Moving Mars

Part Seven

The final crisis had come. As clear as Martian night, I knew Earth would feel it had no choice but to extinguish the accumulating threats and bring the, new technology under its total control. All of Earth’s progress and therapy and sophistication would come apart like wet sizzle in fear of our power and unpredictability.

Once in the air, departing from Lai Qila, I sent an emergency message to Ti Sandra and put Preamble on alert. Ti Sandra replied that she would meet with all her staff and advisors at Many Hills to examine our options.

“The box of troubles is wide open and will not be closed,” she said. “Cassie, nothing we can do is as effective as Preamble. Tell Charles I may call upon him soon, and that he must be prepared.”

Her infinitely weary face has stayed with me in sharp clarity all these years: the face of just and caring power placed in a killing squeeze. I am haunted by that face, so little like the Ti Sandra I had first met and had come to love.

The pilot thinker guided the shuttle across the Kaibab Plateau, engines droning monotonously. The two hours spent soaring over Mars seemed endless; I stared but saw nothing through the window, feeling what a mother must feel for an endangered child.

“What do you know about the Alliance of Alliances?” I asked Aelita Two.

“I was most intrigued by that name,” the thinker said. “We have no record of it.”

So Point One and Lieh, with all of their data flies and searches, but not penetrated to the top authority. How much could I rely on Crown Niger ’s words? Had he been deceived, as well? Or was the Alliance of Alliances our multi-minded thinker-enhanced bugbear ruler of Earth, riding high above the plebiscites?

Whoever was ultimately in control of the forces lined up against Mars, there could be no negotiation with two untrustworthy players wielding, or soon to wield, potentially lethal powers. We would come not to war, which has some rules and some sense of limitation, but to simple, panicked savagery.

Dandy Breaker faced me across the aisle and leaned over in his seat harness. “We’re in real trouble, aren’t we?”

“It seems that way.”

“Because of something Cailetet has done?”

“Yes. No. We’re all grabbing for the brass ring. We made our mistakes, too.”

“Moving Phobos,” Dandy said.

I remembered my sense of exaltation at the sudden turnaround; even now my pulse quickened at the thought of so much power, removing my burdens so quickly, allowing me to give back to Sean Dickinson even more than he had shoveled upon me. We are still children. We still dance to our deepest instincts. “They forced us to do it, but Earth can no more trust us now than it can trust a scorpion under its bed,” I said.

Dandy shook his head, bewildered. “I’ve never even seen a live scorpion,” he said.

More coded transmissions came in on the Presidential net. There had been a great many plans made besides Preamble; we had simply put more of our stake in the Olympians. Now the other plans were being explored: individual station defense against locusts, neighboring stations pooling their resources as well as defenses, more sweeps of all automated systems…

Thirty minutes away from Preamble, I spoke with Charles in the laboratory. He listened, face drawn and colorless, as I described what had happened at Lai Qila, and relayed the President’s message.

“We’re being toyed with,” Charles said. “The government treats us like children. On, off. On, off.”

“That’s not our intention,” I said defensively. “Ti Sandra wouldn’t call on you unless — ”

“We’re on for good this time,” he said. “There’s no other choice. They’re going to wipe our slate. I’ll have to stay near the big tweaker. I’ve been training Tamara as backup in case something happens to me… And last night we sent a tweaker to Phobos again. Stephen put Danny Pincher in charge. Everything’s in place for war.”

War. That word summed everything and gave our preparations a horrible, urgent edge.

“What’s the President going to decide, Casseia?” Charles asked.

I knew what concerned him. Having once held the sword of Damocles, he did not want to see it raised again.

“They’ll have some defense against Phobos ready if we send it back,” I said.

“The Ice Pit,” Charles said. “Our spyhole has been closed.”

“What?” I asked, startled.

“We can’t tune in on their activities,” Charles said. “They must have complete control of the Pierce region. They could use the Ice Pit against anything we send… If they’ve mastered it.“

Leander joined in the conversation. “Better than ninety percent chance they know more than we do now,” he said gloomily. “Maybe they’ll drop the Earth’s moon on us.”

I wasn’t going to dismiss any possibility yet.

“I’ll be near the large tweaker full time now,” Charles said. “We can be ready within an hour. You have to read the signs and give us the order. If Earth decides to blow Mars to pieces… We may not be fast enough to get it out of the way.”

“Charles is being a little evasive,” Leander said. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but — ”

“It’s nothing,” Charles said, voice tense.

“We’ve run into some difficulties,” Leander persisted. “Handling a mass as big as Mars presents special problems. First, it puts a huge drain on Charles or Tamara, whoever watches over the QL thinker.”

“It’s manageable,” Charles said.

“Yes, but at a cost. The QL becomes particularly intractable when dealing with so many large variables. I know Charles can handle it, but there’s also a physical problem. Our tweaker may show instability when moving so much mass across so great a distance.”

Charles sighed. “Stephen’s been working over some anomalies in our test results.”

“What kind of instability?” I asked.

“The mesoscopic sample at absolute zero asserts its own identity. It’s a kind of perverse dataflow problem. So many descriptors being channeled through so small a volume. It may reduce the effectiveness of the Pierce region.”

Charles said, “We’ve encountered the problem before. We can control it.”

Leander said, “I think our masters should be informed, just in case.”

“Can we do it?” I asked, far too tired to argue physics now.

“Yes,” Charles said.

Stephen hesitated. “I think so.”

“Then stay on alert.”

We signed off and I slumped in my seat, anxious to be on the ground working direct and not puppeteering from a hundred kilometers.

Minutes later, Dandy unhitched and stood, stretching, to use the wasteroom at the rear of the shuttle. He passed Meissner and D’Monte and they exchanged brief whispered comments. Falling into a reverie, I jerked to full alertness on hearing a few scraping sounds, and a sharp expletive.

“Ma’am,” Dandy called from the rear. I leaned over the arm of my seat and looked aft. He stood with the two other guards near the wasteroom door. I unhitched and joined them.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, pointing to a series of pits and holes in the rear bulkhead. A section of floor had been unprettily removed as well, edges appearing eaten or chewed. I followed Dandy’s probing fingers; something had termited much of the rear of the passenger compartment.

“It was fine a few minutes ago,” said Jacques D’Monte.

Dandy rose from a crouch and wiped his hands on his pants legs. “Go forward, ma’am,” he said. “Hitch in. Kiri, tell the pilot to get us into Preamble as fast as possible.”

Kiri Meissner went forward, passing me with a breathless apology. I stooped to slide into my seat when I heard a heavy chunk and a cry of surprise at the rear. Face bloody on one side, Dandy staggered forward and collapsed in the aisle.

Kiri swung about and immediately placed herself between me and the rear of the shuttle. “Stay down,” she grunted. She hunkered and pulled out her pistol, then frog-marched aft. Something clicked and hummed and Kiri jerked, clutched the seat arms on each side of the aisle, fell to one knee and rolled over on her back. A pattern of bloody holes on her chest poked through her black shirt. She coughed and convulsed, eyes asking a silent question of nobody in particular, then lay still. Her mouth foamed pink.

Jacques backed up beside me, straddling Kiri’s body, cursing steadily and softly. He pointed his pistol at a dark shape hanging from the ceiling and rear bulkhead. Again the click and hum. Slowly, he twisted on rubbery legs, and the pistol dropped from lax fingers. He leaned over like a man about to be sick and pitched forward on his face.

I remained crouched behind my seat near the front, heart Earth-heavy in my chest. Aelita Two had disengaged her carriage from the mount behind me; my seat flexed as it moved.

The shuttle flew on as if nothing had happened. Had there been time to trigger an alarm? I could not restrain myself any longer; I peered aft around the edge of my seat.

A dark shape extended thin arms and legs, then rose tall from the exposed recesses of the rear compartment. It bumped against the ceiling, dropped slightly, made a high-pitched machine noise and crawled into the glow of an overhead light.

The locust bulked about the size of a man, its body a green twisted ovoid like the pupa of an enormous insect. Its multijointed legs probed at the seats and floor with a gingerly grace that made my blood freeze. A glistening trio of black eyes topped the body, and below the eyes, a flexible snout, thin as the barrel of a gun, swiveled purposefully.

Bioform nanotech, designed to survive on Mars and be deadly.

I stared in fascination. The machine climbed over Dandy, hindmost legs raised as if in effete distaste. My body shivered in expectation of the thin flechettes that had felled at least two of my guards, no doubt peppered from the questing snout.

Decapitation.

The seed of this locust had come aboard the shuttle at Lai Qila — perhaps with the duplicity of Achmed Crown Niger , although I could hardly believe such villainy even of him. More likely he faced a similar assassin even now.

The machine seemed reluctant to push past me. Knowing I was soon to die, a deep calm stole over me, replacing the nausea of seeing my guards so quickly dispatched. I knew I would join them soon.

Still, my mind raced, trying to think of ways to survive.

The pilot thinker would know something was very wrong. It would radio an emergency signal ahead. We were only a few minutes from Preamble.

With a start, I considered the possibility the locust wanted to be taken to Preamble. It would kill me, attach itself to the shuttle’s thinker, take over the controls… And carry itself, and more progeny, into the research site. I could not allow that to happen.

I faced off the machine for more long seconds. I slowly bent down hoping to grab Kiri’s weapon, the closest to me. I didn’t make it. With a slight shudder, as if making a sudden decision, the locust rushed along the aisle, grabbed the gun, and shoved me aside with bone-bruising strength. It moved forward and began to work on the bulkhead door to the pilot thinker’s space.

Quickly, I bent over Jacques and Kiri. They were dead. I ran aft down the aisle and rolled Dandy over. His eyes flickered and opened. He moaned. The machine had hit him hard on the side of his head but had not shot him.

I dragged Dandy forward and hefted him into a seat, clicking his harness. His head lolled and he looked at me.

“Can’t let it get to Preamble,” he murmured.

“I know,” I sad. Facing forward, I shouted at the pilot thinker, “Bring us down, now! Crash the shuttle!”

Dandy shook his head. “Won’t do it. Tell it to land.”

The locust expertly sliced through the forward bulkhead and locked door. Beyond, I saw the shuttle’s cockpit, pilot thinker mounted above the controls. The locust grew a new appendage and poked at the thinker’s box.

“Crash, damn you!” I cried. “Land! Bring us down now!”

The shuttle lurched and rolled. The locust’s body slammed against the luggage bay and released the cases of the dead guards. Behind, Jacques and Kiri seemed to rise off the floor, given new life, limbs flailing. Aelita’s carriage fell past me to the rear of the shuttle, smashing into Jacques’ body.

I did not know that the pilot-thinker would obey my orders, but there was no other explanation for the craft’s wild antics, unless the thinker hoped to throw the locust away from its case.

But the locust would not be thrown. An insectoid limb flew past me, black and gleaming, but despite the loss, the locust clung to the front bulkhead and continued to probe the thinker’s case. Above the roar of stressed engines and the crashing of luggage and awful slapping of bodies, I heard a drilling whine.

I pulled myself into a seat with all the strength I could muster. Jacques slid past me and spattered my leg with blood. The shuttle rolled again just as I locked the harness.

Before assuming crash position, I glanced forward and saw the pilot thinker’s case ripped open, gelatinous capsules spewing forth.

The locust became the center of a spinning nightmare.

We hit.

My shins pushed painfully against the rack in front of me. For some immeasurable time I felt nothing, and then another slam. Bones snapped and I blacked out, but only for an instant. The shuttle was still sliding and rolling as I came to, tumbling across the ground. I heard plastic and metal scream and the hiss of departing air, instinctively shut my eyes and mouth and pinched my nose, felt the touch of vacuum as my skin filled with blood — and the pressure canopies ballooned around our seats, sucked down against the cabin floor, filled quickly with compressed air hot as the draft from an oven door.

The shuttle stopped rolling, slid with a shudder and a leap to a nose-up angle, and lurched to a halt.

I sat strapped in my seat, wrapped within a canopy like a lizard inside a rubbery eggshell. My rib cage had become a plunging of knives with every gasping breath. I gritted my teeth to keep from screaming. My vision shrank to a hand-sized hole of awareness. Going into shock. Fighting to stay conscious, I glanced through the foggy membrane at Dandy’s seat. He had slumped to one side. I couldn’t figure out why; then I realized he had unstrapped the upper portion of his harness before passing out.

I could not see forward. Debris blocked my view. I could not see the locust.

I pressed my head back against the seat’s neck rest. I could stand the pain now; shock numbed me. I felt cold and sweaty. Battle over. Earth wins.

With some irritation, I felt small emergency arbeiters wrap their tendrils around my wrist. The shuttle’s tiny little life-saving machines had scrambled to check us out. I tried to pull my wrist out of the way. The tendrils tightened and a tube of medical nano entered the arteries at my wrist. The silver and copper arbeiter, barely as large as a mouse, tied to a shining blue umbilicus, crawled up my chest and exuded a cup over my mouth and nose. I tried to shake my head free but sweet gas filled my lungs and the pain subsided. The chill lessened. I grew calm and neutral.

The little machine hung on my chin and projected a message into my eyes. You are not badly injured. You have three cracked ribs and ruptured eardrums. Torsion units will reset the ribs and wrap them in cell-growth and sealant nano. The ruptured eardrums are being sutured now. You will not be able to hear for at least an hour.

I could feel the action in my chest, specked little fibers growing from bone to bone, rib to rib, tightening inexorably, torquing the ribs back together.

“All right,” I said, hearing nothing.

The shuttle cabin atmosphere has been breached. Integrity cannot be restored. No rescuers have responded to our emergency signal. The pilot thinker is damaged, perhaps destroyed. We will soon exceed our programming. Do you have any instructions?

I tried to look at Dandy again. The fog on my canopy had cleared a little and I saw him still slumped forward. “Is Dandy alive?”

One seated passenger is alive but unconscious. He will regain consciousness soon. He has a minor fracture of the tibia and minor concussion. There are two dead passengers. We cannot repair the dead passengers.

“What about Aelita?”

Copy of thinker “Aelita” condition unknown.

Dandy lifted his head and raised an arm to wipe the inside of his canopy. He peered at me groggily, plugs of nano sticking out of his ears like muffs. “Are you okay?” He mouthed the syllables extravagantly and signaled with his free hand.

“Alive,” I replied.

“Can you move?” He waggled his hand.

I shrugged.

I caught part of the next message: “… move with me… Get out…” But he could not coordinate his fingers to unhitch himself. He shook his head groggily.

I would have to rescue my guard.

I knew in theory how the canopies worked. They could stretch and roll with my movements, keeping a tough membrane between me and the near-vacuum of Mars’s atmosphere. I unhitched and stood, feeling the nano shift within me, the edges of my broken ribs grinding.

The cockpit of the shuttle had been torn off and the nose lay open to the sky. Part of the cockpit bulkhead panel, cut by the locust and pushed aside in the crash, stuck out at a crazy angle. An emergency safety symbol decorated a small hatch on the panel. Pushing forward in my canopy, I wiped at the moisture inside the membrane, trying desperately to see where the locust had gone.

No sign of it. Perhaps it had been thrown free, or smashed into the dirt with the pilot thinker and the cockpit.

I pushed my hand harder against the canopy. With a worrisome sucking sound, the membrane switched functions and formed gloves around my hands. The panel hatch popped open at my touch. I felt inside, half-blind, and brought out two cylinders and two masks with attached cyclers.

Flesh creeping, expecting to step on the locust or have it rise in front of me at any moment, I pushed out of the shuttle and slowly rolled my canopy to a higher spot on the rough terrain. I peered through the translucent membrane at the rocky, nasty surface, all knife-edge shards and tumbles of flopsand. We were two or three kilometers from the southern boundary of the station. We had enough air for five hours of exertion.

I returned through the jagged hole, nearly having a heart attack when the membrane snagged on a sharp pipe. I carefully lifted the membrane free and proceeded up the canted aisle.

Next I would expand my canopy and merge it with Dandy’s. I carried the cylinders and masks to the rear and dropped them at my feet. Then I bellied up against Dandy’s membrane. The two surfaces grew together with another sucking sound. I cut through the common membrane with a finger as it purposefully rotted, spread the opening, and crawled through. The medical arbeiters had stacked themselves neatly on the next seat, their work finished. Dandy raised his head and looked at me with some puzzlement. His eyes focused. His expression of pained gratitude didn’t need words.

I pulled my slate from a pocket to communicate with him. The emergency suits are gone. We still have some skinseal and masks. We ‘re about three kilometers from Preamble. We’re going to walk.

We sprayed each other with the bright-green skinseal and put on the masks and cyclers before climbing out of the shuttle’s wreckage. It had plowed in head-first, rolled for half a kilometer, and come to rest on a smashed tail. The upthrust broken nose leaned by chance toward Kaibab station, toward Preamble. I tried to find our position on a map through a navsat link but couldn’t get a signal.

I showed Dandy my slate again. Links are down. No navsat.

He nodded grimly. I climbed on top of a rock and used a pair of binoculars to survey the landscape. Dandy climbed up beside me with difficulty. The crack in his tibia made walking rough for him.

We huddled in a smooth patch of sand. Dandy held up three fingers and bent one halfway. Two and a half kilometers. He mouthed, “Trail… clear about half a klick north-northwest.”

He pointed to the glistening fragments of vitreous lava. The rocks were always eroding, rounded segments falling away to reveal sharp fresh surfaces. Very nasty terrain. The soles of our boots could handle the edges, but if we fell…

We agreed on the direction and began walking.

Time stretched, nothing but staring at glittering scalpel-sharp edges and fan-shaped flakes dusted with flopsand; lifting feet, staring for a place to put them down without tripping, pausing to regain our bearings.

Two hours, and we stood on the twisted trail, free of the lava field.

Dandy took my shoulder and guided me due north. He followed the stars with a sparrow’s eye. Another hour on the trail, however, and he shook his head, paused, examined our oxygen supply, and pulled out his slate to consult a map.

I looked up to see a large meteor glowing low in the western sky. No, I told myself; no trail. It wasn’t a meteor, not a large fireball. It was where Phobos should be about now, just past rising. I tapped Dandy’s arm and pointed.

He stared for a moment, brow pulled low in an intense frown, then glanced at me with eyes wide. “What is it?” he mouthed.

“Phobos.”

“Yeah.” He lifted his finger and drew it across his throat.

Danny Pincher and his crew, their tweaker… The Mercury. Earth was using all of its new-found power.

One thing at a time, take care of the immediate problems before considering apocalypse. Dandy pushed his slate back into a belt pouch and made as if to lick his finger and hold it up to the breeze. “That way.” He pointed slightly east of north. “I think the trail curves west of the outermost buildings. Back across lava.”

“Let’s go,” I said.

We picked our way over an even rougher field now. Gullies several meters deep crossed our path. We climbed down slowly, then back up again, removing our equipment belts and wrapping them around our skinsealed hands to protect against the broken-glass edges.

“We’ll cross the emergency exit for the bunkhouse wing. It’ll look a lot like a rock, so stay alert.”

My eyes hurt from dryness under the mask and from staring so hard at the sharp rocks and ground beneath my feet. My ribs hurt despite the pain control of the nano; I would need better attention soon.

The exertion was wearing me down, finally, and the air from our tanks smelled foul. Recirculation and scrubbing was beginning to fail. We were pushing the skinseal suits and masks to their limits.

Dandy held out an arm and I bumped into it, nearly losing my balance. He grabbed my shoulder to steady me, then made a hush gesture with his finger near his mask. I squinted to see whatever he had seen. The landscape was still, orange flopsand crust and scattered black boulders, sunlight glinting from glassy surfaces. I followed his gaze and saw something that was not still, something moving slowly a few dozen meters away. A skeletal metallic arm rose above the rocks, flexed cautiously, then straightened. A round black and orange striped body broke loose from the ground and erected on stubby black legs. A translucent sac fell away, and the thing stood on Kaibab’s rocky plain, as big as a human, surveying its surroundings through tiny glittering eyes on a bulbous head. Its two arms undulated with a spooky, deliberate rhythm, as if tasting the air.

Dandy drew me down slowly as the locust turned away from us, and we tried to hide in the boulders. He raised his head high enough to keep track of the machine, then crawled slowly out of my sight.

I lay in the crotch of two boulders, buttocks pressed uncomfortably against rugged pebbly flop, too tired and in pain to feel any fear or even to wonder what Dandy was up to. After ten or fifteen minutes, he returned and switched on power to my suit again. He pantomimed and mouthed that the locust was stalking away from the station, and away from us, but that he had seen evidence of many others — factory cases, trenches where material had been mined and converted. And he had found the entrance. I followed him on hands and knees, my stomach churning with the added pain.

A large black boulder blocked our way through a narrow gully filled with powdery smear. I crawled past him, bringing up my slate. An optical port glittered within a dimple in the boulder. I programmed my slate for my key codes and ported it. The boulder quickly split in half, revealing a hatch. The hatch swung inward, and Dandy helped me through.

A guard waited for us in the narrow tunnel beyond, down on one knee with electron gun poised. He raised his head from the sight, opened one slitted eye, and blinked in disbelief. “You crashed,” he said. Our hearing was beginning to return, though harsh and uneven; loud noises hurt.

“Yeah, and where was the goddamned rescue team?” Dandy demanded in a rasp.

“Nobody’s going anywhere,” the guard said, hefting his gun and standing. “We posted defenses on all outer corridors. We’ve had two locust attacks — ”

“I have to get to the main lab,” I said.

The station had been breached in two areas, both near the southern tunnel through which we had entered. The head of station defense, a broad-faced woman named Eccles, passed us in a side corridor, followed by a train of maintenance and defense arbeiters. She raised her eyebrows at Dandy, who shook his head with a fierce scowl: no time to explain.

The entire station was on first stage alert. Leander met us at the junction with the main corridor. Water a foot deep coursed along the floor from a pipe rupture. We slogged through the stream beside Leander.

“We’ve put Charles and Tamara on alert,” he explained. “They’re in the main labs, testing the QLs and preparing for whatever you order.”

Having positioned troops and arbeiters, Eccles splashed into the corridor and joined us. “Madam Vice President, we haven’t been able to reach Many Hills. We’ve seen locusts south of the station. There have been two skirmishes, and we anticipate full-scale attacks any time.”

We climbed three steps up into a dry corridor.

“We’ll need better med, and soon, and I want to see everything,” I said. Two distant thumps brought everybody to a halt. We glanced around warily, waiting.

“Our defense arbeiters have begun shelling,” Eccles said.

Dandy shook his head bitterly. “They’ll come in here like cockroaches. We can’t keep them away by shelling.”

“I’ll do whatever I damn well can,” Eccles said defiantly, eyes flashing.

Leander pulled me aside while Dandy and Eccles argued strategy. “Locusts won’t be our biggest worry. Phobos has been taken out.”

“We saw it,” I said.

“And Deimos as well. We don’t have any big guns.”

“Phobos looked like it was torched,” I said.

Leander’s face fell. “We’re picking up high levels of gamma radiation.”

“What, then?”

“Remote conversion,” Leander said. “They seem to be using the Ice Pit to target us.”

“Did the teams get away?” I asked.

Leander shook his head. “I’ve got a medical coming, and some transportation.”

The pain in my ribs had subsided to a brutal throb.

In the annex outside the main lab,, as an officious, humming arbeiter injected more nano and watched my vital signs, Eccles and Lieh worked with the original of Aelita to show me what little they knew. A map of the Kaibab Plateau displayed hundreds of blinking yellow crosses: suspected locust sign, spotted by emergency balloons and gliders circling the station. Red dots indicated positive locust identification. I counted thirty.

Dandy described the locust that had invaded our shuttle and brought us down. Lieh listened attentively.

“We only have the sketchiest ideas what shapes they can take, and what they can do,” she said. “So far, all we’ve seen have been scouts and simple sappers.”

More deep thumps vibrated the walls and floor.

“I hope that’s our ordinance,” Lieh said.

“Sounds like charges,” Eccles said.

“Most links are down,” Lieh said. “Comsats have been taken out — we don’t know how — ”

Leander and I glanced at each other, lips pursed.

“ — And so we’re pretty isolated. We can’t guarantee making any connections with the President. In short,” Lieh said, shadows deeply etched around her eyes and mouth, “they’ve done it to us again, even more dirty. Ma’am, my gut tells me we’ve suffered tremendous damage. Whoever’s in charge of the Earth focus has gone over the edge. I’ll support any effort you decide to take.”

“We assume they’ll try to kill us all,” Eccles said.

“Then it’s war,” Lieh said. “How can we retaliate?”

Leander looked away. We had other swords of Damocles; but if we used them, the loss of life on both worlds would be staggering. So far, only Phobos and Deimos had been hit by what might be remote conversion — an action that could be regarded as frightened, as defensive.

“It’s not an easy call,” Charles said, standing in the door to the annex. He stared at me with a puzzled expression, as if emerging from an unpleasant drunk.

“Where’s Tamara?” Leander asked.

“She’s on the QL, keeping it exercised.”

Eccles tapped my shoulder. The red dots on the display had tightened around the station. They knew where we were, and soon they would know what we were.

“They’ve fully harnessed the Ice Pit,” Charles said. He lifted a hand and flexed it as if it pained him. “They’ll use it on us soon.”

More thumps, and a distant, high-pitched drilling whine that set my teeth on edge.

“They’re doing it,” Lieh said, eyes intense, far more sanguine. “Genocide. We have to respond.”

I knew how she felt. We were cornered. It would only be natural to use all of our claws.

But we still had that other option, and that was why Charles was here: to gently remind me that all along, we had planned to do something completely unexpected. Vengeance would not save us.

But I had to explore all the possibilities. “Can we target the Ice Pit for conversion?”

“I’ve tried. I can’t even find the Ice Pit now.”

“Is anything else protected?”

“We can pick any target on Earth and convert it,” Charles said softly. “Billions of hectares. Entire continents… If you order it.”

Distinct popping sounds came from outside the lab chamber: projectile weapons. Eccles inquired about the action and was told that two locusts had been destroyed, one in a reservoir and the other in an arbeiter tunnel a hundred meters from the lab.

“It’s going to be hand-to-hand in an hour or less,” she said.

I could not order Charles to begin genocide on Earth. He might not even obey. My options had been reduced to just one, but even for that I did not have the authority.

I had to wait, as long as possible, for Ti Sandra.

“What do we do?” Eccles asked.

Aelita interrupted and said, “We have received an important image from a pop-up satcom.”

The display changed abruptly. We looked down from five hundred kilometers above Schiaparelli Basin . A gray impenetrable curtain swept in eel-like folds across the basin, its upper reaches filled with sparkling stars. It seemed to be moving slowly from north to south. Where it had passed, dust filled the thin atmosphere. Through the dust we could barely make out lakes of molten rock, blackened tumult, complete destruction.

“That’s Many Hills,” Dandy said.

“They’re converting Mars now,” Leander said.

“Madam Vice President — ” Lieh began, but Charles interrupted her.

“Aelita, can you magnify the western limb?”

“I see something there as well,” Aelita said, and did as she was told. The picture was at the extreme edge of the satellite’s range; Mariner Valley appeared like a grainy gash in the landscape.

“We’re here,” Leander said, standing beside Charles near the display and pointing with a finger just below, meaning beyond, the horizon. Charles traced another gray curtain barely visible in the magnified image. The curtain might have been a few hundred kilometers beyond northeast Kaibab; it was difficult to be sure.

“Madam Vice President,” Lieh said, “if this is confirmation that Many Hills has been destroyed, then you must take command now.”

Aelita reverted the picture to a wide view. She then magnified the region around Many Hills. The capital of the Republic was lost in dust.

My ribs ground together and I closed my eyes, gasping to regain my breath.

As the satellite continued its grim course from east to west, we saw more clearly the searching fingers of death moving in toward Kaibab. But that seemed expected, even trivial; what shocked was the extent of destruction elsewhere.

Charles’s hands twitched. “You’re in charge, Casseia.”

“Madam President,” Lieh said, stating the obvious.

“Ti Sandra isn’t coming back this time,” Charles continued. “She was at Many Hills. The district governors and representatives were there as well, most of them.”

I stared at the sparkling effects of conversion, pits and slashes filled with molten rock: hundreds of thousands of hectares in Copernicus, Argyre, Hellas. Two of Mars’s biggest stations had been hit.

“Cailetet’s main station is gone, and two outlying stations, as well,” Aelita said.

Achmed Crown Niger had had his final answer from Earth.

“Insanity,” Leander muttered.

But I knew better. It all made horrible sense. It was a pattern as old as time: the display of baboon’s asses. If the ritual was not perfectly observed, and one did not back down, the baboons squared off and bared their fangs. If that did not do the trick, they fought to kill.

The satellite image blanked abruptly.

“Loss of signal,” Aelita said.

Charles stood beside the white cylinder that held the planetary tweaker. Stooped, long-fingered hands hanging by his side, his eyes burned below brows drawn together in eternal concentration. Around him, the support equipment for the largest of all our tweakers sat ready.

Tamara Kwang lay quietly on a couch nearby. She had been prepped for her backup role.

Thirty of the station’s senior staff gathered in the auditorium beside the tweaker chamber, awaiting my instructions. Charles watched us with inhuman patience through the broad plastic window.

No one raised any objection when Leander referred to me as President.

My statement to the assembly was brief. “We can’t remain in the Solar System and survive. We have to do what we brought all of you here to do. The sooner the better. Charles tells me he’s ready. Stephen confirms.”

The thirty sat in stunned silence for several moments. Dr. Wachsler stood and glanced around, hands held out. “We are making a decision for all of Mars,” he said. “In effect, we represent all of Mars. Surely we…” He choked and held his hands higher, voice rising. “Surely there must be some confirmation, some…”

“We will die if we do not act,” I said. My hands shook with a perverse excitement. I wanted Wachsler to challenge me; I wanted any and all challenges now. My bones were knitting; I could feel them. Medical nano filled my bloodstream, rooting out problems, controlling my tendency to slip into shock. I felt strong as a lion, but knew I was still very weak.

“Dr. Abdi hasn’t finished his areological survey,” Wachsler said.

Abdi stood, hands in pockets, shrugged, and sat again. “I have not, indeed,” he said.

“We should vote,” called out Jackson Hergesheimer, the astronomer. “We know what happened on the last trip. What happened to Galena . If we’re going to choose suicide over murder, we should be allowed to vote.”

“No vote,” I said wearily.

“Why not?” Hergesheimer called out. “We’re citizens of the Republic — the only citizens who can respond to you!”

“There will be no vote,” I said.

“Then you are no longer President of this Republic, even if you… even if you might legally…” Words failed him.

“I take this upon my own shoulders,” I said.

“You order our suicide!” Wachsler cried.

Dandy Breaker, sitting at the back, had had enough. He rose, hand held high, and I gave him permission to speak with a nod. “I might point out the strict legality, under the laws of the Republic, of President Majumdar’s position. This is an emergency. The only defensive course of action open to us is retreat. At her instruction, I have declared a state of martial law and broadcast it over Mars.”

“Nobody can hear or object!” Wachsler said, tears of rage rolling down his cheeks. His hands moved like two birds, up and down, fingers fluttering. “My God, this is the most horrifying kind of tyranny.”

“I take responsibility,” I said. My voice sounded dull and hollow, even in my own ears.

“Madam President,” Leander said, “perhaps we should take an informal vote. Just to be certain.”

“We should discuss the option of declaring war,” Hergesheimer said. “What they’re doing is an outrage, and we should defend ourselves, if not with a moon, then by using conversion on their cities, their lands!”

“No,” I said. “That is not an option, if we have any other choice. We do.” I had long ago taken my own personal stand against striking back at Earth. “If anyone wishes to depose me, or petition for my ouster at this time, or do whatever the law allows… or doesn’t allow… let it be done now, and hurry, please.”

I wondered whether we were going to lose all control, whether I had pushed too hard and spoken too strongly. Leander was about to speak when the floor of the auditorium shook. Aelita called up a series of images from the cameras atop the station. The horrid gray curtain unfurled over northern Kaibab, whirling debris clearly visible in the electric blue corona, dust churning at its feet.

“It’s on the plateau, about fifty kilometers away,” Aelita said.

All in the auditorium watched, some weeping. Several jumped from their seats and fled.

“The rest is simply fear,” I said. “We know. For us there are no corners to be backed into… unless we give in to our fear. Then we will die. Let us do what we built Preamble to do.”

Charles entered the auditorium from the main lab space, moving slowly and uncertainly. His presence seemed to spook the staff members in the first two rows of seats. They drew their knees up and away from him, staring like frightened children.

“QL is ready,” he said. “The interpreter is ready. So am I.”

The image of our coming doom hung over us at several points around the auditorium. The floor vibrated as if pounded by a herd of huge animals. Charles stared at the images, then said, barely audible, “It’s a one-in-a-trillion conversion. If they ramp it by a factor of ten, and they can, they could take the entire plateau at once.”

“Let’s do it,” I said. I could barely make myself heard above the horrendous rockborne howl of matter coming to pieces.

Dandy walked stiffly down the side aisle. “Madam President,” he boomed, his formality absurd under the circumstances, “You must give a direct and unambiguous order.”

“By authority of the office of President, I order that we immediately move Mars to the chosen orbit around the New System.”

“It doesn’t even have a name!” Wachsler cried.

“Order so recorded,” Dandy shouted, holding up his slate. He glared at the audience, daring anyone to voice another challenge.

Wachsler shook his head, speechless. Hergesheimer collapsed in his seat, mumbling unheard.

Charles turned and left the auditorium. Leander and I followed. Most of the staffers in the auditorium stayed in their seats or moved closer to the separating glass wall, like observers at an old-fashioned execution.

Charles sat on the edge of a couch beside the main tweaker. “I’ll need some help with these,” he said, lifting one hand to point to the larger array of optic cables. Stephen and I helped him attach the cables, and Charles lay back on the couch. “I’ll be the only one in the loop to the QL,” he said. “But others can observe. It would be easier if I can talk with people while it’s happening. I’ll feel more real. And if those people are seeing some of what’s happening, with me…”

“I’ll observe,” I said.

Charles pointed to a smaller couch on the other side of the thinker platform. “I hope you’ll be comfortable,” he said.

I sat on the couch. “Do I need… ?” I pointed to the cables attached to the base of his neck.

“No. No feedback required. Standard image projection, or immersion. Immersion should really be something.”

I swallowed. “Immersion, then.”

“I appreciate this, Casseia,” Charles said. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, Adam’s apple bobbing on his throat, jaw clenching, relaxing.

“Least I can do,” I said.

“It’s our only choice,” Charles said. “We have to leave. I know that. You’ve made a courageous decision.”

I followed Leander with my eyes as he prepared for my immersion. A few narrow bands around my head, projectors from a modified slate, a few slim optical connections between slate and interpreter, and I experienced a comfortable floating sensation, neural chitchat in the far background.

I glanced around, nervous at even these few constraints. The room smelled cold and metallic and seemed absurdly large for the apparatus; an echoing cavern with lights focused on the tweaker, force disorder pumps, refrigerators… One director, one backup — Tamara Kwang, with her own nimbus of cables and connectors — and one observer.

Leander finished checking all connections and stood to one side, arms folded.

“Mars is a big body,” Charles said. “We have to reference more orthonormal bases for each descriptor, exponentially more for descriptors that superposit. That means storing some results in the unused descriptors within the tweaker. That’s easier in a larger tweaker.”

“The danger is no greater than before — less, probably,” Leander said. “But the director’s job is more difficult. He has to be more congruent with the QL to keep those extra descriptors in tune with the overall goal.”

“And?”

“The interpreter still gets in the way. Charles will have to be more direct. Straight through to the QL.”

Again the howl of converted matter shook the floor. Dandy left the auditorium and stood beside Stephen. “We’re going to lose the station through blast effects if we don’t go now,“ he said.

Dandy avoided looking at Charles as if he were indecent or sacred and forbidden.

“We’ll do it in three,” Charles said. “Just to be extra cautious. First, we’ll advance along Mars’s orbital path fifty million kilometers. If there’s any doubt about the next step, we’ll leave it there.”

“They’ll find us again, finish the job,” Tamara Kwang said softly, self-consciously touching her cables. Drops of sweat beaded her face even in the chill.

“There won’t be any doubt,” Charles said. “The next step will put us about three trillion kilometers from the New System. We’ll get our bearings and make the next jump.”

“We can’t stay in deep space for more than a few minutes,” Hergesheimer said. I had not seen him come into the lab, but he stood a few meters from the tweaker, hands in his pockets, hair thoroughly tousled. “If we stay in deep space for more than a few minutes, Mars will experience extreme weather changes.”

Faoud Abdi entered, followed by two assistants. “I have checked the damage,” Abdi said, “and we have only ten percent of our Mars surface trackers linked through transponders. The rest are gone or we can’t reach them. I believe we can still get a feel for what is happening to the planet, but of course… there is no way to tell others what to expect. There will also be more severe areological effects if we do not enter a comparable solar tide situation quickly. And the same side must be turned toward the new sun. This is very important.”

“Understood,” Charles said.

“The tidal bulge,” Abdi continued.

“It’s in the calculations,” Stephen told him.

“Where’s my station, my instrument hookup?” Hergesheimer asked. I heard but could not see Leander directing him toward the far side of the lab, where all of the exterior instruments of Preamble would direct their flow of data.

“Let’s do it,” Charles said.

I dropped my head back and stared into the projectors. Suddenly my neck hair rose and I nearly screamed. I felt some one standing beside me, opposite Leander and Dandy; I knew who he was, but did not want to accept that I was still so close to the edge.

I could not see him, but his presence was as real as anything else in the room, more real perhaps, more believable. His name was Todd, and he was about five years old, with fine brown hair and a ready smile, cheek smooth and downy and brown, fingers nimble, face flushed, as if he had just come back from exercise or play. He wanted to tell me something. I could not hear him.

He would have been my son. Ilya would have been his father.

I must have made a sound. Charles asked if something was bothering me.

“I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s go.” I wanted to reach out and hold my son’s hand, but he was no longer there.

I would never feel his presence again.

“Go,” Stephen echoed.

“Going,” Charles said.

Staring into the projectors, my head wrapped in neutral sound from the immersion bands, I saw Mars mapped above me as a highly detailed sphere, elevations exaggerated, all of our remaining trackers marked by pinpricks of red. By turning my head, I could see Phobos and Deimos. The map had not been recently updated, for Many Hills and other stations I knew to be gone were plainly marked as well.

“We’ll lose all our satellites,” Dandy murmured. He seemed far away, as did the rumbling howl.

Charles’s voice spoke in the middle of my head, startling me. “First frame shift in two minutes,” he said. “Hear me, Casseia?”

“Yes,” I said. “I see Mars.”

“Would you like to see what the QL is doing?” he asked. “When I go in, I’ll be part of its processing. You’ll be outside, watching.”

“Okay,” I said.

I tried to relax my rock-tense muscles. Best to die relaxed, I thought; the universe seemed unpredictable enough that such a distinction might be important.

The image of Mars changed radically as I was drawn into the QL’s perspective. What I saw was not a planet, but a multi-colored field of overlapping possibilities, the planet as a superposited array. The QL’s assessment changed every few seconds, colors shifting, assignments of the Pierce region flashing at blinding speed: all of Mars scoped and measured using a logic no human could follow, a logic lying outside or beneath the rules of the universe.

I saw more clearly now the value of the QL’s contribution. That it was in fact self-aware, despite these distortions, gave me a chill. What sort of self-awareness could function when consciousness had no shape, no specified purpose?

Who could have designed such a mind? Humans had — famous and less famous; and QL thinkers had played a small role in human affairs for a century and a half — but no human, not even the designers, could encompass the QL mentality. It was not superior — in some respects, it operated much more simply than any human or thinker mind — but what it did, it did superbly — and unpredictably…

If I was a spectator, watching this odd and beautiful horse perform its dressage, Charles was the rider.

“We’ve measured and drawn the first orthonormal base,” Charles said. “Now we measure the translation of conserved descriptors to the larger system.”

With the help of my enhancement, I understood part of what I saw: massive number-crunching through the interpreter’s computer portion, cheating on nature by pulling the “energy” required to shift Mars from the total energy of the larger system, the Galaxy. In fact, the energy would never be expended, not in any real sense; the universe would simply have its demanding bookkeeping balanced, under the table, while it wasn’t looking.

“Twenty seconds until the first frame shift,” Charles told me. Our link seemed more and more intimate. He spoke solely for my benefit. “QL is now reassigning all descriptors to the first destination.” We would move everything in the “space” to be occupied by Mars, at the same “time” we shifted the planet itself, in effect trading places. This was the easiest part of the process to understand, though not to accomplish.

“The tweaker is beginning to radiate,” Stephen said outside. “Fluctuation in the Pierce region.”

I saw the two frames — our present frame and the frame we would translate ourselves to. They overlapped, and then, for an instant, I could not see Mars at all. What I saw instead was horrifying in its simplicity.

Mars had been reduced to an ineffable potential. It could be anything, and we were with it — we had been drawn outside of the rules, away from the game. This was the blanking, when systems that relied on moment-to-moment correlations — minds, computers, thinkers, electronic systems — had to jumpstart themselves, to assume that there had at one time been a reality, and that all of the rules had been what they seemed to be now.

In the potential, I saw — though fortunately, I did not feel — the attraction of what seemed to be choice. We could choose other sets of rules. The QL danced through these with great haste. I wanted to linger, to sample; what if this were changed, or that, or that — such fascinating prospects!

“Frame shift,” Charles said. The potential vanished and I saw again a simple representation of Mars. Hergesheimer took quick measurements of our position.

The rumbling howl died to a faint shiver, barely heard or felt through the couch’s padding. We were no longer where we had been. Earth had lost its target.

“Charles, how are you?” I asked.

“Well enough,” he said. “The QL got a little frightened back there. Changing the rules seems to be as attractive as sex. It feels at home in that kind of place.“

“Don’t let it do any dating,” I suggested. The immensity of what might have happened was lost in a sudden feeling of lightness.

“I think we did it right,” Charles said. I blinked away from the projectors and squinted at him on his couch. His eyes were closed and his breath came in shallow jerks.

Something brushed my arm. I swiveled my head the opposite direction and felt such a sudden sense of relief, tears started to flow. I lifted up my arm and reached out.

Ti Sandra stood beside my couch. She looked very healthy, back to her full weight, face wide and radiant and proud. She wore her most flamboyant gown, hand-stitched tiny glass beads sparkling. She stroked my arm, her touch as light as a breeze. “You made it,” I said. “God, it’s good to see you.”

“We’ve advanced along Mars’s orbit fifty million two hundred and fifty thousand kilometers,” Hergesheimer sang out.

Ti Sandra shook her head, still beaming at me, eyes crinkled down to slits with her pride and her love. I wondered at the lightness of her touch.

“Now for the first big leap,” Stephen said. “Charles?”

“Assessing,” Charles said.

I had glanced away at the sound of Stephen’s voice. When I glanced back, Ti Sandra was not there, of course, but her touch on my arm remained.

I settled back into the couch, mouth dry as flopsand, and let the projectors find my eyes again, filling my field of view.

“There’s no greater time lag — no lag at all,” Charles said. “But we’ll seem to be in the blanking longer, you and I and the QL and interpeter. We have a lot more translation to do — to the larger system. That will seem to put us outside status quo longer.”

Status quo — things as they are. All the familiarities to which our minds adapt from infancy. Home ground, home turf, home rule.

“The longest ever for the QL,” I said.

“Right,” Charles affirmed.

“Temptations.”

Charles chuckled.

“Dangerous for you, too?”

“You bet,” he said.

“Like sex.”

“Much worse, dear Casseia,” he said. “I’m in here with the QL, keeping it from getting distracted, but I experience most of what it experiences.”

“You told me once you wanted to understand everything,” I said.

“I remember.”

“In the blankness… I wanted to play around, too.”

“If we played for an eternity,” Charles said, “we might learn how to put together a universe. You and I.”

“But you say there’s no time passing.”

“Eternity means no time. Infinity without time. A ring of bright and endless theorizing. The ultimate play.”

Leander broke in. “Are you still working, Charles?”

“Still at it,” Charles said. “You want reports?”

“Don’t keep us guessing, Charles,” Leander said.

“QL has finished assessing the planet and the site, and it’s preparing to fix the books,” Charles said. “Don’t mind us, Stephen.”

“Don’t mess with her mind too much, Charles,” Stephen said. “We need her after you’re done.”

“You’ll see something different, this time,” Charles told me, his voice barely above a whisper. Intimacy beyond that of man and wife: the intimacy of two young gods. “I think it will be part of the QL’s longer acquaintance with the larger system. It will be measuring the highest level of superposited descriptors, up to, and maybe beyond those that are actually in use…”

“Unused descriptors,” I said.

“Or no longer in use,” Charles said. “Descriptors for things that once were, or might be. Or for nothing at all. Vestigial or excessive.”

“How many minutes until frame shift?” Leander asked.

“Four minutes,” Charles said.

“Earth might get a fix on our new position and start again,” Leander said.

“To hell with them,” Charles said. I could tell he was smiling, man on a powerful horse, riding confidently. But that horse was going to grow unbearably magnificent in the next few minutes.

“What would you use them for, Charles?” I asked.

“The untagged descriptors?”

“Yes.”

“I think they’re waiting for when we’re mature. We could make new forms of matter. We could translate all human information into the upper memory of mass and energy. We could trick space into believing it was matter or energy, or into believing it was something we can’t even conceive now.”

“You talked about that once, a long time ago,” I said.

“A dialog with the radixes of creation.”

“Radishes?” Leander interrupted.

“Stephen,” Charles said, “leave us alone. We’re fine. Casseia is doing her job.”

“She sounds more theoretical than political,” Leander said dourly.

“One minute,” Charles said.

I had a card to play, to keep Charles rooted in this particular creation. Now seemed the best time.

“I’ve thought of you often,” I said.

“What?” Charles seemed puzzled by the shift.

“I’ve thought of you often since we were together.”

“I’ve caused enough trouble, no?”

“I’ve thought about what you said, when we were trading ambitions. I think I know why I turned you down, Charles.”

He said nothing.

“I did love you, but you were going places I could never go-”

“Right,” he said softly.

“It seems terrible to say it, but I wanted to be with someone less stimulating.”

“Right.”

Leander whispered in my ear, “Casseia, what in hell are you doing?”

I pushed him away. “There was a moment when I felt so close to you, years after, I felt as if we had actually gotten married and lived a lifetime together. You came to my rescue, Charles.”

“When was that?”

“I had my back against a wall, talking with Sean Dickinson.”

“You liked Sean.”

“He was acting on Earth’s behalf after the Freeze. He was forcing us — me — to give up everything. I never felt so trapped in my life. Then you sent your message.”

“Ti Sandra — ” Charles said.

I interrupted. “I went to the surface and looked west and saw Phobos through the clouds.” My voice hitched again with the emotion of that moment. “I knew what you were going to do. And you did it. You took all my burdens away. My God, what you did for me then, Charles. I was so very proud.”

“I’m glad,” Charles said.

The image of Mars grew dark in my field of view. Through the darkness I saw the potential coming, the blankness a huge animal moving through void to reach us. The impression of its living beauty petrified me, like a rabbit facing a tiger.

“Shifting frame now,” Charles said. I felt his calmness, his focus, his strength. Charles was really so simple, still a child. I had spoken a truth I had not been able to acknowledge until now, and he believed me.

“I love you,” I said.

“I always have, and I always will love you, Casseia,” Charles said. He took a deep breath. “Let’s play.”

Abruptly, the QL expanded the scale of our simulation. We seemed to hang over the Solar System, the inner planets bright points marked by armillaries of coordinates, references for descriptor bases, expansions of arrays for major effects on Mars.

Removing Mars would have virtually no effect on the sun or planets.

The tiger struck.

In the blankness, I wondered what the universe would be like if

Charles spoke to me reassuringly

There would have been no agreement between charges of particles having no extension, point-like particles such as the electron, and aggregates such as the neutron; and furthermore, superposition would not be possible, and the universe would crumble

But Charles held firm, and guided the QL

The blankness drew me into something like a dream, where all actuality was but a subset of

My life would have been

“Casseia.”

No going to Earth, staying home, no

“Casseia.”

My enhancement seemed to throw colored layers of notation at me, layer upon layer piling up in beautiful depths, staring through a sea of described realities, and within that sea, the Mars that I had known reduced to a vector space, a single state array forming the basis for everything thereafter, and that moment had been (searching out the root, the zero for its passage over an infinite plane of my existence)

Multiple roots, multiple zeroes

Where my plane intersected with the complex surface of Charles, forming shock fronts that pushed me along and ahead, tumbling like a boulder

Removing those roots, and the function collapsed in an entirely different fashion, and it seemed, in this dream, that we had both been used, that our potentials had been coerced to achieve one thing, what was happening now, and all else could be discarded, our lives the endless scribbling that leads to an answer

I saw also the trials, the judgments, the suits brought against what was left of the Republic, crowds of those who could not be reasoned with, because the shock fronts had tumbled them along, as well; and I would receive the reflection, their anger and fear.

“Ah,” Charles said, something between a sigh and a groan. “Cassie.”

He had never called me Cassie, the familiarity of a husband, and this our child coming now.

“Frame shifted,” he said.

The Solar System had vanished from our perspective. Instead, a view of the distant stars from three angles, combined, twisting my internal gaze until I understood what the interpreter was doing. We swam in a sea of nebulosity, fresh clouds of young stars, stars newly born, the corpses of over-eager suns that, dying, enriched the medium and allowed even more dynamic suns to be made. The QL laid its sight over these things, and all was twisted into uncollapsed vagueness, flickering between states, superpositions of qualities it regarded as important but which meant little even to Charles.

“I’ve found the New System,” Hergesheimer called out. “We’re four point nine trillion kilometers away.”

I broke from the projectors to look at Charles. He lay without moving on the couch. Leander kneeled beside him and looked at me with an expression caught between wonder and pain.

“Do you hear him — in the simulation?” Leander asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I went back under the projectors, bands combining to immerse me again. I did not hear Charles, but through the interpreter, I felt a guidance of the moving figures, a steady hand on the QL.

“Yes,” I said. “I feel him. He’s here.”

“Yes,” I said to the steady hand, the man on the horse.

Frame shift in…

No time at all.

A mere adjustment.

Two thirds of a light-year; having emerged ten thousand light-years from the Sun, this was just a twitch of the toe into the waters of our new ocean. Charles could do it.

Did it.

The blankness almost a familiarity now, a place of rest as well as potential, and within the repose, the steady hand on the surface of the QL.

“Not mad,” Charles said. “The QL is not mad. It’s not even eccentric.” I thought for a moment he was calling out the name of a woman, one of his lovers. Agnes Day. Who is she, Charles?

“Now listen to me closely, because there will not be time to say this again. You are my image of what a woman should be, God save me, Cassie.”

Agnus Dei he had said, lamb of god.

“You are strong, you love and care, and they will come after you.”

“Did you see them, too, Charles?”

“I don’t need to see anything. I know people almost as well as you. I won’t be there in any useful form, because this is going to”

just kill me

“Cassie. But you saved them all. History grinds very fine sometimes, and the dust is bones — or ash.”

“We’re responsible.”

“They’ll put you in a pillory, Cassie. I wish I could share it with you. Stephen will, and the others. I’m taking the easy way.”

“Charles, no.”

“Time’s up.”

I did not even feel the potential, and that may have been why he spoke to me — because that last, final twitch of the toe was the hardest, the worst.

The images projected into my eyes and into my head suddenly hurt abominably. None of it made any sense, all the messages and tags and labels scrambled, all the armillaries blown apart. I could not translate what I saw. The interpreter cut me off — leaving me in neutral, toneless darkness, and Leander pushed the bands away from my head and the projectors from my eyes.

Charles jerked on his couch, grinning horribly with clenched teeth. I rose from my couch and went to his side. Confusion and shouting from the gallery and around the lab; for the moment, everyone seemed to have forgotten us.

“We’re there!” Hergesheimer called out. “My God, we’re actually there!”

Only then did Charles relax. His head lolled, eyes shivering back and forth in their sockets. I cradled his head as Leander disconnected the optical leads. The medical arbeiters pushed forward then, through a sudden crowd, and took over, lifting Charles onto a stretcher.

I squatted on the floor beside his empty couch, dazed; we had done it. Charles had done it.

Hergesheimer walked before a vid image of the new system, pointing out stars as if this were his own triumph. Pictures of the new sun popped up around the lab.

Leander lifted me to my feet with strong hands and held me by the shoulders.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

I nodded. “Charles?”

“I think he pushed it,” Leander said. “We’ll see…”

The first nine hours of the first day in the New System I slept in my quarters. I came awake when Hergesheimer, Leander, Abdi and Wachsler announced themselves at my door. Leander was solicitous.

“Are you feeling stronger?” he asked.

“Well enough,” I answered. I felt as if I could sleep another hundred years, but at least I was functional.

Wachsler’s engineers had erected a transparent dome on the surface and built a platform for us to walk on. I was pushed to the front of the first group of fifty, still expected to lead the way, and in crowded shifts we took an elevator to the central emergency exit, rose to the new airlock, and stepped out under a new sky.

Leander guided Charles in a wheelchair, attended by compact medical abeiters. I held Charles’s hand as we stood under the billowing, crystal-clear dome, but he responded only with a slight squeeze of my fingers.

The new sun seemed only slightly larger, though Mars in fact orbited eighty million kilometers closer. Twilight grew in the east. The sun’s disk slipped below the horizon, its bright, pearly, youthful corona flared and went away, and with nightfall came another glory.

Our eyes adjusted slowly. Minutes passed before we could see the depths of color, the promise of this new garden of suns. Flowers of nebula all around, rose and violet and deep lilac and faint wisps of spring green and daffodil yellow, and within them, the blurred faces of infant stars.

I kneeled beside Charles’s chair and took his hand again. He turned toward me, looked directly at me. Something lingered in his eyes, in his expression, to give me a little hope. I touched his face with my fingers and he flinched back, cheek muscles tightened. Then he relaxed.

“Do you know what’s happening, Charles?” I asked him.

“Settled down,” he whispered, eyes straying again.

“You brought us here,” I said. “For better or for worse, but it feels safe. That must be better.”

“Mm hmmm,” he murmured.

“We’re looking at the New System. It’s nighttime. We can see the stars, and they’re beautiful.”

“Good,” he said.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Too much.”

The quiet that followed our move — stunned realization, adjustment, and recovery — applied, it seemed, as much to Mars as the Martians.

No moons rose over Mars.

The threat of the locusts faded day by day as more machines wandered into our defenses and were shredded, or their energy and purpose died on the cold dry sands.

With Many Hills gone, and Ti Sandra and much of the legislature dead, there was no government, no Republic. Large stations naturally became the centers of Martian social and political life. Martians talked vaguely of returning to normal, but the instinctive pattern of society was the family, the station, the Binding Multiple; nothing else had yet had chance to take root.

At first, millions of Martians had difficulty even understanding what had happened to them. They could not conceive of a force so massive, a conspiracy so powerful, as to tear the planet away from the Old Sun. As the reality seeped in — echoed across the ex net, reaffirmed by scientists and pundits trusted within the smaller communities — shock replaced disbelief, and then indignation.

The evidence of Earth’s assaults on Mars seemed far away from everyday life. Destroyed stations had no voice, of course, and scarred territories, hundreds of millions of hectares of scorched sand, did not seem reason enough for so drastic a move.

Shock ruled. Families made alarmed and angry judgments, and those judgments were passed along the ex net. Committees formed to investigate, argued with each other, and eventually the committees became a kind of ad hoc judicial system, and that system made inquiries.

What at first was called the Escape began to be called the Retreat, then the Rout, and finally the Shame. We could have stayed, some said, and used our new power to fight Earth on its own terms. Surely a few billion Earth citizens would have been fair exchange for keeping Mars independent within the Solar System…

Homesickness of the most extreme kind added to the miseries.

The Republic, despite the best efforts of the surviving government, was quickly being replaced by something worse than anarchy — passionate mob rule, directed by untutored but skilled opportunists.

The mob was spurred on by Mars itself. Mars found its voice, and screamed its own pain.

The first great quake rumbled south of Ascraeus. Three stations tumbled to ruin, and one split asunder as a crevice formed between Pavonis and Ascraeus. The crevice — in later years to be called the New Tharsis Rift — grew in four weeks from a few meters to over a thousand kilometers. The echoes of this new stretching of the crust rebounded. Mars rang like a struck gong.

Within Preamble, the areologists — led by a frantic and inspired Faoud Abdi — tried to track the course of the new Martian tectonic order without satellites, relying entirely upon reports sent across the ex net. But the ex net itself was fragmented as links were broken, repaired, and broken again. Our nano resources were stretched past their limits.

From Kaibab, volunteer crews flew shuttles along Marineris, charting the changes, taking on fuel and supplies at those intact stations willing to cooperate, and proceeding across the Tharsis Bulge. Elevation changes of a few dozen meters were common. In some places, changes of a hundred meters were noted.

The Tharsis Bulge, some predicted, would subside within a hundred years — old years.

Mars orbited the New Sun with a period of three hundred and two days.

On the opposite side of Mars, narrow, linear ridges appeared, thousands of kilometers long, aligned in great arcs like waves frozen in stone. More stations found their tunnels in jeopardy and had to be evacuated.

Wachsler’s contingency plans were enacted, but often too late. For this of course I was blamed. To have pushed Mars into such an extremity, without adequate planning, seemed a horrible blunder; the word “crime” was not too strong.

On my orders, the remaining Olympians disassembled the tweakers and carried them away from Kaibab to secure storage elsewhere. Some of the shipments were seized by factions who laid claim to them. No single faction, thankfully, could do anything with what they had. No one understood. The Olympians fell silent, even under threat.

Some were imprisoned.

I spent much of my time flying from station to station, touring quake sites and trying to provide solace, meeting with the new unsympathetic committees. Each and every Martian had become a refugee, even if they still had their lifelong familiar four walls around them.

And Martians were afraid. In station after station, they asked when we would go Home — to the Solar System — and when I told them, probably never, many wept in anger and despair.

Some supported me, but not many.

Mars, on its surface and below, suffered madness.

When water poured from the northern scarps of Olympus and flooded Cyane Sulci, damaging the labs where my husband had worked to make the mother cysts bloom, I flew in the last Presidential shuttle, on my last official tour of a disaster area. Dandy accompanied me, and Stephen Leander. We traveled first to UMS, spending the night and refueling there; then we proceeded to the sulci.

Something had come awake within the huge volcano, liberating a vast subarean mineral aquifer. The water boiled from the northern rapes, some of it coursing into the sulci, flooding the hundreds of kilometers in between to a depth of several meters. The water, meeting age-old flopsand and sizzle, liberated huge quantities of bound carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Lakes of fizzing mud bubbled, churned, and then froze. We flew across this dark, thickly clouded terrain, observing new islands in the new mud oceans.

Only the southern lowlands and valleys of the Cyane Sulci had been flooded, of course. But the lab had been positioned in one such valley, and the containment domes had been destroyed, leaving four mother cysts open to the new skies of Mars.

My husband’s colleagues met us. Dr. Schovinski, Ilya’s assistant, extended cordial greetings in the makeshift airlock.

“It is proverbial,” Schovinski said, leading Dandy and Leander and me to a small room where tea and a crude lunch was being served. “We lose most of our buildings and tunnels, nearly all of the domes, and yet… The experiment is a success. What you have done is controversial, dear Madam President, but from this scientist, all I can say is… thank you!”

We ate quickly and Schovinski showed us through a shored-up and still-damp tunnel to the lab where fossil mother cysts had once been prepared for experiments in the domes. The cyst cradles here were empty. “We’ve moved them all outside,” Schovinski explained. “If only Ilya could have seen this!”

We put on pressure suits and walked into the open. Beneath the brighter skies, filled with high, swirling clouds of ice crystals, the floods had pushed the containment domes into mounds of glittering scrap. The carefully prepared soil beds had been scoured, leaving deep ruts and gullies, and in these gullies, beneath a thin layer of ice rime that gathered every evening and dissipated by noon , thick brown shoots rose two and three meters, forming fan-shaped leaves at their tips.

Schovinski urged me into a gully about a meter deep. He took my gloved hand and slapped it against the trunk of a shoot; rising from congealed and vitrified slime. The slime poured from a cracked mother cyst six meters away.

“First come the aqueduct bridges,” Schowinski said. “Then, we assume, follow other forms. First the young ecos manages its water supply, then it tries to complete its blooming.”

From one advanced shoot, five meters tall and two meters thick at the base, four fan-shaped leaves had sprouted, spread wide now in the bright light of the New Sun. A translucent green globe as big as a watermelon hid in the shadow of the largest leaf.

Even before Schovinski told me, I knew what this was. In time, the fruit would grow huge, and serve as one of many reservoirs for the aqueducts. It seemed an eternity ago that Charles had guided me into one such buried and fossilized globe.

I resolved he would see this someday, when he was ready.

We spent several hours in the open, and even experienced a light flurry of snow. The brown shoots gave me a sharp, high joy, and I enthused over them like a little girl, trying to live this for Ilya as well as myself.

When we returned to the surviving tunnels, we heard from concerned lab assistants that half a dozen shuttles had arrived from Amazonis. Dandy’s intuition kicked in and he quickly hurried me toward our own shuttle, but too late; we were met by a solid wall of well-armed citizens.

Schovinski’s indignation meant nothing to the vigilantes. The time had come. They arrested me and charged me with half a dozen crimes, highest among them treason. Dandy and Leander were bound hand and foot like lambs before slaughter; the grim-faced mob, all men, subjected me to the lesser indignity of having my hands sticky-roped.

It had happened to me before.

So died the Federal Republic of Mars.

I have drawn the limits of my story and will stay with them. All that I have written deals with moving Mars, the whys and hows, and my role in this event. What comes after I would just as soon forget.

Writing in prison is much overrated.

I do not ask for forgiveness, or even for fair judgment. In a way, I have received my reward. I do beg however that Charles Franklin be treated gently, as well as all of the Olympians held under arrest.

Because of them, Mars still exists and would-be-governments can still struggle and argue and accuse.

When all the judgments are made and my punishment settled, I will think of these things: a trunk, a leaf, a green and glittering globe. Children will be born who remember nothing of the Old Sun. The new bright-flowered skies will be home for them — for you, whom I hope and pray will read this story. I see you playing in the shadow of the bridges of Old Mars, your skin revealed to the air, a hundred, a thousand years from now. For you there will be no time, no distance, no limits; nothing but what you will.

Do better than your elders. You will have to; the power is yours to command.