang, the youngest, with large black eyes, oolong-tea skin, carried several external enhancements as torques around her neck and upper arm; and Nehemiah Royce, of Steinburg-Leschke BM, tall and liquid-eyed, with fine brown hair covered by a silk yarmulke.

I turned my attention to the table. Several rectangular black boxes from twenty centimeters to a meter in height occupied one end. At the other end, a shining white box sat alone, linked to the others by thick optical cables. The white box was obviously a thinker, but it did not bear any marks of origin or affiliation.

Leander motioned for Royce and Kwang to bring us chairs. We sat and Ti Sandra leaned back with a deep sigh.

“I don’t think I’m going to like this,” she said.

“On the contrary,” said Leander, sitting on the edge of the table. “We’re about to present you with the most extraordinary opportunity… perhaps in all history.”

Ti Sandra shook her head firmly. “Sounds dangerous,” she said dubiously. “ Opportunity being the flip side of disaster.” She pinched her lips and said, “It’s more than communications, if I’m not mistaken.”

Leander nodded and turned to me. “Charles says Miz Majumdar might have some idea what we’ve discovered.”

“Not really,” I said. ‘Tweaks, I presume.“

Charles smiled, eyes level on me. Over the years, he had acquired something I would never have thought possible for him: not just poise, not just self-assurance, but charisma.

“Charles once said — ” I began, and stopped, feeling heat rise in my face.

Leander faced Charles.

“I once told the Vice President that I hoped to break the long status quo and discover the secrets of the universe,” Charles explained.

Leander laughed. “Not so far wrong,” he said. “The status quo is certainly shattered. There hasn’t been anything this revolutionary since nanotech — and that will pale by comparison. Charles is our pivotal theorist, and he seems to have a knack for explaining things simply. Would you like to inform the heads of our new Republic what we’re offering?“

With an uncharacteristic scowl, Ti Sandra conspicuously turned her large body toward Charles.

“We’ve discovered how to access the Bell Continuum, how to adjust the nature of the components of energy and matter,” he began. “Together, we’ve developed a theory of matter and energy that is comprehensive. A dataflow theory. We know how to reach into the descriptive core of a particle, and change it.”

“Descriptive core?” Ti Sandra asked.

“Every particle exists in an information matrix. It carries descriptors of all its relevant characteristics. In fact, the total description is the particle. It passes information on its character and states with other particles through exchange of bosons — photons, for example — or through the Bell Continuum. The Bell Continuum is a kind of bookkeeping system that balances certain qualities in the universe.”

“What kind of matrix?” Ti Sandra asked.

“A dataflow matrix,” Charles said. “Otherwise undefined.”

“Like computer memory?”

“That’s an occasionally useful metaphor,” Leander said.

“We do not define the matrix,” Charles persisted.

“God’s computer?” Ti Sandra said, her frown deepening.

Charles smiled apologetically. “No gods necessary.”

“Pity,” Ti Sandra said. “Please go on.”

“Most particles that make up matter have a description of two hundred and thirty-one bits of information — including mass, charge, spin, quantum state, components of kinetic and potential energy, their position in space and moment in time relative to other particles.”

“Their portfolios,” Leander said.

“Credit ratings,” Royce offered. The humor fell flat.

“Very good,” Ti Sandra said. “Very interesting. But why not send me a paper on your results?”

Leander sobered. “This is just background. Much of this theory is accepted in high-level physics now — ”

“It’s controversial in some circles,” Charles said, rubbing his hands together.

“Idiots,” Royce said, shaking his head in pity.

“But we’re the only ones who have been able to manipulate particle data by accessing the Bell Continuum,” Charles said. “We can convert particles into their own anti-particles — ”

“As long as we conserve charge,” Royce added.

“Right. We can produce antimatter or mirror matter directly from ordinary matter.”

He let that sink in. Ti Sandra looked at the Olympians critically, still dubious. “Would that be an energy source?” she asked.

“Tremendous amounts of energy,” Leander said. “We haven’t yet built a large-scale reactor, but there are no theoretical limits to the energy we can release. Harness.”

“Lead into gold?” Winkleman asked.

“We can’t create mass,” Charles said. “Not yet.”

Ti Sandra seemed genuinely stunned now. “Not yet?” she repeated. “Perhaps someday soon?”

“We don’t know,” Charles said. “It’s not impossible, I think. But a few folks disagree.”

Royce and Kwang raised their hands. “We keep the others humble,” Royce said.

“I’m open to the possibility,” Leander said.

“Just as significant, we can do the conversion at a distance,” Charles said. “That is, we can aim at a specific region and convert matter to mirror matter within that region, at distances up to nine or ten billion kilometers. Effectively, anywhere within the Solar System.”

The group fell silent for a moment. The Olympians looked at us, and each other, uncomfortably, like youngsters accused of some misdemeanor.

I stared at Charles with a mix of horror and awe.

“Does Earth know you’ve made this… discovery, this breakthrough?” I asked.

The Olympians shook their heads. “They might suspect,” Charles said, “but we’ve kept it very quiet. Only the nine of us, and Ira, have understood how far we’ve come. And these recent developments… the most significant developments… they’re no more than six months old.”

“Cailetet?” I asked.

“They’ve been led to believe we’ve made a minor communications breakthrough, after we left them,” Charles said “Nothing more.”

“How minor?” I asked.

“We’ve told them we can access descriptors to correlate broadcast communications with states at origin. That is, we can clean hash off radiated signals.”

“Can you?” I asked.

“Of course,” Charles said. He made me uncomfortable, focusing intently on me with his curious, detached expression. “But actually we can do much better than that. We can transit signals across the Solar System instantaneously.”

“Have you?” I asked.

“No. Only across Mars,” he replied. “Of course, we need two devices. None exist on Earth or anywhere else in the Solar System.”

“What do you expect us to do?” Ti Sandra asked.

Leander and Charles spoke together, and Charles deferred to Leander. It was becoming apparent to me that Charles led the group, but that he had chosen Leander as a more mature-looking speaker. That did not stop Charles from interrupting.

“Madam President, you’re at the head of the first effective government in Martian history,” Leander said. “We’ve been worried for years now that our work would bear fruit in an improper political climate, and would be misused, or that Earth would benefit, and not Mars. In a few more years, perhaps sooner, researchers on Earth will know what we know, and that could be dangerous.”

“It’s dangerous for just Mars to know,” I said. “If Earth believes we have this power…”

“I agree,” Charles said. “But we can’t just sit on what we know.”

Ti Sandra rubbed her large shoulders with crossed hands. “Ours is an interim government,” she said. “We only serve for a few months.”

Leander said, “We didn’t think we could afford to wait any longer.”

Charles leaned his head to one side and shook it slowly, then stared at me again. “I apologize for the short notice, with no preparation,” he said. “Casseia, I do not know how to tell you… the importance of this. I’m no egotist — you know that.”

“Well,” Royce said, smiling, but Leander put his hand on the young man’s shoulder.

“When you were on Earth, you asked me a question I could not answer. I apologize for that. Maybe now you understand why.”

“Cailetet couldn’t support you, so you turn to us,” I said. The words came out more accusing than I intended. “You need money.”

“Actually, we’re already in a development and applications phase,” Leander said. “Using a Tharsis Research grant, we’ve been designing motors for long-range spaceships, standard shuttles or liners refitted. In theory, we could use a few tons of propellant to cross the system in a few weeks, in comfort…”

Charles held out his hands as if pleading. “That’s hardly even a beginning. The implications of what we’ve learned are immense,” he said, still speaking as if only to me. “We may not know everything — ”

“We most certainly do not,” Leander said.

“But we’ve opened the door,” Charles finished. “We’re not telling you this to get funding. It’s my duty as a Martian to inform the leaders of the first true Martian government. Having done that, it is up to you to decide where we go, next.”

“All right, young man,” Ti Sandra said. She was not that much older than Charles or I, but her attitude did not seem out of place. “You give us the universe on a platter. Am I correct to say that?”

Leander started to speak, but Charles took over again, leaving the gray-haired scientist smiling crookedly and lifting his hands in agitation.

“We can arrange a demonstration,” Charles said. “Something small but convincing. We can arrange for vapor clouds in orbit to go off like big sparklers. No damage, not much dangerous radiation, but…”

“Earth might think something peculiar was happening,” Leander cautioned.

Ti Sandra released her shoulders and folded her hands in her lap. “We don’t need a big, obvious demonstration,” she said. “I’d like other scientists to look over your work. We choose the scientists. Then we think about the next step.”

“We think security is an important consideration,” Charles said, and his colleagues nodded emphatically.

“Oh, yes,” said Chinjia Park Amoy.

“Parts of our discovery are very subtle, and we happened to be a little lucky,” Charles said. “But much of what we know is familiar to scientists on Earth. It might not take them long to work from a few clues…”

“Won’t it be better if everybody knows?” Ti Sandra asked.

“I don’t think so,” Winkleman said, stepping forward. “Earth would use it to force the rest of the Triple to do what it wants.”

“Couldn’t we defend ourselves?”

“There is no defense, yet,” Charles said. “You’ll need to understand the details to understand why. As a weapon, the uses are truly frightening. Remote conversion of matter to mirror matter… No defense.”

“Where does all this energy come from?” Ti Sandra asked brightly, as if a new doubt gave her hope this was all a sham. “You’re saying you can violate basic physical laws?”

“No,” Leander said. “We just alter the books. Add here, subtract there. It balances.”

“Mr. Leander, what is your association?” Ti Sandra asked.

“I’m ex-Cailetet as well,” he said.

“You’ve all broken completely with Cailetet?”

The group nodded. “None of us trusts Achmed Crown Niger ,” Winkleman said.

“Do you need more money?” I asked.

“That’s up to the government,” Charles said. “To you.”

“Not at all,” I said. “We have no idea what you’ll need, or what — ”

My voice had started to break. Ti Sandra held my hand and squeezed it. “We need time to think. And documents to study. I believe other scientists should be called in to advise us. No demonstrations for the time being. And I’m certain my Vice President will agree with me, that you should all be seriously considering the practical applications of your discoveries, and preparing another report.”

“We have such a report, with detailed plans,” Leander said.

Ti Sandra shook her head firmly. “Not now, please. I shall have nightmares tonight as it is. We’ll get back to our duties, to our husbands… To our private thoughts. And,” she added, “to our prayers.”

Charles offered his hand, as did the others, and we all shook. “We’ll do nothing without the government’s agreement,” Winkleman said as he escorted us to the gate, and down the tunnel beyond.

“No,” Ti Sandra said. “You most certainly will not.”

Ti Sandra called me into her quarters, the chancellor’s suite, and offered me a cup of late-evening tea. Her face was gray as she poured. “I once had a dream,” she said. “A beautiful man approached me and dropped a bucket of gold into my lap. I should have been very happy.”

“And you weren’t?” I asked.

“I was terrified. I did not want the responsibility. I told him to take it back.” She drew herself up and stared at the chamber. Here, years before, Chancellor Connor had ordered the voiding of students, sparking our protest.

“You know Charles Franklin?” she asked.

“We were lovers, briefly,” I said.

Ti Sandra nodded appreciatively at the confidence. “I had four lovers before Paul. None of them showed much promise. Charles Franklin must have been something.“

“He was sweet and enthusiastic,” I said.

“But you did not love him.”

“I think I did,” I said, “but I was very confused.”

“And if you had lawbonded with him?”

“He asked,” I said.

“Oh?” Ti Sandra sat on the couch beside me and we sipped our tea in silence for a while. “Please tell me these scientists are making bad jokes.”

I did not answer.

“Madam Vice President,” she said, “life is becoming a bowl of shit.”

“Not cherries,” I said.

“Shit,” she repeated emphatically. “We are nothing but children, Casseia. We can’t possibly handle this much power.”

“Humans aren’t ready?”

She snorted. “I don’t speak for humanity. I speak for us — for simple Martians. I am terrified what Earth might do if they find out, and what we might do in return…”

“If they…”

“Yes,” she said before I finished.

“We should look on the bright side,” I said.

She ignored that with a toss of her hand and a shiver of her shoulders. “And over the years, Charles Franklin never told you? You wrote to him, asked him questions, no?”

“Once,” I said. “At my uncle’s urging. Charles told me he was working on something very important, and that… it would, it could cause us a lot of political trouble. What he actually said was that things were not going to get any easier. I thought he was exaggerating.”

“Should we speak privately with Charles Franklin, or with Stephen Leander?”

“I think Charles is the one in charge.”

“Is he wise, Casseia?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I don’t know. He wasn’t very wise when we were younger. But then, neither was I.”

“Cailetet’s involvement concerns me,” Ti Sandra said. “I would not put it past Achmed Crown Niger to know more than these scientists say he does. And if he knows, he will use the information. We have pushed him into a corner. He has gotten nowhere on Mars. He is trapped, politically and financially.”

“We don’t have guidelines for keeping government secrets,” I said. “Whom do we trust?”

“Trust! I don’t even trust myself.” Ti Sandra made a sad face. “God help us all.”

I lay beside Ilya that night, watching him sleep. He almost always slept soundly, like a child; I imagined his head filled with memories of the digs, thoughts of work yet to be done in the sulci… I envied him so much it brought tears of childish frustration to my eyes.

We had shared a glass of port and fresh cheese, both made by Erzul families and donated to the new government. He had joked about the infinite privileges of being at the center; I had not reacted, and he had asked why I was so somber. “Everything is going well,” he had said. “You deserve congratulations, all of you.”

I tried to smile. The effort was hardly convincing.

“Do you mind if I pry a little?” he asked, pushing closer to me on the bed.

I shook my head.

“You’ve heard something upsetting,” he said. “Something you can’t tell me about.”

“I wish I could,” I said fervently. “I need advice and wisdom so much.”

‘“Is it something dangerous?”

“I can’t even tell you that,” I said.

He lay back on the bolster with his hands behind his head. “I will be glad when — ”

“You have your wife back?” I said quickly, fixing him with an accusing glare.

“No,” Ilya said evenly. “Well, yes, actually.” He smiled. “Trick question. I haven’t lost you yet.”

“Yes,” I said, unassuaged, “but I can’t go on digs with you. We seldom spend time together. I wish I was with you all of the time. I’m getting sick of meetings and dinners and propaganda and being called ‘the midwife of a New Mars.’ ”

Ilya refused to snap back. This angered me even more, and I jumped out of bed, marching back and forth along one short wall of the inn room, raising my fists at the ceiling. “God, God, God!” I shrieked. “I do not want this, I do not need this!” I turned on him again, hands outstretched with fingers curled in witch’s claws. “We had things under control! We could do everything on our own! This only makes things so much worse.”

Ilya watched me helplessly. “I wish—”

“But you can’t!”

The one-sided rant faded and I slumped by the wall, knees drawn up, staring blankly at a corner of the bed. Ilya kneeled beside me, hand on my shoulder. After, as a kind of apology, I forcefully made love to him. My false performance did not seem sufficient. I held on to him and we talked about the time after the interim government’s term had expired.

I wanted to take a teaching position at an independent school, I said, and he reassured me, there would be no end of such appointments. I had only to ask. “Midwife to the New Mars,” he had said softly. “It fits, really. Don’t be angry at yourself.”

I had watched him fall asleep, thinking of when we would have children, wondering now whether that time would come.

It was easy to imagine what so much power could lead to. Images of Achmed Crown Niger and Freechild Dauble, unwise leaders, memories of forceful, together Earth; how would they feel, knowing youthful, naive, dangerous Mars had such power? Perhaps they already knew, and plans were in place, and there was nothing we could do.

The Olympians erected a small, remote laboratory in Melas Dorsa, using some of their own money and a bit of land donated by Klein BM. Melas Dorsa is moderately cratered land, cut from the south by shallow canyons, and swept by low dunes. There was little water and few resources.

Even on Mars, it was a desert.

I went alone to view the demonstrations. Ti Sandra had an emergency meeting in Elysium to shore up support for the new government among suddenly nervous delegates and a district governor of marginal competence and few brains. She trusted me to be her eyes and ears, but I also sensed she was terrified of what they might show us, of the magnitude of this unexpected and unwanted gift. I was no braver than Ti Sandra, but perhaps I was less imaginative.

Charles and Stephen Leander accompanied me on the shuttle flight from UMS. The shuttle had been marked with government symbols — the flag and “FRM 1” to signify it was carrying VIPs. We were to meet two impartial scientists from Yamaguchi and Erzul, flying separately from Rubicon City , at the Melas Dorsa lab.

There were no trains through Melas Dorsa, no stations within four hundred kilometers of the lab, and Charles warned me there would be few amenities.

I stared at him accusingly. “Luxury is not very important to me, certainly not now,” I said. Leander sensed the charged atmosphere and conspicuously studied the landscape passing several dozen meters below. The craft flew over a low ridge, then continued its ascent to avoid a chain of diffuse dust devils.

Charles blinked at me, surprised by my tone, then reached for his slate. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

“I’ve read your papers,” I said. “Most of it’s way beyond me.”

Charles nodded. “The ideas are simple enough, however.”

He drew his lips together and raised an eyebrow. “Are you prepared to take some things on trust?”

“I’ll have to, won’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose I’m prepared for it.”

“You’re angry.”

“Not with you specifically,” I said.

Leander unharnessed himself and stood. “I’m going forward for a better view,” he said. We ignored him. He shrugged and took a seat out of earshot.

“That’s not what I meant. You’re angry about our giving you so much responsibility.”

“Yes.”

“I wish we could have avoided it.”

“You wanted to change the universe, Charles.”

“I wanted to understand. All right, I wanted to change it. But I didn’t want to make you responsible.”

“Thanks for nothing.”

Charles drew back and looked away, hurt and irritated. The slate rested on his lap. “Please be fair, Casseia.”

“You know,” I said, fairness far from my thoughts at the moment, “it was you who scuttled our first initiative on Earth. You Olympians. You made everybody so very nervous… You put us under so much pressure — and we did not even understand what you were planning.”

“Planning?” He chuckled. “We didn’t know ourselves. Apparently the implications were more clear to people on Earth than they were to us.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Did you think you could do all this in a vacuum?”

He shook his head. “Vacuum?”

“Ethics, Charles.”

“Oh… Ethics.” His face reddened. “Casseia, now you’re being very unfair.”

“Dust unfairness. Do you know what this is going to do to us?”

“What kind of decision could I make? To back away from knowledge? Casseia, I’ve tried to be as ethical and straightforward as I can. Our whole group has stuck with very high standards.“

“That’s why you worked for Cailetet.”

“They are — were — hardly villains. As soon as Achmed Crown Niger came on board, we prepared to close up shop. And Cailetet actually helped us. With a push from Earth. Crown Niger was less concerned with what we could offer him than with satisfying his bosses on Earth.”

“You left when they cut funding.”

“We told them nothing even before that.”

I smiled. “Are you sure they don’t have your results locked away somewhere? Before Crown Niger ?”

“It’s possible. But if they look over that material, they won’t have a clue about what we’ve discovered since. It will be very misleading. We explored a lot of blind canyons, Casseia. Earth is still chasing up blind canyons.”

For a few seconds, I had nothing to say. Then my anger collapsed and I shivered. “Charles, aren’t you frightened?”

He considered cautiously, looking at me. “No,” he said. “You’ve put our house in order, Casseia — or it’s on its way to being put in order. A responsible government — ”

“In its infancy, uncoordinated and frail and new. We don’t even know whether the interim government can flow smoothly into an elected government. We haven’t tried it out yet, Charles.”

“Well,” he said. “I have faith in you.”

“In Mars?” I asked, wrapping my arms around myself to control my shivering. He reached out to touch me and I gave him a withering glare. He pulled his hand back. “Charles, you’re giving us the power to destroy our enemies, and we don’t know who our enemies are. Earth has very subtle means of persuading us… and all you’re offering is a sledge hammer!”

“Much more than that,” Charles said softly. “Huge supplies of power, remote control of resources. We are limited in significant ways, but that doesn’t mean we can’t defend ourselves against almost anything.“

“By threat, perhaps. You can convert matter to antimatter. Remotely. From a very great distance. With pinpoint accuracy.”

He nodded.

“We could fry Earth’s cities. You’ve brought back the horror of the twentieth century.”

He grimaced. “That’s melodramatic,” he said.

“Do you think Freechild Dauble would have hesitated to abuse such power?”

Charles said, “I know that you will use it wisely. We would not have told you if I thought otherwise.”

For a moment, I was speechless. I waved my hands and finally pointed a finger at him, not knowing whether to laugh or scream. “My God, Charles, I’m glad I made such an impression on you! Maybe I am a saint. But what about those who come after — for generations?”

“Long before then, everybody will know. There will be a balance. Look, Casseia, this is irrelevant — ”

“I don’t see that,” I muttered.

“It’s irrelevant because the knowledge is here and it won’t go away.” His face fell into an expression of weariness. “There is no peace, no end to the new and frightening in this life.”

I bit my tongue to keep from saying, Philosophy comes late, Charles.

“I know,” he continued. “I’ve thought about this for years. What happens if we complete the theory, I asked myself, and find a way to get into the Bell Continuum. To manipulate descriptors. We all worried about it.”

Leander came back and sat, looking between us. “Do we have any agreement?” he asked.

I laughed weakly and shook my head. “Bad dreams,” I said.

Charles said, “ ‘O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.’ ”

“We think of that quote a lot,” Leander said, settling into his seat. “The universe is bounded in a nutshell. Distance and time mean nothing, except as variations in descriptors. Knowing that, we could be kings of infinite space.”

“And the bad dreams?”

Leander’s expression abruptly grew stern, even sad. “Charles put me up front because I look the part and because bureaucrats respond to me better. That doesn’t mean I can be circumspect all the time. We’re in this together, Miss Majumdar. You can stand on your high mountain and accuse us of naiveté and intellectual hubris and tell us nothing we haven’t pondered a thousand times in private.”

“Don’t assume, Stephen,” Charles said. “Casseia isn’t so simplistic.”

Leander controlled himself with visible effort, smiled brightly and falsely, and said, “Sorry. I happen to think that focusing on ‘bad dreams’ points to a lack of imagination.”

“Why didn’t the President come with you?” Charles asked. “This should have taken precedent.”

“There’s a major problem. If she doesn’t solve it, the cloth might unravel, and there will be no constitutional government to decide what to do with your work. She trusts me to tell her what happens.”

“She’s afraid, isn’t she?” Charles said.

I sniffed.

“I saw it in her eyes,” Charles said. “She’s human-scale. She’s not comfortable with this kind of immensity.”

I nodded. “Perhaps.”

“What about you? Can you overcome your fear and look with a child’s eyes?”

“Don’t expect too much, too soon, Charles,” I said.

The test area had been equipped with a temporary shelter for twenty people, built by arbeiters the day before. Four of the Olympians — Leander, Charles, Chinjia, and Royce — were present, Chinjia and Royce having flown in even before the shelter was finished to prepare their apparatus.

The landscape around the site was as barren as I remembered from vids seen in areological studies in second form. Melas Doras had none of the drama of the sulci, none of the color of Sinai, no fossils, no minerals…

An hour after we arrived, the scientists we had chosen to witness the demonstration flew in on yet another shuttle. Ulrich Zenger and Jay Casares were avid supporters of the constitution, with impeccable academic credentials. They were professors of theoretical physics from the University of Icaria , an independent research school funded by six BMs. We were introduced in the shelter, and Charles immediately briefed them on the experiment.

The test bed itself lay beneath an unpressurized tent-dome. In suits, Charles, Chinjia, Royce, Zenger, Casares and I walked from the shelter to the dome. Charles removed a cylinder of pure hydrogen prepared and delivered by Zenger and Casares, and carefully placed it in a sling hanging from the apex of the dome. Zenger and Royce then brought forward a neutron counter and other equipment. Arbeiters recorded the preparations on vid.

“What are we doing to see?” Casares asked Charles as the final arrangements were made.

“You’ve studied our theory papers, and you understand what we claim we’ve done?” Charles asked in turn.

Casares nodded.

“Are you convinced?”

Casares shook his head. “It’s fascinating, but I resist switching paradigms.”

“Is there any way your hydrogen-filled cylinder can produce energy?”

“In its present state, no,” Casares said.

“We’re going to make it produce a great deal of energy.”

We returned to the shelter, removed our suits, and joined Leander and Zenger in the equipment room. Here, once again, waited a broad steel table and the white thinker with no affiliation. Several small black boxes were connected to the thinker by optical cables.

Leander asked the thinker whether all the equipment was working properly. It replied, in a young man’s voice, that all was well.

Charles sat on a stool beside the table. “Our thinker provides an interface with a Quantum Logic thinker, also contained within the box. Both were grown on Mars, by Martians.”

“Who?” Zenger asked, clearly interested in this development.

“Myself,” Leander said, “and Danny Pincher. At Tharsis Research University .”

“This by itself is worth the trip,” Zenger said. “If the thinkers are stable and productive.”

“They’re dedicated and not very powerful,” Leander said. “Danny and I are growing better ones now. We’ve probably violated several laws by building them the way we have, but we needed QL control of the apparatus, and we exhausted all legal means of procuring a QL thinker.”

Zenger nodded. “Please go on,” he said.

“Some of our work was inspired by a pretty famous scientific mystery. We’ve all studied the Ice Pit accident. That was almost fifty years ago. A Lunar scientist named William Pierce tried to reduce the temperature of a small sample of copper atoms to absolute zero. He succeeded, with disastrous consequences. Pierce and his wife were killed. One observer managed to escape, but he was badly injured. The Ice Pit cavern became an incomprehensible void.”

Zenger seemed unimpressed. “So what are you going to do with our hydrogen?” he asked. “Send it to Wonderland?”

“We’ve never duplicated his experiment,” Casares said. “It’s never been proven that absolute zero was reached. Something else may have happened.”

“We know that zero temperature was achieved,” Charles said.

Zenger turned down his lips and thumped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “How do you know?”

“No details for now,” Leander said.

“We’re going to convert some of the hydrogen in the cylinder to mirror matter,” Charles said. “The reaction between normal hydrogen and mirror hydrogen will produce neutrons, gamma rays, and heat.”

“Let’s do it,” Casares said impatiently.

Charles sat beside the thinker. A control panel was projected above the white box. “The thinker is fixing the descriptor coordinates for the sample,” he said. “The descriptors do not use absolute measures or coordinates. Every space-time descriptor is relative to the descriptors of the observer. In some ways, that makes our job easier. When we’ve located our sample, we can confirm by querying other descriptors, which will tell us what the sample is made of… And we’ll know we’re tweaking what we want to tweak.”

“You won’t tell us how it’s done,” Zenger said, pointing to the apparatus. “But you’re doing it, whatever it is, remotely… What’s your maximum distance?”

‘That’s not going to be discussed today, either,“ Leander said. ”Sorry.“

Zenger turned to me, grim-faced. “We can’t make an evaluation if we don’t have enough information.”

“We’ve asked the group not to reveal certain facts,” I said.

Zenger drew his chin back and shook his head. “You’ve called us in to give expert testimony, but by keeping us ignorant, you might as well impress a couple of chimpanzees.”

Casares was less prickly. “Let’s see what there is to see,” he said. “If you produce energy from our sample, we have something interesting. We can debate secrets later.”

Part of me had hoped for more drama. There was expectation in that little room, curiosity, skepticism — but very little drama. Charles did not try for emotional effect. Instead, he worked quickly and quietly with Leander. Both passed instructions to the thinker, and we were invited to observe.

The display above the thinker projected a 3-D diagram of the cylinder, filled with colors showing temperature gradients. The cylinder, Charles explained, was still cooling to the ambient temperature, about minus sixty degrees Celsius. The gas within churned slowly.

“Charge is conserved, of course,” Leander said. “We can’t convert charged particles except in pairs with particles of the exact opposite charge. Neutral atoms and molecules are ideal. The descriptors distinguishing mirror matter and matter are tied to other descriptors describing a particle’s spin and time component. We have to access these linked descriptors all at once. The result is a conversion that violates no physical laws. But since matter will meet with mirror matter, energy will be released.”

“And how do you change the descriptors?” Casares asked.

Charles grinned almost shyly. “I’m sorry. Can’t say just yet.”

Zenger said, “So what is there to evaluate? You might show us a splendid magic trick. Everything could be rigged…”

“We hope you trust our reputations enough to accept that what you see is legitimate,” Leander said.

“We can’t pass judgment without evaluating the theory behind the effect,” Casares said, folding his arms. “Science is about reproducible results. If only one group has done the work and gotten results, it isn’t science. What I’ve heard so far isn’t encouraging.”

Charles looked between us, clearly frustrated. “I’d just as soon tell you all there is, but for obvious reasons, it’s up to Vice President Majumdar.”

I felt completely out of my element, but I could not afford to be indecisive. “Key parts of the theory must be kept confidential,” I said.

Charles held out his hands, What can I do?

Zenger and Casares shook their heads. Zenger finally waved his fingers as if dismissing me, but said, “All right. I don’t like it, but show us what there is to see, and we’ll argue details later.”

“Thank you,” Charles said. He nodded to Leander. “Let’s project the sample as our thinker sees it.”

Leander touched the insubstantial control panel. A surface of peaks and valleys appeared, arrows dancing from peak to peak and finally settling on one, which promptly grew. A small red cube appeared, and within the cube, blue lines sketched the cylinder. Again the cylinder filled with colors, and within the colors, flashing numbers and Greek letters moved like bottled flies.

“The QL thinker evaluates the sample,” Charles said. “Everything is in the hands of the thinker now. We should see energy produced within the sample in a few seconds.”

We looked out the window; the suspended cylinder, beneath the dome, was not visible except in a vid projection. The room filled with a whine and distinct clicks and growls and howls. “Atoms of matter and mirror matter meeting,” Chinjia explained, adjusting the sound. “They’re bouncing around within the cylinder. The cylinder’s heating up, and…” Her finger traced a new graph on the display. “Here’s gamma ray production. We expect about ten percent efficiency, and of course some interaction with the bottle… Neutron flux now.”

“So far, we’ve created about a trillion molecules of mirror hydrogen,” Charles said. “The reaction has produced about fifty-four joules.”

“That should be enough,” Zenger said. “There seems to be heat and neutrons.”

Charles told Leander to stop the experiment. Leander touched the control panel and the red cube and graph disappeared.

“We’ve thought of ways to increase efficiency,” Charles said. “We can convert half of the molecules in the cylinder to mirror matter in a shape that interlocks with the normal hydrogen. The ambiplasma pressure will push fleeing molecules and particles into optimum configuration for further interaction. Ninety percent destruction would occur. But that would vaporize the cylinder and part of the apparatus and dome.”

Zenger nodded. “To the extent that we can make any judgments, it seems you’ve done something interesting.”

Charles said, “We’ll have an arbeiter remove the cylinder and put it in the back of the lab. You can examine it remotely.”

Zenger said, “I assume we can’t take it with us?”

All heads turned to me. “It should stay here,” I said.

“Very exciting indeed,” Zenger said flatly.

An arbeiter moved the cylinder to an isolation box at the rear of the lab. While Zenger and Casares looked it over, muttering quietly to themselves, Charles sat across from me in the dining booth. I forked through an uninspired bowl of nano food.

“Bit of a letdown?” he asked.

“Not at all,” I said, looking up with what I hoped was calm dignity. “I didn’t expect Trinity.”

He smiled briefly. “You’ve been reading history, too. Mind if I eat with you?”

I shook my head. He returned with his own bowl. I was nearly finished, but clearly, he wanted to talk.

“Do you still resent what we’ve done?” he asked.

“I’ve never resented any of this,” I said.

“No,” he said, suspending his tone between statement and question. “It’s only going to get more stressful.”

“You said that years ago.”

“Was I right?” he asked.

“You were right.”

He tasted the paste, made a face and dropped his fork into the bowl. “Not the best,” he said. “It’s a tradition. Scientists on Mars must eat stale nanofood. Something to do with creativity. Remember the terrible wine at Trés Haut Médoc? I’m still sorry about that.”

“The wine,” I clarified.

“Not just the wine.”

I leaned my head to one side, determined to avoid the subject, and pulled out my slate. “Do you have any other demonstrations? This one — ”

“Isn’t going to impress politicians. I know. We can vaporize Olympus Mons if you wish.”

For a moment, I couldn’t tell whether he was joking. “That would be… mature,” I said.

Charles laughed and toyed with his bowl, tipping it with a finger. “We can do a lot more. As Stephen said on the way here, we can build a super-efficient, high-acceleration mirror matter drive, better than the best Earth can make. We can install it in a standard Solar System liner and zip around like hornets. Make a planetary tour in months instead of decades. With a fully equipped engineering plant, we could put it all together in sixty or seventy days.”

“A ship like that would be very bright, visible across the Solar System,” I said. “How about something that won’t upset Earth?”

Charles put his elbows on the table. “Of course,” he said. “Stephen and I have been planning a number of demonstrations, with varying degrees of sophistication. Experts to yahoos. Bring them on.”

He was being a shade too flippant, given the nature of our problem, but I had tired of bringing him up short. “I’m still not well versed on physics,” I said.

“You really should be,” he chided. “I don’t use one, but I could recommend a good enhancement. Martian-made.”

“No thank you. Not right now.” I made sure the others were still out of hearing. “But I’m curious. How did you manage all this?”

Charles leaned forward, face as bright and eager as a child’s, and placed his hands on the table. “I’ve always wrestled with stupid problems — the really big problems. It’s stupid to wrestle with them, because many of them circle back to the language used to state them — and that’s a fool’s chase.

“But one problem seemed truly big and truly interesting — fundamental. Mathematics is powerful. We can create equations to use as tools to describe nature. We can use them to predict what will happen. What gives mathematics such power? It took me years to come to a conclusion, and when I did, I told nobody — because the conclusion was so simple, and I was too young, and there was no way to prove anything.

“So I waited. I studied the Ice Pit, all I could find about William Pierce and his work, his fatal discovery. I knew that my simple solution fit into his theories — explained and supplemented them, in fact. I joined other people who seemed in tune with me, worked with them and prodded them… My ideas became testable.

“Mathematics is made of systems of rules. The universe seems to operate by a set of rules, as well — not so precisely, but then, measurements aren’t ever precise in nature. That in itself should have given everybody a clue.

‘The rules of math give it the quality of a computational machine. We can design computers using mathematical concepts and rules, because math is a computational system. The computer’s operation is not so different from math itself — it’s math operating in light and matter. And math is useful in describing and predicting nature because nature itself uses a set of rules. Nature behaves as if it is a computational system.

“When we do math in our heads, we store results — and the rules themselves — in our heads or on paper, or in other kinds of memory. Our brains become the computer.

“The universe stores the results of its operations as nature. I do not confuse nature with reality. At a fundamental level, reality is the set of rules the results of whose interactions are nature. Part of the problem of reconciling quantum mechanics with larger-scale phenomena comes from mistaking results for rules, — a habit built into our brains, good for survival, but not for physics.

“The results change if the rules change. Our universe evolved ages ago out of a chaos of possible rules… An original foundation or ground that simply bubbled with possibilities. Sets of rules vanished in the chaos, because they were not consistent — they could not survive against more rigorous, meaningful sets. I don’t mean ‘survive’ in time, either — they simply canceled and negated in a time-free eternity. But sets of rules did come into existence which were not immediately contradictory, which could work as free-standing, computational matrixes.

“Those which strongly contradicted — whose rules could not produce long-lived results — were simply not ‘recorded.’ They vanished. Those whose results could interact and not contradict, at least for a while, survived.

“The universe we see uses an evolved, self-consistent set of rules, and the rules of mathematics can be made to more or less agree.

“Mathematics is a computational matrix. Its power to describe and predict is no puzzle if the observed universe is the result of a computational matrix. No mystery — a fundamental clue.”

I listened to him carefully, trying to follow his reasoning. Some of it was clear enough, but I could not track his leaps of intuition.

Charles squinted up at the ceiling. “I’ve never told anybody that before,” he said. “You’re looking at my theoretical underwear, Casseia.”

“I’m not embarrassed,” I said. “I hardly know what I’m seeing.”

“We’ve been around and around about responsibility for discovery, about the problems descriptor theory has caused you and everybody else. I thought I’d tell you more about my excuses. God is not necessary in all this — but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been searching for God. I just haven’t found the key yet. Maybe there isn’t any. But when I contemplate these things, when I work on these problems, that is the only time I feel worthy.

“I’ve lived my life well enough, and I’m no monster, but I have sufficient emotional problems for any human. When I work, I transcend those problems. I am pure. It’s like a drug. I can’t stop thinking just to become responsible and put a halt to change. I need the purity of that kind of thought, that kind of discovery. I may never know a redemptive love, I may never have complete self-understanding, but I will have this, at the very least: the moments when I’ve asked questions about reality and gotten meaningful answers.”

“When did you first think your theory was justified?” I asked.

“I put the Olympians together. Stephen was crucial with the politics, especially when we went to work for Cailetet. First, we duplicated William Pierce’s experiment. We redesigned his apparatus, improved field damping, used more efficient force disorder pumps. We used a smaller sample of atoms. And we brought the atoms down to absolute zero. At zero temperature, the Bell Continuum becomes coextensive with space-time. They merge. Descriptors within particles can be changed.”

“That’s all?” I asked.

“That’s something all by itself,” Charles said. “But you’re right. It still wouldn’t be enough… Earth thinks descriptors are simple yes-no switches. But I decided they couldn’t be simple. First, I tried to think of them as smoothly varying functions. That didn’t work, either. They weren’t yes-no toggles, but they weren’t smooth waves, either. They were codependent. Each referred to the others. They networked. Every particle having mass contains the same number of descriptors. But that number is not an integer. It isn’t even rational. Descriptors obey Quantum Logic from beginning to end.” He looked at me with some concern. “Am I boring you?”

“Not at all,” I said. I found myself attracted by the sound of his voice, boyishly enthused and powerful at once. Children playing with matches. The fascination of fire.

“If you want to tweak a descriptor, you must first persuade it to exist,” Charles said. “You have to separate it out from the cloud of potential descriptors, all of them codependent. And to do that, you need a QL thinker.”

“But how do you reach them?” I asked.

“Good question,” Charles said. “You’re thinking like a physicist.”

“More like mud pies to me,” I said.

He smiled and tapped my hand with his finger. “Don’t underestimate yourself.”

I withdrew my hand. “How?” I asked.

“When we bring a sample of atoms down to zero, the coextensive space around it takes on the characteristics of a single large particle, what we call a Pierce region, or a ‘tweaker,’ ” he said. “It has its own charge and spin and mass, e times the mass of the original sample of atoms. Its extra mass is pseudo, of course, and the traits are pseudo as well. We suspended the pseudo-particle, the tweaker, in a vacuum. We found that when we manipulated the tweaker, we were actually choosing a descriptor, pulling it from the cloud, and changing it directly. But nothing happened. The accident was stumbling upon the unique identity descriptor that keeps a particle separate from all others.”

“So?”

“Tweaking unique identity could convert our pseudo-particle into any particle, anywhere. The pseudo-particle itself doesn’t actually exist in the matrix — the matrix doesn’t recognize it. So another particle takes on the traits we assign. It can be a single particle far away — or all the particles within a well-defined volume.”

It almost made sense. “The tweaker, the coextensive space, becomes a surrogate for others. What you do to it, you do to them.”

“Right,” Charles said. “There are no particles, you understand — no such thing as space or time. Those are just fragments of the old paradigm now. We’re left with nothing but descriptors interacting within an undefined matrix.” He looked over my shoulder at Casares and Zenger, visible as moving shapes behind the translucent curtain. Chinjia and Leander helped them. “We can excite a distant particle in a way that can be interpreted as a signal.”

“How fast?” I asked.

“How fast can the signal travel? Instantaneously,” he said. “Remember. Distance doesn’t exist.”

“Don’t you violate a few important laws?”

“You bet,” Charles said enthusiastically. “Paradigm shift. And I don’t say that lightly. We’ve thrown causality right out the door. We replace it with an elegant balancing act in the Bell Continuum. Bookkeeping.” He rounded his lips, sucked in a deep breath, folded his hands on the table and rapped the surface lightly with a knuckle. “That’s the explanation. In a nutshell.”

“All of it?” I asked. He was holding something back.

“All of it that’s relevant for now — and certainly as much as you’d care to hear.”

“You mean, as much as I’d understand. One more question. What’s the ‘destiny tweak’?”

Charles lowered his eyes. “You’ve read the letter from Stanford,” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s why you sent me that message a few years back.”

“Yes.”

“It was speculation. Pure and unfounded.”

“Nothing more?”

He shook his head. “How’s your husband’s work going?”

“Very well,” I said.

“You’ve a curious taste for scientists, Miz Majumdar,” Charles said with an enigmatic smile.

Before I could respond, Leander and Casares pushed through the curtain. They sat in the booth and Casares said, “We’re finished. The inside of the container is scarred — as if it’s been baked and etched. I’m convinced energy was created by a mirror matter interaction in the sealed sample. Doctor Zenger is convinced, as well.”

Zenger came forward and said, “I’ll go along for the time being.”

“We can send our report directly to the President, or…”

“I’ll take it to her,” I said.

“Have you made security arrangements yet?” Leander asked. “We need to know whom we can talk to.”

“We’re still working out details.”

“Government’s in the details,” Charles said.

On the shuttle back from the lab, I looked at Charles and Chinjia, observing their postures, the play of their glances at each other and at me, Zenger, and Casares. Flying over Solis Dorsa, avoiding the edge of a thin but wide dust storm, I experienced a quick shiver of unease.

Something very important was being left unspoken, undescribed.

More than government lay in the details.

I fell into a darker mood. The less I understood, the less I could interpret what was being said, the weaker Ti Sandra and I would be. We could not afford weakness. We would have to understand more fully — and anticipate as much as we possibly could.

There was only one way for me to do that. I lacked Charles’s native ability. I could not track his leaps of intuition. I would have to take at least a step toward being more like Orianna. Charles had made the suggestion. It was obvious, it was necessary, but I still strongly resisted.

I would need an enhancement.

I would have to reach Charles’s level of comprehension, if not brilliance, and as soon as possible.