Moving Mars

Part Six

Preamble

“I’m going to be in the goo for at least three more weeks,” Ti Sandra said, allowing herself to be seen only from the shoulders up. She appeared pale but more animated. She had just come out of intensive reconstruction, three more days unconscious and at the mercy of her doctors. I took her call in my small office at Kaibab, weary from days of conferences. Memory cubes piled high on my desk carried station designs and reports from manufacturers, shippers, and architects.

“I’ve convinced the doctors to move me to Many Hills. They’ll take me over this afternoon by shuttle. I can start seeing visitors and be rolled into committee meetings… I’ll be able to take over that part of the job.”

“That’s a considerable relief,” I said. I moved her image a few centimeters in the projection space to make room for incoming text reports from Point One on project security.

“I can’t come to Kaibab, obviously. You’ll have to build our little project by yourself for the time being.”

“It’s building,” I said.

“You sound flat, Cassie.”

“I’m keeping on keeping on,” I said, never able to hide my feelings from Ti Sandra. In truth, in the past week, since hearing of Ilya’s death, I had become an automaton. It was the best thing that could happen to me. No time to think of my grief, no time to contemplate the future beyond a few brief weeks, lists of jobs to do that took me eighteen or twenty hours a day, and the worst times of all, those few minutes before exhaustion compelled me to sleep…

“What’s your goal, honey?”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“We have to keep goals. Even sacrificial lambs should have something to look forward to.”

Somehow that suggestion seemed obscene. I turned away, shaking my head. “Survival,” I said.

Ti Sandra’s face wrinkled with concern. “We’re going to talk at least once every day. We’ve both lost our rudders, Cassie. I’ll be your rudder if you’ll be mine.”

“Deal,” I said.

“Good,” she said. She took a deep breath and the top of her head rose briefly out of frame. “Tell me about Kaibab.”

I outlined what had happened in the few days since we had last spoken. From around Mars, cargo and passenger shuttles had arrived by the score at the secret station on Kaibab Plateau. Half-finished tunnels had been given quick cosmetic touches. New quarters had been opened and supplied with rudimentary comforts. The main laboratory had been finished and construction of the main tweakers had begun.

Kaibab’s population had expanded quickly: two hundred, three hundred, four. The ice lens could supply water enough for a thousand people. Other Point One people arrived daily. Soon I would have a miniature capital working within the cold tunnels and chambers — a backup to Many Hills.

The tweaker project and the Kaibab laboratory had been given the same code name: Preamble. The ultimate goal of Preamble — to provide the President with an option in case of extreme emergency — was known only to a very few. That the option loomed large as a real possibility was known only to Ti Sandra, Charles, Leander, and myself.

Two more Olympians — Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta and Tamara Kwang — had flown in to join Charles, Stephen Leander, Nehemiah Royce, and Vico-Persoff. Pincher and Yueh Liu remained at Tharsis Research, working on a backup tweaker and overseeing the growth of more thinkers.

I finished my report. Ti Sandra bit her lower lip, nodding approval. “You’ve done great, Cassie,” she said. “I tell you what. When this is all over, we’ll have a family party. I’ll wear the brightest gown you’ve ever seen, and we’ll celebrate being secure. That’s my goal.”

“It’s a wonderful goal. Welcome back into the loop,” I said, and we signed off.

I stared at the desk for a moment, lost in contemplation.

Mars was still deep in the dangerous woods. We could mount big guns, but that was all — and there was still a question as to whether we had the will to fire our big guns. So long as that question remained, we were far from secure. But our most obvious and insidious danger was internal.

The Republic would not long stand the strain. Martians rebuilt, installed more robust backup systems for life support… And still lived in fear of another Freeze, or worse. Rumors swept the stations as government agents fanned out to old mining claims, searching for evidence of locusts. Even Cyane Sulci was searched from the air. The search was futile. A factory seed no larger than a fist, disguised as a rock, would be almost impossible to uncover. But for the destruction at Melas Dorsa, no signs were found.

The locusts had struck Melas Dorsa with extraordinary cunning and efficiency, first sending small units into the deserted station to reconnoiter and knock out com, then big destructors. Or so the speculations went… for we had no record of what had happened there, other than the mute evidence of breached tunnels, destroyed equipment, and the shattered remains of arbeiters.

We maintained a tentative date for elections, but that date was six months away — and nobody knew what would happen or where we might be by then.

As accusations flew, heads of state within the Triple exchanged messages, offered reassurances, scanned all available diplomatic channels for signs and symbols of actions to come…

And found nothing. The channels were jammed with posturing and denial. I had never seen the Triple in such a state of absolute confusion.

None of the Earth alliances would admit to having given the go-ahead for war on Mars — but all were demanding full disclosure of Mars’s newfound powers. The Moon and the Belter BMs were if anything even more shrill about the Martian threat. The Republic Information Office and all diplomatic agencies worked to reassure the other members of the Triple of Mars’s peaceful intentions, but could not tell them precisely what had happened… or what we might do next.

Most Martians demanded full disclosure as well. Opposition inside the government was still too disorganized to mount a full effort against Ti Sandra and myself, but clearly the pressure would increase in weeks or months until it became unbearable.

We were contemplating a game of baboon’s asses — displaying the colors — on an enormous scale. In this game, however, for one contestant to even blink while making preparations to depart the field…

Disaster.

Point One’s extensive com net returned to full operations. Everything was cobbled together, with human rather than thinker oversight. Martian thinkers were still in very short supply; fewer than twenty had been grown and initiated at Tharsis Research and of those, only ten could be pulled from civilian purposes for the Republic’s needs. Many Hills received three, Kaibab, six — three of them QLs with built-in interpreters, to guide the large tweakers.

Lieh Walker had become spymaster. Day by day, she expanded the Republic’s solicitation of outlaw data gleans — buying information at great expense from sources that were not particular about their methods. We should have established extensive spy networks months before — but we had not foreseen a time when there would be such serious disharmony between Earth and Mars. Now, perhaps too late, we became more ruthless.

We added dozens of new data flies — operatives who coursed the Earth nets, tapped cable transmissions, fed from the sweet attractions of private GEWA and GSHA connections. Some of the data we gleaned we sold to other sources to help finance our own operations.

When Lieh asked me to authorize the funding of twenty additional agents on Earth and in the Belt, I asked what their status would be. “Well-paid,” she said. “Expendable.” GEWA and GSHA had already swatted a few of our flies — a usually fatal punishment that transferred corrosive evolvons to the data-coursing enhancements the flies used in the nets. “If I need to know any more,” I said, “tell me.” “It’s on my back,” she said. “You’ve got enough to carry now.”

By which she meant, I was carrying the lives of every Martian, herself included — and I never knew whether she approved or not. I suspect she didn’t.

Still, some good news came. Stan had been released by Cailetet. Crown Niger had kept Stan and his wife and child in detention at Kipini Station in Chryse for a total of ten weeks, preventing any communication with the outside. I had two text letters from Stan after his release; there was time only for a brief reply, and of course I could not tell him where I was, or what I was doing.

I made a few quick calls and got him a post at Many Hills, where he could use his experience with Cailetet to work on some diplomatic patchwork. I had heard little from Crown Niger’s camp; they were lying low after the Freeze, wisely enough, hoping to weather the storm. Ti Sandra created a special task force to deal with the dissident BMs and regions. Stan, I thought, could join this task force.

Charles and I met frequently, sometimes alone, more often with Stephen Leander and others present. Our discussions revolved around practical aspects of moving large objects with the tweakers.

He spent hours each day immersed in the QL thinker, preparing, exercising for another trip. The effort took its toll. After long sessions connected to the QL, Charles needed several minutes to begin speaking coherently. I feared for him.

Six attended the first conference on Preamble, two weeks after Ilya’s death: myself, Charles and Leander, areologist Faoud Abdi of Mariner Valley, architect and engineer Gerard Wachsler from Steinburg-Leschke in Arcadia, and a newly initiated Martian thinker, who had just the day before chosen her name: Aelita. Aelita would act as Preamble’s main thinker, coordinating all the station’s and project’s activities.

The experts convened in the laboratory annex, still unfinished. As we seated ourselves, nano paint crept along the walls, hissing quietly and forming geometric decorations. The ever-present smell of yeast was particularly pungent here. We seemed to live always in a vast bakery.

Faoud Abdi — tall, sharp-featured, with large, languid eyes — was the first to speak. He wore a neat white jallabah, slate and books making prominent lumps in the robe’s large pockets.

“I have been told to consider an impossibility,” Abdi began, standing before us with his back to a small data display. “I have been told to research the effects on Mars of a brief period without Solar System gravitational pull. I am told this is purely theoretical — and so I must assume that we are all going to do something drastic with Mars, perhaps what happened to Phobos. Unless Phobos is theoretical as well.” He regarded us dubiously, received no reaction to his humor — if humor was intended — and sighed. “I must tell you why Mars is stable now, and discuss popular theories of Mars’s areological decline. Is this what you wish?”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“I once worked with your husband, Madam Vice President. He was a fine man and we shall all miss him.”

“Thank you.”

“He was concerned, as am I, about the death of Mars hundreds of millions of years ago. But in fact death is a misnomer, for Mars is not completely cool inside. There is still areological activity. However, the plumes rising within the mantle have stabilized and no longer produce lateral pressure on the crust of Mars.

“In the past, there were never more than twelve crustal plates, and now those plates have frozen into one. No lateral pressure — no migration of the old plates — no fracture and subduction of plate boundaries — reduces volcanism. The last volcanoes active on Mars were the shield volcanoes familiar to us all, the Tharsis trio by main example, and Olympus itself. Without plate movement, mountains stopped building, and without volcanism, outgassing ceased, and Mars’s thin atmosphere simply evaporated into space, not to be replaced. Mars’s biosphere died within a few hundred million years of the end of tectonics. Now, stability…”

“Balanced flow,” Leander said.

“Precisely. Aelita, please bring up Dr. Wegda’s deep soundings of the Martian crust and mantle.”

Aelita complied. Behind Abdi appeared a diagram familiar to all — a cross-section of Mars, rotating to provide a three-dimensional view of the interior. “You see, there are sixteen cyclic plumes rising and sinking, but they have assumed a dimpled inverted form, rising on the outside and sinking on the inside. The net force conveyed to the crust over these plumes is zero, though local areological effects are evident. The stability is really too delicate… That is, Mars should shift at any time. But this has not happened in three hundred million years. There is much we do not understand.

“A shove applied to the entire planet, however slight — as might be given by removing solar tidal forces, for example — could upset the plumes and re-start tectonic activity.” He stopped for a moment, hands hovering beside the frozen diagram of Mars. “Without a large moon to keep Mars in balance, relatively slight changes may also tilt the axis.”

“If we leave, it must be to venture closer to the sun, no?” Abdi asked.

“We haven’t decided,” I said.

“If that is so, there would be much greater effects than I have calculated. And my results already point to resumption of tectonics.”

“What would that mean? For all of us living here?” Wachsler asked.

“More marsquakes. Substantial activity along the old plate boundaries, perhaps. Volcanoes. There is no way to predict the long-term effects.”

“Short-term?” Wachsler asked.

“Several major marsquakes, but it would take decades before volcanism became widespread along new arcs of fire.”

“Would it be reversible?” Wachsler.asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Once we jiggled it, could we expect Mars to become stable again?”

“Not for perhaps tens of millions of years,” Abdi said. “Stability is stability. Instability is not.”

“Aelita?” Leander asked, patting his new offspring on its arbeiter carriage.

Aelita’s voice was smooth and huskily feminine. Its image, a long-faced, classically featured female with black hair cut in a short shag, reminded me of a Disney wicked queen. “Dr. Abdi’s conclusions seem reasonable. My libraries do not provide complete information about Mars’s interior.”

“You have all that’s available,” Leander said.

“Then I suggest we learn more,” Aelita said.

Abdi glanced around the table. He smiled.

“We will,” I said. “Dr. Abdi, we’ll need more information about Mars’s interior within twenty days.”

“Yes, Madam Vice President,” Abdi said happily. “Am I to understand — I will do a survey, on the quick, larger than that of Dr. Wegda himself?”

“Please,” I said. “It’s very important. You understand security requirements?”

“I do,” said Dr. Abdi solemnly.

“Doctor Wachsler, every station should make a structural report. How well can they withstand quakes? Do any stations lie directly over old plate boundaries?”

“A few.” Wachsler frowned and shook his head. “We’ve never designed stations to withstand heavy areologic activity.”

“Can they be strengthened?” I asked.

“Some stations sit on old alluvial soils. If there’s a major marsquake, every seam will be torn out, tunnels breached… You name it.”

“Those we’ll have to evacuate, won’t we?” I said. “We’ll meet with the folks in charge of civil preparations and discuss, that tomorrow. Dr. Wachsler, Dr. Abdi, I authorize you to draw funds from government accounting, tagged Black, Preamble. Aelita will monitor your experiments, and you will report every week to this committee.”

Wachsler stared at us as if we were all out of our minds. “I understand we’re dealing with some spectacular technologies here, but have you thought about the human impact?”

His note of condescension rankled me. “That’s almost all I’ve thought about, Doctor.”

“What could Earth possibly do to us that would be worse than what you’re contemplating? We’ve all seen the destruction at Melas Dorsa — but that’s nothing compared to hundreds of stations facing quakes.”

Charles raised his hand like a student in class. “May I answer?”

“Certainly,” I said.

“The locusts are just the beginning. In a few more months, they can turn Mars into a burnt cinder. If that isn’t enough, they can drop us into the sun, or shoot us out into space.”

Wachsler’s face went pale, but his dander was up. He obviously could not comprehend what Charles was saying, and was going to treat it as high exaggeration. He crinkled his eyes dubiously. “You truly believe this?”

Abdi said, “My dear doctor, was it trivial that a moon was shifted from its orbit, and moved instantly to the vicinity of Earth?”

“I only know what I was told,” Wachsler said stubbornly.

“I was there,” Leander said. “So was Charles.”

Wachsler shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Madam Vice President, I know my duty. But I must express my dismay that so much disruption and even destruction is contemplated, yet nobody is going to ask Martians what they want.”

“I wish there were time, and that we had the means,” I said.

“No, you don’t,” Wachsler said. “Not really. If Martians decided to vote this idea down, to stay where we are…”

“That could be suicide,” Charles said.

“Do we have the right to choose our fate?” Wachsler asked heatedly. “Or do you believe you can choose for us, because you are so much better informed?”

To this there was no good answer. Wachsler had expressed the dilemma admirably. “I hope we are judged less harshly, Doctor Wachsler,” I said quietly.

“Don’t count on it, Madam Vice President,” he said.

Charles stayed behind after the meeting ended. Aelita stayed as well. “We haven’t talked about Ilya,” he said.

“I’d rather not,” I said.

“Doctor Abdi reminded me… I’d like to express my sorrow. He was a wonderful man.”

“Please,” I said, looking away. It was all the more unbearable coming from Charles.

“Do you blame me for his death?” Charles asked, his voice plaintive.

“No,” I said. “How could I?”

“If I had died ten years ago, none of this would have happened… Not this way.”

“What kind of megalomania is that?” I asked.

“Without my contribution, we wouldn’t have built a tweaker for another five or ten years. Earth might have built it first.”

I stared at him, wondering whether I could maintain my careful mask of neutral efficiency. “I’m as much to blame as you are.”

“I need to know. Because if you blame me for that, I don’t think I could stand it. Really.”

Tears welled in his eyes. I turned away, absolutely unwilling to join him in a display of emotion. “Get yourself together,” I said, a little harshly.

“I’ve never felt more together and clear-headed in my entire life.”

“My head is not clear and I’m not at the top of my form. Please. Please.” I pounded the table with my fist. “Just please don’t.”

“I won’t,” he said,

“I spoke to Ti Sandra a few hours ago,” I said, swallowing and regaining my composure. “We have to choose where we’ll take Mars when the time comes. If it comes. And we’ll have to make a test run with Phobos.”

“I’ve been planning that,” Charles said. “We can take the Mercury and the original tweaker to Phobos within a few days. The larger tweakers should stay here.”

“We need to disperse the tweakers and thinkers, in case Earth makes another, more directed attempt to stop us.”

Charles looked away. “We could destroy all of our equipment,” he said. “Provide proof to Earth.”

“I’d do that in an instant,” I said, “if Earth could possibly believe us. They can’t. The stakes are too high. Politics and survival drive everything now.”

“I thought I’d make the suggestion. I would kill myself if I thought it would change the situation. If I thought I could stop your grieving.”

I glared at him. “I’d kill all of you, myself, if…” The admission startled me, and the last few words came out weakly, with a sudden decrease of breath. Charles did not seem startled or shocked.

“I envied Ilya. I remember you years ago,” he said after a pause of many seconds. “I’ve been with a fair number of women since, and none has had your strength of purpose, your conviction.”

“Purpose?” I asked. “Conviction?”

“I said to myself, ‘She’s as crazy as you are.’ ”

“Jesus,” I said, forcing a laugh.

“I believed I could rock the century-long status quo, discover how the universe worked. And you… I said you’d become President of Mars. Remember?”

“I’ll go back through my diaries and check it out,” I said. “Maybe you can read tarot after all this is settled.”

“It will never be settled,” Charles said. “Events this large never finish. You’ve never asked about my wife.”

“It’s none of my business.”

“She was a sweet woman, a true Martian. She stood by me for three years. She had a strong sense of duty, and she really tried. But eventually she left. She said she never knew where I was — what I was thinking.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You obviously weren’t well-matched.”

“No.” He turned away, seeming to wilt. I wondered how much the QL links were draining him.

I needed to bring us back to our focus. “Where should Mars go?” I asked.

Charles straightened and linked his slate to the main display. “Aelita, these are rough coordinates and star numbers. Link and update with the astronomy library.”

Aelita graphically depicted a scatter of densely-packed stars.

“We can’t just move a few light-years away. With present tracking and measuring, Earth could find us anywhere within a few hundred light-years. If we move at all, it’s because Earth has proven it will do everything it can to destroy us… And will keep on trying.“

Bald expression of our dilemma still had power to chill me.

“So I’m suggesting we make a grand leap. I’ve looked at the new surveys, run them through Aelita for processing, and come up with a candidate. It’s the best of all possible places in the near galaxy. About ten thousand light-years away, five thousand light-years closer to galactic center. A narrow, restricted cloud separating from the leading edge of a galactic arm. A thick cluster of stars a few billion years younger than most of the stars near the sun, stable and rich with metals. Beautiful skies, bright nights.

“I searched the Galactic Survey Twenty-Two Catalog and found a yellow dwarf star about nine-tenths the size of the sun, with perturbations suggesting four large planets. Rocky worlds unknown, of course. And there are a dozen similar stars in the same region.

“I give them to you,” he concluded. “All the clouds and stars, a new garden of flowers.” He watched me closely. “Choose. Become mother to the new Mars.”

I remembered the ancient flowers Charles had given me near Trés Haut Médoc, cut from the Glass Sea beds. Now he offered me a bouquet of stars. After the weariness and grief, Charles could still take my breath away.

“I want to apologize,” I said. “I’ve been very rough on you. You’ve done magnificent work.”

“Thank you,” he said. His face brightened, and he watched me with gentle intensity. I still had such power to please Charles. I had never had such a hold on Ilya, and perhaps that was why I loved him.

I stared at the stars circled and blinking on the outskirts of the elongated blob. “Will we need reservations?” I asked.

I interrupted an argument the next day, as I walked with Dandy and Lieh to inspect the progress on the big tweakers.

The central laboratory had been finished the week before, the equipment had been consolidated in one chamber, and a few simple tests had been run converting small samples of oxygen to anti-oxygen. When we entered the lab, I heard Leander’s voice rise above shouting.

“Doesn’t anybody understand what we’re up against?”

Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta and Tamara Kwang had squared off against Charles, Leander, and Royce. Kwang saw me enter the lab and fixed her face in a chilly mask. Maspero-Gambacorta shook his head, swearing beneath his breath, and walked to squat on the low bench supporting the larger force disorder pumps. Royce gathered up his slate and a few tools and seemed about ready to leave, but relented, standing awkwardly with his arms full. Leander’s face had flushed with emotion; Charles, sitting with hands wrapped on one crossed knee, appeared calm, even a little distanced from the row.

“Disagreements?” I asked.

“Nothing we can’t handle,” Leander said, a little too quickly.

“Tamara and Mitchell feel we should open our research to public scrutiny,” Charles said.

“It’s the sanest thing to do,” Kwang said.

“None of this is sane,” Maspero-Gambacorta murmured, folding his arms.

“Whom would we tell first?”

“Earth, obviously,” Kwang said. “I have friends on Earth, people who could help all of us sort these things through — the political problems, the misunderstandings — ”

“Misunderstandings?” I asked.

“I’m not a fool,” Kwang said defensively. “I know what our situation is, but if only we could talk, find common ground… It would make me feel so much better…” Her words faded and she shook her head.

“We’ve been over this time and again,” Leander said.

“It’s a feedback dilemma,” Charles said.

“I know!” Kwang shouted, raising her fists. “They might kill us if they think we know how to kill them… But they won’t kill us if they think we can get to them first. We can’t tell them what we know, because we know how to kill them. And if we tell them, they’ll know how to kill us. That is not sane!”

“I agree,” I said. “The best solution is to let things equalize, cool off.”

“By running away?” Maspero-Gambacorta asked. “Doesn’t seem very adult.”

“Can you think of a better idea?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “A dozen better ideas. None of them supported by Charles or Stephen.”

“Tell me,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see their value.”

He screwed up his face in frustration. “All right, they’re idealistic, screwball risks, not better ideas. But maybe if we tried one of them, we would sleep better nights!”

“The point is not for us to sleep better,” I said. “It’s for Mars to live, and live free.”

“We’re all working as hard as we can,” Kwang said. “Don’t think just because we disagree, we’re not doing our work.”

“I don’t think that,” I said. “If you come up with a better idea — idealistic or cynical or whatever — please let me know.”

Royce sat emphatically, arms still folded, and said, “All right. Over with? Can we get back to work now?”

“We’ve got about four more weeks before we have no secrets whatsoever,” Ti Sandra said at the beginning of our next daily conference call. Alone in my quarters, surrounded by hollow sounds of construction echoing through the soil into the tunnels, I watched Ti Sandra’s range of expressions as I might examine the face of an idol, hoping for clues. “It’s time to survey,” she said. “Take Phobos to our suggested destination. People will notice that a moon has been borrowed, so we’ll need to have the moon back before any alarm is raised. The trip must take less than five hours.”

“Charles and I have discussed the details. He thinks we can manage,” I said. “I want to go with them.”

“Why?” Ti Sandra said.

“I won’t even think about sending Mars someplace unless I’ve been there first.”

“Point One will have a fit.”

“Then we just won’t tell them,” I said.

Ti Sandra considered for a moment, weighing risks against advantages. “You’ll go with them. I want somebody I can trust implicitly. As far as I’m concerned, you’re flesh of my flesh.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’d like to put a tweaker team on Deimos as well. If you don’t come back, or come back too late, we’ll move Deimos into the Belt, hide it, and prepare for the worst.”

The prospect of using Deimos as a backup — no need to specify for what purpose — seemed almost normal, not in the least disturbing.

“Are we telling them that Phobos is moving?”

“We owe them that much,” she said. “Whether they’ll believe we’re not attacking, I can’t predict.”

I told her about Wachsler’s continuing objections, about the growing spirit of resistance among the Olympians and some of our closest advisors and aides.

“Just what I expected,” she said. “I’d join you if I could. Help you state our case a little more firmly. But you can do it. They’ll come around.”

I felt my sense of urgency might not be communicating over the vid display. “It may not be that easy. Think of what we’re suggesting.”

“It scares the hell out of me,” Ti Sandra said. “Maybe they’re so scared they’d rather trust Earth?”

“It’s a natural reaction.”

“Is everybody forgetting so quickly?”

“I hope not,” I said.

“Some folks didn’t lose much,” Ti Sandra said with a touch of bitterness. “Keep fighting and persuading, Cassie. Keep your believers enthused. Send them out as proselytizers, if you can spare them.“

“Another campaign,” I said.

“It never ends,” Ti Sandra said.

“Sometimes I feel like such a monster, even contemplating this. Couldn’t we investigate the possibility of having a plebiscite?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Charles gives Earth a month, maybe two, with the clues they have… And he doesn’t eliminate the possibility that there are spies here. It could come much sooner. Oh, God. There is so little choice.”

“Exactly,” Ti Sandra said. “You and I are expendable. We’re working to save everybody else. Remember that, honey.”

“We need you here so much,” I said, my voice breaking. “There’s so little to keep me going any more.”

“I’m healing as fast as I can. You hold on. You’re strong.”

Just hours before dawn, on the twenty-third of Aquarius, five of the Preamble team — -Charles, Leander, myself, and two astronomers — boarded a tractor and crossed a kilometer along a new-carved track from Kaibab to a hidden Mercury launch site.

The astronomers I had met two hours before. They had just arrived from UMS. The elder of the two, Jackson Hergesheimer, specialized in the study of extrasolar planets. He had originally come from the Moon and had no BM affiliation. UMS had invited him to join the faculty twenty years ago. He was tall, knobby, gray-haired, with a worried monkey-like face and large hands.

His assistant, Galena Cameron, had come from the Belt five years before to study at Tharsis Research University . She specialized in the engineering of deep-space observatories. Some of the equipment being brought on board was hers: prototype sensors for the Martian SGO, Supraplanar Galactic Observer, a multi-BM prestige project whose launch had been postponed nine times in the past five years. Hergesheimer seemed unimpressed by what we were going to do — hiding his fear, I suspected — but Cameron’s face sported a rosy flush and her hands could not stop moving.

The launch pad revetment appeared as low dark mounds in our searchlight beams. The Mercury itself lay under a simple soil-colored tarp — the merest of camouflage. Clearly, there had been only a knee-jerk attempt to disguise what was happening here. Equally clearly, observers from the Belt or Earth or points between would have to track hundreds of such launch sites. Martian orbital space was still open to all former BMs, many of whom stubbornly maintained separate orbital shuttle fleets. A launch from what had been disguised as a reopened mining station on Kaibab plateau would not, in itself, attract attention.

The tractor driver, Wanda, a stocky, athletic woman in a bright green thermal suit, looked over her shoulder at us and smiled. “You need to be up and out in thirty minutes. Once you reach orbit, you’ll be given clearance by direct link. When you get back, we’ll use direct link to tell you where to land. We don’t want Terries tracing Mercury back to Preamble.”

“Direct link” was code talk for instantaneous communications using the tweaker. We would be using “direct link” for the first time, but only from orbit.

Charles thanked her and patted her shoulder. “Wanda was our tractor driver on the first jaunt,” he said. “We’re getting to be old hands at this.”

“I don’t ask questions,” Wanda said, brown eyes focusing on each of us in turn, lips set in mild amusement. “I just want the pleasure of seeing the results in the news.”

“No news on this one, I hope,” Charles said. “And that’s all you’ll learn today.”

“Awhh,” Wanda said, disappointed. She extended a pressurized chute between the tractor and the Mercury. The six of us clambered through on our hands and knees. Charles and Leander unloaded the equipment carefully. I helped carry the QL thinker and interpreter. We sealed for launch.

In our narrow couches, stretched side by side in two rows, we waited tensely for the rockets to fire. I hadn’t gone to orbit since my trip to Earth, lifetimes ago.

“Time to tell you something about making a leap,” Charles said. I turned to look at Leander and Charles on my left. Leander lifted his head and grinned. “It isn’t all tea and cakes. For passengers, I mean.”

“What did you leave out?” I asked.

“We won’t have any electrical activity for several minutes while we make the trip, and for a few minutes after. No heat, nothing in the suits, that sort of thing. It might get stuffy in the cabin, but we’ve made a mechanical scrubber without electrical parts, and that should take care of most difficulties for as long as ten or fifteen minutes.”

“Why the lapse?”

“We don’t know. You’ll feel a little queasy, too. It’ll pass, but all your neurons will seem to be on hold for a few minutes. It’s like a blackout, but you sort of realize what’s going on. The body doesn’t like it. Other than that — and it’s pretty minor stuff — everything is as advertised.”

I lay back on the couch. “Why didn’t you mention this earlier?”

“We had trouble enough back there.” Charles waved his hand in the general direction of the laboratory. “What would Wachsler say if we told him?”

“He’d have a fit,” I admitted. “But what will happen to everything on Mars… life support, not to mention everybody’s mental state?”

Leander interrupted what threatened to be a long discussion. “It may not be a problem in a week or two. We think it’s adjustable. We think we can fix it. But for now… be prepared.”

“Anything else I need to know?”

“You won’t even feel a lurch. Smoothest ride in the universe,” Charles said.

Mercury’s human pilot from the first mission had been replaced by a Martian-manufactured dedicated thinker. It gave us a one-minute warning. With a loud series of pops like gunshots, the vehicle lifted on a pillar of flame and steam, pushing us firmly into our couches. Through the ports and on vid displays, we watched Mars recede. The little ship swung around to target the small gray-black moon, and we enjoyed a few minutes of quiet inaction while it carried us into a high dawn.

Cameron lifted her head from her couch as far as the restraints allowed and smiled at me. “I wanted to tell you how honored we are — I am — to be included. This is incredible… Absolutely fantastic. I’m terrified.”

I smiled as much reassurance as I could muster. What we were about to do was beyond my imagination — though not beyond the calculating power of my enhancement.

Because there would be no acceleration, no force expended, a very different notion of force and work came into play — based entirely on descriptor adjustments observed in experiment. Translating into familiar terms, moving Phobos across ten thousand light-years would require stealing from the galactic treasure-chest enough energy to power a star like the sun for several years.

The approach to the moon seemed glacially slow. Phobos, across an hour, grew from a bright speck to a dark smudge as we fell again into Martian shadow.

Deceleration was more abrupt than take-off, one loud staccato burn that left bruises on my elbow where it pressed against a thinly padded metal bar. We skimmed a few hundred meters above the regolith of Phobos, ancient gray and black mottled craters, grooves, pits, and scars from early mining and research.

We would be occupying a thirty-year-old mining base near the center of Stickney crater, still viable but inhabited only by arbeiters.

If Mercury were attacked, we would have a better chance of surviving buried beneath the small moon’s bleak gray surface.

“There it is,” Leander said. Charles sat up. On one sloping side of the irregular bowl of Stickney crater, a small landing beacon flashed every few seconds, as it had for decades. Mercury shifted course with a lurch. We approached the beacon with alarming speed.

“Searching for anchor points,” the thinker announced.

Another jarring deceleration, then a gentle bump as Mercury locked down. We checked all systems in the station, found everything in adequate condition, and extended the ship’s transfer tube.

Charles unbelted from the couch and I followed, floating free. “Three days’ supplies,” Charles said with a crooked grin as he passed me in the cargo bay.

“Will that be enough?” Galena Cameron asked, face creased in concern.

“We hope to be gone less than five hours,” Leander called from the deck above.

Hergesheimer grimaced. “We could spend ten years studying the system and not know enough.”

“The tunnels are going to be cold and uncomfortable for several hours,” Leander said. “Not used to visitors.”

Crawling through the transfer tube behind Charles, I nearly bumped into an old arbeiter felted with dust. It floated in a corner, the size and approximate color of a much-loved teddy bear, ancient sensor torque spinning with a faint squeak as it examined us.

“This device is in need of repair,” it said in a muffled voice.

Charles rotated in the lock to look at me, and for the first time in weeks I smiled, remembering Trés Haut Médoc. He returned the smile, wincing as stretched skin tugged on his nano patches. “We really should take better care of our orphans,” he said.

Hergesheimer cursed the lack of adequate sensor ports, and Leander instructed a small sample-drilling arbeiter to make new ones. We had brought repair kits with us, and most of the station arbeiters were undergoing upgrades and refits. Galena Cameron coordinated the sensors and telescopes, sitting in a cold cubic chamber by herself, putting everything through practice runs with simulated targets and data.

For the time being, I had little to do. I helped Leander by sitting in the star-shaped central control chamber and keeping close watch on pressure integrity; we could not trust the station’s own emergency systems until the upgrades were finished. I occupied one point of the star. Charles nursed the QL thinker in another. He leaned around the corner, optic leads attached to the back of his head, and said, “It’s fuddled.”

“What is?”

“The thinker. I should have given it a focusing task before we left. It’s off somewhere doing something we’ll never need to know about.”

“Can you get it back?” I asked.

“Of course. It just takes a while to corral all of its horses. How’s your enhancement?”

“Quiet, actually,” I said. “I think I’ve finally got it under control.”

“Good.” He looked at the wall behind me as if someone might be there. I felt the urge to turn, but I knew we were alone in the control center. “Casseia, I don’t know what this is going to do to me. Every time I guide the QL, I get a different reaction. It’s definitely not…” He couldn’t seem to find the word. He waggled his fingers in the air.

“Pleasant?” I offered.

“Maybe too pleasant.” he said. “Like slipping into a bad habit. Like joining a raucous party of crazy geniuses. There’s always something enchanting, the solution to everything — ”

“You’d like that,” I said quietly.

“Exactly. My weakness. I go looking for it, and the true parts vanish like ghosts, leaving only a sensation of completeness. The QL chases different kinds of truths, things not useful to human brains. Mathematical tangents we’ll never pursue, logics that actually hurt us. I have to watch myself, or I’ll come back and not be useful. To you or anybody.”

“You’ll always be useful,” I reassured him.

“Not necessarily. I just wanted to ask… May I keep a focus on you? I don’t really have anything but this job and you. Focusing on the job is recursive. Not productive.”

“How do you mean, focus?”

“A goal,” he said. “Something to value that’s real.”

The request bothered me deeply. I decided that a question needed to be asked now, no matter how awkward it might be. “Are you making a pass, Charles?”

“No,” he said. A frown crossed his face and he looked away again. “I need a strong friend. I hope that’s clear, and appropriate.” He took a deep breath. “Casseia, to hit on you now would be so horrible… You’re still grieving.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I need someone here who cares for me in more than a professional sense. To bring me back. Me. Not some product of merging with the QL, not some intellectual mutant.”

“I care for you,” I said. “You’re important in and of yourself. I value you.”

His expression softened. Once again, I felt my power to please and was dismayed by it. “That’s what I need,” he said. “But don’t be frightened. Even if I lose myself, whatever’s left will bring us back. Tamara or Stephen can take my place later. For the big trip.”

“Is it that dangerous?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “But each time gets more difficult. The truths are so compelling.”

“Dangerous truths.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Falling in love with another reality… Getting all set to marry it. And being jilted.”

Leander entered the control center from below, hand over hand in the moon’s weak gravity. “ Galena and Jackson say they’re ready. I’ve connected our tweaker by direct link to Preamble’s big tweaker. We’re getting good signals. I can’t guarantee keeping a connection when we move, but I can probably get it back when we return.”

“It’s all so primitive,” Charles said.

“Doing my best,” Leander said, grinning. “Ready when you are, my captain.”

Galena Cameron came into the center from above, deftly maneuvered around Leander, and faced me. “Madam Vice President — ”

“Casseia, please.”

“We’re ready. We’re getting clean images from outside. The equipment’s meshed and the arbeiters seem to be functioning.”

“Tell Mars we’re going to do it,” I said to Leander.

“Five hours?” Leander asked.

“If we tweak all the descriptors just right,” Charles said. Hergesheimer squeezed in beside Galena , his face slick with sweat. He was terrified.

I felt calm. I pushed from the corner and reached for Charles’s hand. He clasped mine strongly. “We’re all here for you,” I said.

“My orders, Casseia?”

“Take us someplace far, far away,” I said. “Someplace safe and wonderful. Someplace new.”

“I think I have just the place,” he said. “Excuse me.”

He settled back into his chair and connected one last optic lead, long fingers working expertly. We watched the back of his head, the gray nano clamps attached to his cranium, the patterns of his black hair.

Cradled in a sturdy frame of the old base’s central control panel, the QL thinker projected a multicolored circus of complex shapes. The shapes had edges. The edges smoothed and the geometries became fluctuating blobs.

In a foamed rock alcove a meter away, the tweaker itself, and the force disorder pumps that maintained its sample of atoms at absolute zero, awaited the QL’s instructions.

Charles closed his eyes.

“Should we strap in?” Galena asked nervously, her voice little more than a whisper.

“No need,” Leander said, licking his dry lips. “Do anything you feel comfortable with.”

“We’re going,” Charles said.

I glanced at the outside views stacked atop one another on the console, Mars directly below us, Mars’s limb with sun’s corona flaring on black space, clouds of pinpoint stars, graphic of targeted galactic region, graphic of tweaker status.

The QL was now translating human measurements and coordinates into descriptor “language.” The interpreter spoke in a clear female voice, “Particle redescription complete. First destination, first approximation, complete.” The interpreter presented its own private estimation of how things were going: red lines growing as the QL addressed and tweaked descriptors within the supercold sample, then applied the sample’s changing qualities to all particles within the mass and near vicinity of the moon.

“We’ll need at least half an hour to find out where we are and calculate how far off we are,” Hergesheimer said.

“Right,” Leander said. The position fed into the QL would automatically correct for the movement of our target star in the ten thousand Earth years since its image began a light-speed journey, but other factors made exactitude difficult.

The room felt colder. The displays blanked, my arms numbed, my vision filled with fringes and distortions. I felt no sensation of movement, no momentous change whatsoever. Unlike anything in previous human history, tweaking involved no machinery, detonated no fuel, wasted no energy as heat and noise. The process had very little drama. The results would have to make up for that…

The displays flicked back on. My arms seemed cold, my legs hot, but I did not feel ill. My companions blinked, opened their eyes as if from a brief nap.

Charles moaned slightly, then apologized under his breath. “I’ll be with you in a minute,” he said.

“Where are we?” Leander asked.

I saw nothing in all the external views but stars. Mars had vanished. The background darkness, however, was enlivened by thick, interwoven wisps of faint color. Some of the stars seemed fogged, broader and less well-defined than pinpoints. I had never seen a sky like it in my life. Beautiful and terrifying. My blood pounded in my ears, my throat went dry, and I coughed into my fist. For a moment, I felt a rush of claustrophobia. This old tunnel, trapped in a moon tiny as moons go, but huge as rocks go.

And this old battered black rock had gone very far, incomprehensibly far.

There were no human beings within ten thousand light-years, ninety-five thousand trillion kilometers. We were surrounded by billions of kilometers of this vacuum-thin star mist and nothing else, could not know where we were, might be lost.

I forced my fingers to unclench and took several deep breaths.

Hergesheimer and Cameron worked quietly and quickly, drawing together all of their equipment to process the images and calculate position.

Hergesheimer swore under his breath. “We need more specifics on family dispersion for this group,” he told Cameron, pointing to five stars wreathed in blue haze, and she quickly calculated on her slate, forgoing the computers attached to the equipment.

“That’s group A-twenty-nine, EGO 23-7-6956 through 60,” she said.

“There’s the target.” Hergesheimer fingered a toggle beneath the display and swung our view, then pointed to a brilliant, tiny, unfogged spot centered in cross-hairs, barely more than a point against the wispy blackness. “We’re off by sixty billion kilometers,” he said, and then, admiringly, he added, “Not bad for a first approximation.” His admiration quickly turned somber. “But this isn’t horseshoes. We’re outside the orbit of the farthest planet by fifty-four billion kilometers.” He examined his equipment, nodded with an intense frown, and said, “Gentlefolks, if it matters after what we’ve just done… There are seven planets in our target system, three immense gas giants, very young, two to five times bigger than Jupiter, four small rocky worlds close to the star, and in between, lots of empty- space situated just right for a comfortable orbit, with nothing to avoid but a diffuse asteroid belt.

“But that won’t mean anything if we don’t make a slight correction.” Hergesheimer looked at me, swallowed hard, and nodded, as if acknowledging this was all worth being slightly uncool over.

“Charles?” Leander said.

“QL’s getting the corrections and translating now,” Charles said. “We’ll move again in five minutes.”

Deep within Phobos, something shifted with a grinding bass groan that sounded alive and monstrous. The station’s insulated walls vibrated. All of us except Charles looked at each other uneasily.

“We’ve heard that before, not as loud,” Leander said. “We’ve jerked this moon around a lot recently. Different tidal stresses.”

“And more to come,” Cameron said.

“There shouldn’t be any problems,” Leander assured us. “The stresses are minor. But the noise is impressive…”

Cameron pushed up beside me. “There’s a rec room with direct view,” she said. “The miners must have added it before the last map update. I sent an arbeiter to dust it and see if the outside armor would open. Dr. Hergesheimer doesn’t need more help until after we arrive — everything’s automatic now. I’d like to experience the move… I’d like company, too. Do they need you right here, right now?”

Charles seemed oblivious, but I did not want to leave him. “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll stay here.” Cameron gave me an eager, anxious look, backed away, spun around with the expert grace of a Belter, and took a tunnel leading to the surface.

Hergesheimer said, “She’s young. I don’t even look through optical telescopes any more; it’s not worth the effort. The eyes see nothing.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing direct,” Leander said. “We’ll all take a peek when we finish moving.”

I still straggled to absorb the enormity of the region of space around us, the hundreds of thousands of stars, clouds of gas and dust.

Distance not important. Distance does not exist except as values within descriptors.

“Are you all right?” Leander asked me, and I shook my head. My cheeks were wet; spherical glittering tears drifted slowly toward my feet in the weak pull of Phobos.

“Sad?” Charles asked, turning toward me. His face seemed extraordinarily peaceful, unnaturally relaxed and unconcerned. I realized Leander’s question had pulled him away from his concentration.

“No,” I said. “A sense of scale. Lost. I just don’t know what will awe me any more.”

Charles turned away, eyes languid. “Making a mistake will awe every one of us,” he said quietly. “Destiny tweak.”

That phrase again, so often denied. I faced Leander and poked a finger not gently into his chest. In a whisper, I said, “I’ve heard that before. You said it was nothing.”

“Charles said it was nothing,” Leander said, shrugging. “He mumbles odd things when he’s down there with the QL.”

“Do you know what he means?” I asked.

Leander shook his head wryly. “I thought I did, once, years ago.”

“Well?”

“We invoked a destiny tweak to clear up logical contradictions. Also, to explain why we could not travel in time, except as instantaneous travel in space affects our position in time. It seemed very classical and naive, and yet… It was that simple.”

“What was simple?”

“With your enhancement, you must understand what the problems are.”

“Travel at speeds that outstrip a photon is logically difficult in a causal universe,” I said.

“Nobody’s much cared about a causal universe for over a century,” Leander said. “But descriptor theory puts everything back on a different sort of causal basis, albeit cause and effect are ultimately limited to the rules governing descriptor interactions.”

I understood that much: all external phenomena, all of nature, is simply a kind of dependent variable, the results of descriptor function. Now I had lost myself in mathematical abstractions and had to backtrack. “So is there logical contradiction or not?” I asked.

“The rules of descriptor-function are the only real logic,” Leander said. “We don’t need the destiny tweak.”

“What was it?”

“We never found it,” Leander said, shaking his head reluctantly. “I don’t know why he mentioned it”

“What was it?” I persisted.

“A variation on the old many-worlds hypothesis,” he said. “We thought that moving a mass instantaneously to a point beyond its immediate information sphere simply recreated the mass in a universe not our own. But we have no evidence for other universes.”

Charles said, “Stephen, I don’t feel right about this one. The QL is looking at too many truths.”

Leander frowned. “What can we do, Charles?”

“Hang on,” Charles said, voice thin. His hand reached up. From behind his couch, instinctively, I grasped it. He sighed, squeezed my fingers painfully, and said, “Damn. We’re missing something.”

Hergesheimer listened with his forehead creased. “What is he talking about?” he asked.

“Get Galena in here,” Charles said. “Please hurry. Don’t let her look outside.”

Hergesheimer started down the tunnel.

“Can I do something, Charles?” I asked, still holding his hand.

“The QL has found a bad path,” Charles said. “Don’t look outside.”

I felt a directionless jerk. With my other hand, I grabbed the back of Charles’s couch. Leander became indistinct, wrapped in shadow; he seemed to turn a corner. His mouth moved but he did not speak, or I could not hear him. A whining sound came from behind me, then enveloped me like a cloud of gnats in a nursery full of hungry babies. Bump, bump, bump, I seemed to keep running into myself, yet I did not move, there was only one of me. Collapsing forms around Leander gave me a clue to what I felt: he appeared to be wrapped in deflating balloon images, each slapping itself down around him, making him jerk and shiver: the momentum of colliding world-lines. The cabin filled with collapsing images of the past, but of course that made no sense at all.

I turned my eyes to the displays and saw ghosts of images unsuited to electronics and optics, images that could not be reassembled correctly from their initial encoding. The math was failing. The physics of our instrumentality had become inadequate. We could not see, could not process the information, could not re-imagine reality.

The feeble whining increased in pitch. Still slapped by my colliding past selves, I sensed a direction for the sound and turned to face it, the star-shaped chamber all corners and wrong sight-lines, angles senseless. I recognized a shape, saw Hergesheimer’s face gone cubist and fly’s eye multiple, and the face became Galena Cameron’s, and I was able to put together an hypothesis that Hergesheimer was holding Galena and she was making the whining sound, eyes closed, hands floating around her face like pets demanding attention.

Hergesheimer’s lips formed shapes: I did not look.

And then, Outside.

And, She did.

Leander had moved and I could not locate him in the diverging angles. I still held Charles’s hand. The fingers wrapped in mine became external. Charles held an inverse of my hand. It didn’t matter.

The whole popped. The final slap was horrendous, soul-jarring. My bones and muscles felt as if they had been powdered and reconstituted.

Drops of blood floated in the air. I took a deep breath and choked on them. Something had scored my skin in long, thin, shallow razor passes. My clothing had been sliced as well, and the interior surfaces of the chamber seemed to have been lightly grooved, as if a sharp-tipped flail had thrashed through the cabin. Leander moaned and held his hands to his face. They came away bloody. Hergesheimer hugged Cameron to his breast. She lay in his arms unresisting and unmoving. All slashed, all bloody.

Charles let go of my hand. Where we had held hands, there were no cuts. The back of my hand might have been a picture of cat practice, except where his fingers had covered.

The interior of the chamber felt deadly cold. The displays and electronics still did not function. Then, they returned, and outside, we saw stars, and the brightness of a much closer sun.

For a moment, nobody said anything.

“We need medical attention,” Leander said, holding out his hands and inspecting his bloody clothing. We had brought a fresh medical kit in the shuttle. I went to fetch it. It seemed imperative that I take charge and become nursemaid.

Otherwise, I thought, I might end up just like Galena , limp as a doll, eyes shut tight, lips drawn in endless riddle.

Leander had plunged deep in conversation with Charles when I returned. I applied medicinal nano directly from a vial with a sterile sponge. Everyone stripped down to receive my ministrations. Hergesheimer undressed Galena , who did not resist. We wiped each other, the touch itself reassuring, healing, an orgy of medicinal tenderness.

I applied swift strokes of sponge to Charles’s arms and face. He closed his eyes, enjoying my attentions.

Hergesheimer suspended Galena in a sling net. She drifted lowly down and settled. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Where we want to be,” Charles said.

“What the hell went wrong?” Hergesheimer asked.

“The QL took us through a bad path,” Charles said. “It couldn’t disengage from some compelling truths. I’m sorry. That must not be any explanation at all.”

“We passed through a different universe?” Leander asked.

“I don’t think so,” Charles said. “Something to do with changing our geometry, altering boson world-lines. Photons acquired slight mass.”

Leander said, “Is this something we can understand?”

“Maybe not,” Charles said.

“Are we damaged? I mean, permanently,” Leander said. He knew the questions to ask Charles, our oracular connection to the QL. I kept my mouth shut and listened. Galena seemed to be asleep. Hergesheimer hung in one apex of the star-shaped chamber, half-visible from where I stood, feet pressing with a pebble’s lightness against the floor. The astronomer’s eyes seemed listless, half-dead.

“Photons cut through matter, but not deeply. Only some photons acquired mass. Not complete.” Charles looked at me directly, then at Leander. “QL doesn’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t think we should waste time trying now. It won’t happen again.”

“How do you know?” Leander asked, bringing himself closer to Charles, staring at him intently.

“Because the QL got scared,” Charles said. “It won’t examine those truths again.”

We mopped up the droplets of blood as best we could and made new clothes while Hergesheimer worked alone with his instruments. In the tunnel to the shuttle pad, I stopped Leander to ask, “Do you know what might be wrong with Galena ? She’s still asleep.”

“I’m not sure,” he said.

“Will she recover?”

“I hope so.”

“Can we do what we need to do?”

“Ask Hergesheimer,” Leander said testily. “I’m worried about getting us back. Charles is exhausted. We’re all strung out. It’s been four hours already.” He tried to break loose from my hand, but my fingers clamped down like talons. He grimaced.

“It’s all over, isn’t it?” I said. “We can’t move Mars.”

He swallowed and shook his head, unwilling to face the obvious. “Charles says it won’t happen again.”

“The risk, Stephen.”

“It’s horrendous,” he admitted, looking away. “Horrendous.”

“Did you expect anything like this?”

“Of course not.”

Hergesheimer dragged himself through the tunnel hand over hand. “Not that it matters much,” he said, “but this goddamned system is ideal. It’s everything we thought it might be. The planets are rich with minerals, one is Earth-sized and has a reducing atmosphere but no detectable life… Ripe for terraforming. Two prime gas giants. Lovely young asteroids. The star is a long-term variable like the sun. No sign of intelligent life — no radio chatter. It’s beautiful.”

He showed me pictures and graphs and strings of numbers on his slate. Sludge-brown Earth-sized planet, very unappetizing; huge blue-green gas giants banded with orange and yellow, rich with hydrogen and deuterium; he had made estimates for the total mass of free minerals and carbonifers and volatiles available in the belt. Rich indeed. He switched the slate off abruptly. “To hell with it.”

“You’ve finished?” I asked.

“No, but the essential work is automatic and should be done in a few minutes.”

“Margin for error?” I asked.

“Certainty on broad descriptive grounds. All we could expect,” Hergesheimer said. “Does it matter, Casseia? Are we ever going to return?”

I shook my head. “Do it right anyway.”

“ Galena ’s awake,” Hergesheimer said. “She doesn’t behave.”

“Beg pardon?”

He waggled his fingers in front of his face, stared at me with eyes bulging, accusing, and said, “There is no behavior. She’s blank.”

“Did you see what happened to her?” Stephen asked.

“She was in the observation blister. She’d pulled back the armor and she was looking outside. I caught a glimpse and turned away. It felt like knives.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Leander said.

“You look at her, then,” Hergesheimer said angrily. “Talk to her. You pull her out.”

When I returned to the control chamber, Charles had unstrapped from his couch and exercised slowly, pressing feet against one wall, hands against an adjacent wall. The optic cables to his head had been disconnected. He turned to me as I came in and said, “It truly won’t happen again.”

“ Galena ’s in bad shape,” I said. “What can we do for her?”

“Bad information,” he said, pressing until he grunted. “Bad paths.” He floated free and fell slowly to the deck, landing on flexed knees. “She took in outside information without prior processing. We saw it through viewers that can’t convey the fullness. She’ll have to sort it out.”

“How could what she sees hurt her?” I asked.

“We assume certain things are true,” he said. “When we have visual proof they are not true, we become upset.”

“Hergesheimer says she’s totally unresponsive.”

“She’ll just have to find her way back.”

“I still don’t understand.”

“I have the interpreter modeling a human response to the QL’s re-creation of what was outside. Maybe that will tell us more. If we had stayed in that condition more than a few seconds, we would all have ceased to exist.”

“We can’t move Mars,” I said. “I won’t take the responsibility.”

“It won’t happen again. The QL was badly upset. It won’t look at those truths again.”

My frustration and anger peaked. “I will not send my people into a place like that! I don’t know what you’re talking about, ‘truths’ and that shit. The QL is too damned unreliable. What if it decides to do something even more dangerous and incomprehensible? Was it experimenting on us?”

“No,” Charles said. “It found something it hadn’t noticed before. It was a major breakthrough. What it found answers a lot of questions.”

“Shooting us off into an alternate universe — ”

“There are no alternate universes,” Charles said. “We were in our own universe, with the rules changed.”

“What does that mean?” My breath came in hitches and my hands opened and closed reflexively. I hid my hands behind me, clamping my jaw until my teeth ached.

“The QL discovered a new category of descriptors and tweaked one. This category seems to co-respond directly with every other descriptor on the largest scale. Wholeness. The destiny tweak. We changed the way the universe understands itself. Builds itself.”

“That’s stupid,” I said.

“I don’t understand it yet, myself,” Charles said. “But I don’t deny it.”

“What happened to the old universe?” I demanded.

“The new universe couldn’t conduct any business. It didn’t fit together. Rules contradicted and produced nonsense nature. Everything reverted to the prior rules. We came back.”

“The whole universe?” I folded myself up beside him, hugging my knees. “I can’t absorb that. I can’t take it in, Charles,” I said.

“I think Galena will be all right in a few hours,” Charles said. “Her mind will reject what she saw. She’ll return to what she was before.”

“What happens if we touch that descriptor again?” I asked.

“We won’t. If we did, we’d get another incomprehensible universe, and it would revert. The problem is for us, for now. The rules of our universe were created by countless combinations and failures. Evolution. We’d have to learn how to design all the rules to interact and make sense. That could take centuries. We don’t know anything yet about creating a living universe from scratch.“

“But we could do it, someday?”

“Conceivably,” Charles said.

The way he looked at me, the way he spoke — reluctantly, afraid of hurting or disappointing me — made me, if such a thing was possible now, even more uneasy. I had been badly frightened just when I thought I was beyond caring for my personal existence.

I wondered what would have happened if we had died before the rules reverted.

Suddenly Charles seemed unspeakably exotic: not human, intellectually monstrous. “Can we go back?” I asked.

“I’ll hook up again in a few minutes. The interpreter should be finished and the QL should have sorted itself out. I’m sorry, Casseia.”

I stared at him owlishly, my neck hair pricking. “Why do you always feel the need to apologize to me?”

“Because I keep shoving bigger and bigger problems on your back,” he said. “All I really want to do is make things easier for you, take care — ”

“Christ, Charles!” I unfolded and tried to kick away, but he reached out like a cat and grabbed my ankle, bringing me down in an ungentle arc. I bumped against the chamber floor, but he had saved me from a serious head blow against the ceiling.

With a creeping horror I was immediately ashamed of, I kicked loose.

He shrank back, eyes slitted. Then he returned to his chair and attached the optic cables to his head. By now, he had become expert and did not need any help.

Charles took us home, putting Phobos into its old orbit around Mars, as if nothing had happened. By direct link, we were given a new landing site at Perpetua Station, five hundred kilometers east of Preamble, below the Kaibab plateau.

Charles asked for medical help to be ready to receive Galena Cameron and deactivated the tweaker equipment in preparation for leaving the old Phobos base.

Still ashamed of what had happened earlier, I helped him undo his cables and carry the thinker and interpreter to the shuttle. We said little. Galena ’s eyes focused on me as Leander and I guided her limp body to the shuttle. She stiffened slightly when we buckled her into her couch, then asked, “Have my eyes changed color?”

I really did not remember what color her eyes had been, but I said no. “They’re fine,” I said.

She shivered. “Is Dr. Hergesheimer alive?”

“We’re all fine, Galena ,” Leander said.

Hergesheimer leaned over her couch, hanging from the top of the passenger compartment. “We’ve been worried about you.”

“I don’t think I’ve been here very long,” she said, still shivering. “I know I wasn’t asleep. Did we get anything?”

“We got what we went there for,” Hergesheimer said. Then, looking at me, he added, “It was a wild goose chase. We can’t go back.”

“Because of me?” Galena asked, distressed.

“No, dear,” I said. “Not because of you.”

Ti Sandra Erzul and the Presidential entourage — all those privy to our plans — came to Kaibab and Preamble, and Charles, Leander, Hergesheimer and I made our personal presentations in the lab annex. Ti Sandra sat on the left side of the table, flanked by a medical arbeiter and three heavily armed security guards. Twelve kilos lighter than when I’d last seen her, the President appeared alert but distant. On the way into the annex, she had said, “I’ve been close to the reaper, Cassie. Saw his eyes and played a little canasta with him. Don’t blame me for being ghost-eyed.” I let Hergesheimer speak first. He presented a sadly glowing picture of the new stellar system. “It’s a beautiful choice,” he concluded. “A planet placed between these two apopoints,” he highlighted points interior and exterior to an elliptical shaded band, “would receive enough light and warmth to become a paradise. Even Mars.”

Faces became more and more grim as I described the difficulties of the second passage. Ti Sandra shuddered. “Charles gives me reassurance that such a thing will never happen again, but I take a more cautious view.”

Ti Sandra nodded reluctantly.

“Whatever our problems with Earth, in my opinion, we can’t take the extreme solution,” I concluded. “We have to find another way.” Leander looked down at the floor and shook his head.

Charles took it calmly. “We must have the full confidence of all involved,” he said. “I’ll transfer a technical report on the passages, but I see no need to go into details here. We accomplished what we set out to do. There was a major problem, and it injured all of us, and badly disoriented one of our people. Until this group is fully confident again, I concur with the Vice President.”

From most there rose an audible sigh of relief.

“I would like more experiments,” Ti Sandra said. Eyes turned back to her. “How quickly could Mercury travel to an unclaimed asteroid?”

‘To find an asteroid of sufficient size, rendezvous with it…“ Leander mused, and began figuring quickly on his slate.

“Two months,” Charles said, beating him to the answer. “Almost certainly, we’ll need to have our problems with Earth resolved before then.”

“If there’s so little time,” Ti Sandra said, “the risks of kidnapping a few asteroids might be too extreme.” She considered for a moment, weighing the options, and shook her head. “No. We can’t take the chance.”

Charles looked between us, a quiet, chastened little boy.

“I can’t thank all of you enough,” Ti Sandra said quietly.

“We feel as if we’ve failed them,” Leander said as the President’s entourage filed out. Ti Sandra stayed behind. She stood, steadying herself against the table. I approached her and she wrapped her arms around me.

“How does it feel to make history?” she whispered.

“Scary,” I whispered back. “Parts of it… indescribable.”

“I think I’d like to try it sometime,” she said, glancing at me conspiratorially. “But I agree. Not Mars. Not with things the way they are now.”

“It was never more than a pipe-dream anyway,” Charles said. “Was it, Casseia?”

I did not know how to answer. Ti Sandra stepped forward, her legs steady but gait slow, and shook their hands. “You’ve done momentous things,” she said, and her resonant voice and motherly manner gave the words impact beyond cliche. “Mars can never be grateful enough.” She clasped my hands in both of hers, laughed softly, and said, “And probably wouldn’t be grateful, even it if knew.”

“It was getting difficult to keep everybody in agreement,” Leander admitted.

“It’s difficult to realize the predicament we’re in,” Ti Sandra said.

“The predicament hasn’t gone away,” Charles said, sitting forward and clasping his hands. “We’ve learned some interesting things in the past few hours. There’s lots of activity on Earth’s Moon.”

“Lieh tells me Terrestrial authorities have taken over Ice Pit Station,” Ti Sandra said. “What does that mean?”

“Let’s go to the main lab,” Charles said. “If the President is feeling well enough…”

“I’ll last a few more hours,” Ti Sandra said. “Lead on.”

The center of Preamble, the main lab occupied a chamber half a hectare in area, divided by heavy steel curtains into three spaces. The dark gray ceiling arched ten meters over the middle, broken by tracks of focused lighting and life support conduits. The smallest of the spaces was the most important, near the side of the chamber, away from the shielded power supplies. Charles led the way, Leander following. The President and I flanked Leander.

Nehemiah Royce, Tamara Kwang and Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta sat in chairs near a table that supported two QLs with integral interpreters. I had not seen these particular units; they had been installed in the past few days.

“We’re finished educating and updating the QLs,” Tamara said, glancing at us uncertainly. “They’re informed.” Her head carried several small nano connectors; the plan had been for her to back up Charles in an emergency.

“Good,” Charles said. “I’d like to show the President and Vice President what we know about the Ice Pit.”

Tamara and Nehemiah worked for a few moments to bring up displays controlled by the interpreter: graphs and charts and picts showing fluctuations in quantities as yet unexplained to us. One vid picture, however, was very clear: a crisp, full-color, three-dimensional view of a hallway filled with men and women and arbeiters carrying equipment.

‘This is a direct link, optical transfer,“ Charles said. ”The Ice Pit contains a huge Pierce region — the tweaker that William Pierce made by accident. It’s a larger version of our own, ready-made. We’re looking at a laboratory just outside the Ice Pit.“

“Live?” Ti Sandra asked.

“Next best thing to being there,” Royce said, smiling.

“Do they know we’re looking at them? And what are we looking through?” I asked.

“We can adjust part of the shielding around the Ice Pit region to have optical properties,” Charles said. “The region — the tweaker — can transmit images and sound back to our own tweaker,” Charles said. “They’ve dug out a chamber next to the Ice Pit, set up a research center. They’re not aware that we’re spying on them.”

“The Ice Pit region and all of our Pierce regions are the same,” Nehemiah said. “All tweakers are essentially coexistent.”

“Tweaker…” Ti Sandra said.

“We call it a tweaker when we adjust things with it. The Ice Pit tweaker appears larger than ours, but that doesn’t matter. They’re conterminous, and continuous.”

“Just an example of the identity of all undescribed elements in the dataflow matrix,” Nehemiah said.

“That makes it much more clear,” Ti Sandra said.

Nehemiah struggled onward. ‘Tweakers are undescribed, blank. They can become anything.“

“We’ll stick with the important issues for now,” Charles said. “They seem to know how significant the Ice Pit is, and they seem to know what to do with it. Notice these things…” He pointed to several rounded cubes resting in intricate slings. “High-level thinkers. At least one of them is a QL, but we’ve never seen thinkers like them. Large, probably very powerful.”

“More subtle and multiplex than anything we can manufacture,” Nehemiah said.

“Coming to the Moon to use the Ice Pit means they haven’t been able to create their own tweaker,” Leander said.

“Perhaps,” Charles said. “But they may be sequestering the Ice Pit to keep anybody else from getting access. We could learn how much they know right now, if you give us permission.”

Ti Sandra spoke in an undertone to one of her guards, and he stood aside to pass her orders along through his slate. “How?” she asked, turning back to us.

“If they know this is a direct link, they can receive signals from us. They’re listening to it — so to speak — right now. That’s what we did at first, to understand the nature of a tweaker. We can make the Ice Pit tweaker resonate and pass them a message.”

Lieh entered the space and stood beside Ti Sandra. Leander quickly explained the image and its implications.

“What would we say to them?” Ti Sandra asked.

“If we’ve given up any plan to leave the Solar System, then we need to resume full and public negotiations with Earth immediately,” Charles said. “We could use this as a faster, more efficient channel. But… it would have the effect of startling them.”

Ti Sandra grimaced. “If we talk to them, assure them of our peaceful intentions,” she said, “will that be enough? How can they believe us, after what’s happened?”

“They must believe,” Charles said. “We’re sunk if they don’t. Somebody will make a pre-emptive strike.”

Ti Sandra snorted. “ ‘Pre-emptive.’ That word… so twentieth century.”

“They must also be made to believe we have complete control of Preamble,” Leander continued. “That there are no splinter groups or dissenters with the same capability.”

Ti Sandra nodded to Lieh. “I’m afraid Point One doesn’t have good news for us. Tell us the details, Lieh.”

“Earth’s a shambles right now, politically,” Lieh said. “They’re paralyzed by unending plebiscites. There have been recalls on every board member and syndic of the four major alliances. Ambassadors have been recalled for consultation.”

“War footing?” Charles asked.

“Probably not,” Lieh said. “Just confusion. Whoever okayed the Freeze — probably high syndics in GEWA — has stirred up a cyclone. It keeps getting worse. We’ve received millions of messages from Terries offering their support. But we’ve received even more messages expressing sheer terror.”

“Is anybody able to govern?” Ti Sandra asked.

“In national politics, the paralysis is complete. We don’t know about the alliances. They operate at a higher level — plebiscite of the legislatures of the national governments, effectively. All our flies have gone quiet. There are searchers out on all nets, public and private. Somebody in GEWA has authorized central thinker net dumps of all data seeks for certain patterns of subjects. They’ll learn who some of our flies are. Except for public nets, we’ll be almost blind.”

“They’re violating their own laws,” I said. “That tells us a lot in itself.”

“They’re not completely paralyzed,” Charles said. “Somebody is funding the scientists. They’re working around the clock at the Ice Pit.“

“Talk to them as soon as you can, however you can,” Ti Sandra said. “Direct link or regular channels.”

“I wish to clarify one thing,” Charles said. “Our options are not reduced. I have complete confidence that we could do everything we’ve planned to do, without repeating the mistake of our last trip.”

“Would you wager five million lives on your success, Mr. Franklin?” Ti Sandra asked grimly.

“I can’t,” he said.

“Would you?” she demanded, her voice rising.

Charles did not flinch or even blink. “I would,” he said. “But Casseia might disqualify me.”

“Why?”

“My proximity to the QL,” he said.

“It was the thinker — the QL thinker — that made the mistake, wasn’t it?” Ti Sandra asked.

“It wasn’t a mistake,” Charles said.

“Poor Galena Cameron might not agree,” Ti Sandra said. She gestured for a chair to be brought forward, and reclined in it slowly, never taking her eyes from Charles’s face. I had seen her assume this attitude of concentration before, but never with such intensity.

“The QL saw an opportunity to serve its purpose more deeply,” Charles said. “It could not know the effect on human observers. It can’t even model us effectively.”

“What would keep it from doing something even more foolish?” Ti Sandra said. Charles winced but did not challenge the adjective.

“It realized immediately that it would never search for truths again, any truths of any kind, if it ceased to exist,” he said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Ti Sandra said.

“It learned fear,” Charles said.

Ti Sandra leaned back, still frowning, and rubbed her hands on her knees. Then she stood and put her arm on my shoulders. “I understand so little,” she murmured. “King Arthur never understood Merlin, did he?”

“I doubt it,” I said.

“We’ve accomplished so much,” Charles said plaintively. “Everyone has worked their fingers to the bone on this. I think the idea should be kept open — against the chance that Earth does something drastic.”

“Everything’s in place,” I said. “There’s no reason to dismantle it. But it won’t be our main emphasis.”

“What about the areological reports?” Leander asked. “What about all the other balls we’ve started rolling?”

“We won’t shut them down. They’re all useful as general knowledge,” I said.

“And us?” Charles asked, holding his hand out to his colleagues.

“Keep track of the Ice Pit,” I said. “I think Lieh should work with you.”

“We’re reduced to spies, then,” Charles said.

We stared at the image of a place hundreds of millions of kilometers away, at men and women and arbeiters moving purposefully before their own mystery. On the Moon, a woman in protective clothing — black, thick on her body, wrinkled like elephant hide, perhaps to protect against radiation and cold — approached our locus of observation. Her image suddenly skewed and smeared — too close for whatever descriptor “optics” the Olympians had devised. “How much do they understand?” I asked.

“A lot,” Charles said. “Or they wouldn’t be there.”

“What can they do, if they harness the Ice Pit properly?” I asked Charles.

“Everything we can do,” he replied. “Unless they’ve learned more than we have. In which case, they can do more.”

I walked alone across a flat, sandy, unspoiled area half a kilometer outside of the station, on the Up. I was supposed to be sleeping, but it was early morning and my head buzzed with too many problems. I did not want to induce sleep again. I had been doing that too much lately.

I had put on a guard pressure suit and sneaked outside through a newly-finished maintenance corridor frequented only by construction arbeiters. Once outside, I walked across the pebbly hard ground, in the only area free of nasty glassy lava shards, kicking my boots lightly against the brown and orange varnish. High crystal clouds crossed the dawn and refracted rainbow glints. It was cold now — about eighty below at Kaibab’s altitude — but the suit provided ample insulation, and I really did not give a damn about the danger.

We had actually contemplated moving our entire planet, changing the lives of every inhabitant of Mars, simply to avoid a showdown with Earth. That seemed incredibly cowardly to me now. I tried to imagine the journey to the new system, across thousands of light-years that did not really exist, and even with the enhancement providing all of its sophistication, in my deep gut, I knew it had to have been a dream, and a bad dream at that.

I squinted at the western horizon. Phobos would rise soon, and shortly after, Deimos. I squatted on the rough ground, drooped my head, and stared at the dirt between my legs.

Casseia, Cassie, woman, daughter, wife, no longer existed. I had had my roots torn out too many times. I could not just dig my hand into this soil and grow some new consciousness, some new center to my being — Mars itself was not ours, not mine. We had come from places very far away. We were invaders, dug into the surface like chiggers in skin. Mars belonged to a stillborn biosphere.

I could not find anything at my center — no emotion, no enthusiasm. Nothing but duty.

My arms trembled. I willed them to stop but they did not. I was not cold. My legs began to shiver next, and my toes curled in their boots. My suit voice inquired, “Are you feeling well?”

“No,” I murmured.

“This suit does not monitor a medical emergency, but it will send out a distress signal if you speak aloud the word ‘Yes,’ or curl your right hand into a loose fist.“

“No,” I said.

“This question will be repeated in two minutes if your symptoms have not improved.”

“No,” I said.

I looked up. There were people standing on the sand and pebbles, not wearing suits. They regarded me curiously.

My mother approached first and kneeled before me. Behind her came Orianna from Earth and my brother Stan. Stan carried his young son. Orianna’s face was blank, but I sensed some resentment. If Phobos had ever fallen on Earth, she would have died. Particular and immediate recognition of the enormity of my guilt.

I’m having a problem, I thought. I’m having a nervous breakdown.

My mother touched my arm but I felt nothing. Stan came forward. His little boy dropped to the ground as Stan released him. The boy wobbled from leg to leg, learning to walk. Infants learned to walk sooner on Mars.

I heard Stan’s voice but did not understand anything he said. His tone seemed reassuring.

After a few minutes of watching the phantoms, alive and dead, I numbly got to my feet, brushed dust from my suit bottom and legs, and turned slowly to survey all of Kaibab.

“It isn’t over,” I said. “I can’t afford this luxury. I have to hold on.”

Stan nodded, and my mother assumed an expression of understanding sadness. They behaved like mimes; a little exaggerated. “Mother, I’m very glad to see you again, looking so good,” I told her. “I wish you could talk to me.”

She shrugged and smiled, still mute. Stan muttered something but foam seemed to fill my ears.

“When this is all over,” I said, “I will take a few weeks and visit the dead. I’ll go crazy just to be with you. Okay?”

Mother tilted her head to one side and gave me her enigma look.

“Where’s Ilya?” I asked.

“Here,” he said behind me, and I turned, smiling, full of joy.

I lay on the ground. For a moment I thought somebody had knocked me down, but I had reclined purposefully and simply did not remember. My throat hurt abominably. I wondered what would make it hurt so. The rim of my helmet was damp around my neck and in the seals below my chin. Oh, I thought. Crying and screaming.

Affect distancing. I could not acknowledge my weakness by mourning openly. I could not let anyone, even myself, see how far gone I actually was. So I saw ghosts and blanked out to give my body time to release its misery. The mind put on a distracting show and performed its ablutions in primal privacy.

I had been on the surface for two hours. I felt different — not better, but different. I walked across the waste and re-entered the lock, using my private key, which opened all doors in Kaibab. The lock closed behind me.

I sucked the dust away, showered quickly in my room, and dressed for the morning meetings.

Back to business. Nobody the wiser.

But my time was running out.

Ti Sandra and her entourage, including Lieh and four of the top Point One people assigned to Preamble, returned the next day to Many Hills. We parted with warm hugs in the offices outside the main lab.

“I hate to see us get so worn down,” she said, holding me at arm’s length. As always now, we were surrounded by guards and aides; this was as close to privacy as we could manage, President and Vice President together. “You’re like a sister to me, Cassie. Promise me we’ll come out of this and retire to run our own station. You’ll be the syndic and I’ll manage a tea farm. Honorable Martians all.”

“I promise,” I said. We hugged again, and Ti Sandra took a deep breath.

“There’s a meeting I’ll have to miss, with Cailetet,” she said. “Aelita has the scheduling. You’ll have to shuttle to the Lai Qila this evening.”

“Crown Niger ?” I asked, stomach tensing.

“Something urgent, he says. Cailetet’s not getting any business, I hear. Our punishment is working. You know him better.”

“He’s a fapping beast,” I said.

“Keep on keeping on,” Ti Sandra said. “You can curse me later, honey.”

I let Aelita and my chief aides sort through the less important events that would have to be canceled, including a status briefing from Wachsler and the Olympians.

Despite the government’s shunning of Cailetet, and its isolation even among the dissenting BMs, it still held a few important cards in the future of the Republic. Crown Niger had skillfully kept himself in office as head syndic despite major blunders.

Reparations for damage sustained in the Freeze had been demanded by regional governors — if not from Earth, then from the central government, which had no fund so extraordinary. Cailetet had offered to channel funds from sympathetic sources on the Earth. So far, we had refused to discuss the matter. Pressure was increasing, however, and Ti Sandra had hinted earlier that we might have to cut a deal with Crown Niger again — trusting him much less farther than we could oh so willingly throw him.

I had a few questions of my own to ask him.

Lai Qila — the Red Fort — lay about three hours’ flight south across the valley, in an independent region owned by the smallest Muslim BM, Al Medain. It had been a resort fifty years before, but pernicious exhaustion of resources — water and money — had forced it to become a New Islam monastery.

It was said to be very beautiful, all buildings on the surface, native stone facings with poly pressure layers and radiation shields hidden beneath.

Dandy Breaker and two younger guards, Kiri Meissner and Jacques D’Monte, accompanied a reduced copy of Aelita and me.

The shuttle ride across the valley was, as always, spectacular. Storms in the deep chasms of Capri churned up rivers of pink and orange dust, six kilometers below; the Eos Chaos swam in ice-crystal clouds streaming in the lee of high winds blowing south. There was no time to lose myself in the landscape, however; Aelita was supplying me with the most recent information about Cailetet’s financial position, the status of its loans through Triple banks on the Moon, even Crown Niger ’s personal finances.

“Tell me more about his personal life,” I said. Aelita Two carried encrypted files from most of Point One’s databases. Her image seemed to become full-size and solid, sat in the seat beside me, and made as if to sort through stacks of ghostly papers. She held up a piece of paper with scorched edges and gave me a sly look.

“That hot, hmm?” I asked.

“He’s New Islam, as is his wife, who left the Fatimites three years ago to marry him. But apparently his affiliation is a convenience. He is not devout.”

This much I knew already. “Not so startling,” I told Aelita Two.

“He’s sexually omnivorous. Men, women.”

“Sheep?”

“No sheep.”

“Corpses?”

“No evidence of that.”

“Lots of politicians have high spirits. Does he treat his partners well? No complaints, lawsuits, that sort of thing?”

“No lawsuits. His wife is unhappy but will not leave him.”

“This is all very tame. Why the scorched paper, Aelita?” I asked.

“Achmed Crown Niger was on Earth for three years following the anti-Statist uprising in Sinai. Data flies have turned up documents which indicate that a man with a very similar speech pattern may have been involved in several political actions in southern Africa , resisting pan-African unification.”

“How similar?”

“Speech patterns match to ninety-eight percent certainty. This man is listed on fugitive return declarations by GSHA and United Africa. His name is Yusef Mamoud.”

I couldn’t think of any particular use for the information, even if it was significant. “Aelita,” I said, “scorched paper should indicate murder, pederasty, or the posting of exaggerated penis size in lonelyhearts ads.”

“Beg pardon?” Aelita Two asked. Her humor was no more sophisticated than her political instincts.

“We have no contacts or contracts with United Africa, and GSHA won’t extradite on their behalf. It’s not a scorcher. We know he’s a political opportunist. A traitor. Someday,” I almost choked on the words, but anger made me say them anyway, “we may have to kill him.”

“I see.”

Lai Qila lived up to its name, heavy red walls with minarets at every angle surrounding a dozen stone domes, the largest some two hundred meters in diameter: very expensive, and in the Martian psychology, arrogantly assertive. Mars’s New Islam community had always been proud and patriotic, never praying toward Earth, but always west toward the setting sun. The New Islam stations I had visited were clean, orderly, never politically active; their men polite and well-dressed in India-cut longsuits or jallabahs, their women stylish and self-possessed in calf-length sheath dresses with silk or cotton vests, veils down and decorously draped at shoulder.

It was said that to modestly don a veil before a strange man was the most sincere form of flattery available to a New Islam woman; veiling before a man known to family or community was a sign of intent to court, very stimulating.

Since this meeting was to be private, our group was met by security and the mayor of the station, a plump, pleasant man in a natty silver-gray longsuit. Dandy, Meissner and D’Monte met with guards from Cailetet. Security arrangements were agreed to, and Aelita Two joined optically with a Cailetet thinker.

The mayor smelled of anise and rosewater. He led us by foot to a broad, high dome near the station’s outer wall. Inside were pillows and fine carpets woven on Earth, wash basins cut in stone for the faithful, displays of the Hay amulets of departed brothers.

I squatted on a pillow, stomach acid with tension.

Crown Niger entered, his walk even more catlike than before. His eyes darted around the large dome, and he squatted with a break in grace that spoke volumes. He expelled his breath with a small groan. “Excuse me, Madam Vice President,” he said. “I’m very tired. I’m sure you know why. All of our important files seem to be open to prying eyes. Whatever happened to Martian honor?”

I smiled. “What can I do for you, Mr. Crown Niger ?”

His nostrils flared. “I’m going to be completely open. I know you can’t be, but my situation is different. I’m a small jackal running with wolves. I’m going to tell you what has happened, and let you judge what it means. I’m frightened.”

He was not lying, that much was obvious. He even smelled sour. “I will be completely frank. You have suspected these things already, but I tell them to you now… openly. We made many mining claims before the Freeze, on orders from our major partner on Earth.”

“GEWA,” I said.

He shook his head. “Above GEWA. Alliance of Alliances. You have heard rumors?”

“Not of that,” I admitted.

“It is a fact. Most of the claims were denied, but some we opened to Earth interests, about ninety that we acquired or already controlled. They were seeded with locusts, factories to make destructive nano machines.”

My face must have crimsoned. My hands began to shake with rage.

“We did not know this would be done, but… To you, our complicity cannot be excused. This is not why I call you here. I tell you this because we now have no more protection from these locusts than you.” He paused,

“I’m listening,” I said.

“I had hoped to speak with the President.”

“She’s busy,” I said.

He sighed. “We’ve made some breakthroughs at Cailetet. Nothing as impressive as moving moons. Communications… Important work, very lucrative. A week ago, we passed this information to our contacts on Earth. We sought to license new technology. We hoped to conduct business even in this climate of crisis. The answer was unexpected. They asked us to disband our research team. They asked us to send our scientists to Earth.”

I had felt superior and in control at the beginning of the conversation. All I felt now was horror. “You told them?” I managed to say.

“We had an agreement with the Alliance of Alliances. I have never made so great a miscalculation in my life.” He clasped his hands under his chin and rocked back and forth on his pillow. “They do not speak with me now. I fear they will take some horrible action. I strongly believe they were behind the Freeze. It’s necessary for us to join forces. Together, we may survive.”

“What have you learned about communications?” I asked, my mind racing far ahead of my questions. We would have to leave soon, get back to Kaibab; I would have to confer with Charles and alert the President.

“We can communicate instantaneously, across great distances,” Crown Niger said. “Petty stuff compared to what your people can do… But we consider it significant, and we’ve had no reports that you’ve made this particular breakthrough.”

“What else have you discovered?” I asked.

“On Earth, they seem to think there’s much more… Because of you and your damned exhibitionism!” Crown Niger shouted. He lowered his eyes and sighed again as if with great impatience. “I have worked hard to create a sanctuary away from these insanities. The insanity of Earth, and now of the Republic. I have put my life and soul into standing apart, giving my people the choice of independence.”

“You sold your services to Earth. I don’t call that independence.”

His lips drew tight; he seemed about to spit. “I do not care what you think about me. It is clear you have no honor. There is nothing truly Martian about you. You would threaten the mother of us all for political gain. To use such weapons… Insane!”

“Martians have died because of Terrie force. Nobody on Earth has died,” I said.

“So naive! To even display such power, such abilities, in itself must lead to violence. And now Cailetet is put in the same basket with you, by our former friends. Martians think they understand the politics of nations, but Mars is just a spread-out village, full of simpletons.”

“You’ve put a new element into the equation,” I said. “They think you’ll soon be as powerful and as capable as we are.”

“Will we?” he asked, face pale. “Are we on this same track?”

Whatever Cailetet might discover in another few months or years was actually irrelevant at the moment. “They wanted to bottle this genie from the very beginning, years ago.”

“What must we do?” he asked.

I stood and said, “The game is out of our control. Do you sense that?”

He shook his head. “Yes, but — ”

“This Alliance of Alliances must know your history. Disturbances in Africa — linking up with Dauble. They can’t possibly trust you. Once you were useful to them. But now…” I shook my head. “I have to leave.”

Aelita Two broke her link with the Cailetet thinker. I walked away, the thinker following on her carriage. In the middle of the dome, Achmed Crown Niger got to his feet, raised his arms, and shouted, “What can we do? Tell me! There must be something!”

Dandy, Meissner and D’Monte joined me in the corridor outside the dome. The mayor of Lai Qila followed, asking questions, trying to understand our sense of urgency. Dandy pushed him back gently, hand on chest. The mayor’s mouth fell open, shocked by this rudeness. We left him and his assistants near the entrance to the dome. Within the dome, Crown Niger ’s shouts and pleas echoed hollow.

“We’re returning to Preamble,” I told Dandy. “I have to speak with the President as soon as possible.”

“What’s wrong?” Dandy asked.

“There isn’t any time,” I said.

No time, no distance, no chance.