by Greg Bear
"Whoever," he answered. "You're from UMS, right? Friends and colleagues of the patients?"
"Fellow students," Felicia said.
"Right. Now listen. I have to say this, in case one of you is going to shoot off to a LitVid. 'The Time's River District neither condones nor condemns the actions taken by these patients. We follow historical Martian charter and treat any and all patients, regardless of legal circumstance or political belief. Any statements they make do not represent — '"
"Jesus," Felicia said.
"' — the policy or attitudes of this hospital, nor the policy of Tune's River District.' End of sermon." The public defender stepped back and waved us through.
I was shocked by what we saw when we entered Sean's room. He had been tilted into a corner at forty-five degrees, wrapped in white surgical nano and tied to a steel recovery board. Monitors guided his reconstruction through fluid and optic fibers. Only now did we realize how badly he had been injured.
As we entered his room, he turned his head and stared at us impassively through distant green-gray eyes. We made our awkward openings, and he responded with a casual, "How's the outside world?"
"In an uproar," Oliver said. Sean glanced at me as if I were only there in part, not a fully developed human being, but a ghost of mild interest. I specked the moments of passionate speech when he had riveted the crowded students and compared it to this lackluster shell and was immensely saddened.
"Good," Sean said, measuring the word with silent lips before repeating it aloud. He looked at a projected paleoscape of Mars on the wall opposite: soaring aqueduct bridges, long gleaming pipes suspended from tree-like pedestals and fruited with clusters of green globes, some thirty or forty meters-across ... A convincing mural of our world before the planet sucked in its water, shed its atmosphere, and withered.
"The Council's taken over everything again," I said. "The syndics of all the BMs are meeting to patch things together."
Sean did not react.
"Nobody's told us how you were hurt," Felicia said. We looked at her, astonished at this untruth. Ochoa had checked into all the security reports, including those filed by university guards, and pieced together the story.
"The charges," Sean said, hesitating not a moment, and I thought, Whatever Felicia is up to, he'll tell the truth . . . and why expect him not to?
"The charges went off prematurely, before I had a chance to get out of the way. I set the charges alone. Of course."
"Of course," Oliver said.
Charles stayed in the rear, hands folded before him like a small boy at a funeral.
"Blew me out of my skinseal. I kept my helmet on, oddly enough. Exposed my guts. Everything boiled. I remember quite a lot, strangely. Watching my blood boil. Somebody had the presence of mind to throw a patch over me. It wrapped me up and slowed me down and they pulled me into the infirmary about an hour later. I don't remember much after that."
"Jesus," Felicia said, in exactly the same tone she had used for the public defender in the waiting room.
"We did it to them, didn't we? Got the ball rolling," Sean said.
"Actually — " Oliver began, but Felicia, with a tender expression, broke in.
"We did it," she said. Oliver raised his eyebrows.
"I'm going to be okay. About half of me will need replacing. I don't know who's paying for it. My family, I suppose. I've been thinking."
"Yeah?" Felicia said.
"I know what set the charge off," Sean said. "Somebody broke the timer before I planted it. I'd like one or all of you to find out who."
Nobody spoke for a moment. "You think somebody did it deliberately?" I asked.
Sean nodded. "We checked the equipment a hundred times and everything worked."
"Who would have done something like that?" Oliver asked, horrified.
"Somebody," Sean said. "Keep the students together. This isn't over yet." He turned to face me, suddenly focusing. "Take a message to Gretyl. Tell her she was a goddamned fool and I love her madly." He bit into the words goddamned fool as if they were a savory cake that gave him great satisfaction. I had never seen such a join of pain and bitter pride.
I nodded.
"Tell her she and I will take the reins again and guide this mess home right. Tell her just that."
"Guide the mess home right," I repeated, still under his spell.
"We have a larger purpose," Sean said. "We have to break this planet out of its goddamned business-as-usual, corrupt, bow-down-to-the-Triple, struggle-along mentality. We can do that. We can make our own party. It's a beginning." His eyes fixed on each of us in turn, as if to brand us. Felicia held out her splayed fingers and Sean lifted his free arm to awkwardly press his hand against hers. Oliver did the same. Charles stood back; too much for him. I was about to raise my hand and match Sean's. But Sean saw my hesitation, my change of expression when Charles stepped back, and he dropped his hand before I could decide.
"Heart and mind, heart and mind," Sean said softly. "You are . . . Casseia, right? Casseia Majumdar?"
"Yes."
"How did your family fare in all this?"
"I don't know," I said.
"They're fixed to prosper. The Gobacks will do well in the next government, It was funny, Connor thinking we were Gobacks. Are you a Goback, Casseia?"
I shook my head, throat tight. His tone was so stiff and distant, so reproving.
"Show it to me, Casseia. Heart and mind."
"I don't think you have any right to question my loyalty because of my family," I said.
Sean's gaze went cold. "If you're not dedicated, you could turn on us . . . just like whoever broke the timer."
"Gretyl handled the charge," Charles said. "Nobody else touched it. Certainly not Casseia."
"We all slept, didn't we?" Sean said. "But it's irrelevant, really. That part's over."
He closed his eyes and licked his lips. A cup came up from the wallmount arbeiter and a stream of liquid poured into his mouth. He sucked it up with the expertise of days in the hospital.
"What do you mean?" Felicia asked in a little voice.
"I'll have to pick all over again. Most of you went home, didn't you?"
"Some did," Felicia said. "We stayed."
"We needed students to occupy and hold, to take the administration chambers and dictate terms. We could work from the university as a base, claim it as a forfeit for illegal voiding, claim it for damages ... If I had been there, that's what we would have done."
I felt like crying. The injustice of Sean's veiled accusations, mixed with my very real infatuation and guilt at not serving the cause better, turned my stomach.
"Go talk to Gretyl. And you two ..." He pointed to Charles and me.
"Think it over. Who are you? Where do you want to be in ten years?"
* * *
Gretyl was less severely injured, but looked worse. Her head had been wrapped in a bulky breather, leaving only a gap for her eyes. She had been laid back at forty-five degrees on a steel recovery plate as well, and tubes ran from mazes of nano clumps on her chest and neck. An arbeiter had discreetly draped the rest of her with a white sheet for our visit. She watched us enter, and her silky artificial voice said, "How's Sean? You've been to see him?"
"He's fine," Oliver said. I was too unhappy to talk.
"We haven't been allowed to visit. This hospital shits protocol. What's being said outside? Did we get any attention?"
Felicia explained as gently as possible that we really hadn't accomplished much. She was ready to be a little harder with Gretyl than with Sean; perhaps she was infatuated with Sean as well. I had a sudden insight into people and revolutions, and did not like what I saw.
"Sean has a plan to change that," Gretyl said.
"I'm sure he does," Oliver said.
"What's on at UMS?"
"They're moving in a new administration. All the Statist appointees have resigned or been put on leave."
"Sounds like they're being punished."
&
nbsp; "It's routine. All appointments are being reviewed," Oliver said.
Gretyl sighed — an artificial note of great beauty — and extended her hand. Felicia squeezed it. Charles and I remained in the background. "He thinks the charge that blew up was tampered with," Oliver said.
"It may have been," Gretyl said. "It must have been."
"But only you and he handled it," Charles said.
Gretyl sighed again. "It was just a standard Excavex two-kilo tube. We didn't pay a lot of money. The people who stole it for us may have tampered with it. They could have done something to make it go off. That's possible."
"We don't know that," Oliver said.
"Listen, friends, if we haven't attracted any attention yet, it's because — " She stopped and her eyes tracked the room zipzip, then narrowed.
"I have new eyes," she said. "Do you like the color? You'd better go now. We'll talk later, after I'm released."
On our way out of the hospital, in the tunnel connecting us to Time's River Station's main tube, a hungry-looking, poorly-dressed and very young male LitVid agent tried to interview us. He followed us for thirty meters, glancing at his slate between what he thought were pointed questions. We were too glum and too smart to give any answers, but despite our reticence, we ended up in a ten-second flash on a side channel for Mars Tharsis local.
Sean, on the other hand, was interviewed the next day for an hour by an agent for New Mars Committee Scan, and that was picked up and broadcast by General Solar to the Triple. He told our story to the planets, and by and large, what he told was not what I remembered.
Nobody else was interviewed.
My sadness grew; my fresh young idealism waned rapidly, replaced by no wisdom to speak of, nothing emotionally concrete.
I thought about Sean's words to us, his accusations, his pointed suspicion of me, his interview spreading distortions around the Triple. Now, I would say that he lied, but it's possible Sean Dickinson even then was too good a rabbler to respect the truth. And Gretyl, I think, was about to pass on some sound advice about political need dictating how we see — and use — history.
When we returned to our dorms at UMS, we found notices posted and doors locked. Diane met me and explained that UMS had been closed for the foreseeable future due to "curriculum revisions," Flashing icons beneath the ID plates told us we could enter our quarters once and remove our belongings. Train fare to our homes or any other destination would not be provided. Our slates received bulletins on when and where the public hearings would be held to determine the university's future course.
We were arguably worse off than we had been with Dauble and Connor.
Charles helped Diane and me pull our belongings from the room and stack them in the tunnel. There weren't many — I had sent most of my effects home after being voided. I helped Charles remove his goods, about ten kilos of equipment and research materials.
We ate a quick lunch in the train station. We didn't have much to say. Diane, Oliver and Felicia departed on the northbound, and Charles saw me to the eastbound.
As I lugged my bag into the airlock, he held out his hand, and we shook firmly. "Will I see you again?" he asked.
"Why not?" I said. "When our lives are straightened out."
He held onto my hand a little longer and I gently removed it. "I'd like to see you before that," he said. "For me, at least, that might be a long way off."
"All right," I said, squeezing through the door. I didn't commit myself to when. I was in no mood to establish a relationship.
My father forgave me. Mother secretly admired all that I had done, I think — and they personally footed the bill for expensive autoclasses, to keep me up-to-date on my studies. They could have charged it to the BM education expenses, as part of the larger Goback revival. Father was a firm believer in BM rule, but too honorable to squeeze BM-appropriated guvvie funds, or take the victor's advantage.
When next I saw Connor, it was on General Solar LitVid. She was on the long dive to Earth, issuing pronouncements from the WHTCIPS (Western Hemisphere Transport Coalition Interplanetary Ship) Barrier Reef, returning, she was at pains to make Martians understand, to a kind of hero's welcome. Dauble was with her but said nothing, since day by day the awful truth of her failed Statist administration was coming out.
It so happened that there was a Majumdar BM advocate on that very ship, and he took it upon himself to represent all the BMs and other interests hoping to settle with Connor and Dauble. He served them papers, day after day after day, throughout the voyage . . .
By the time both of them got to Earth, ten months later, they would be poor as Jackson's Lode, born on Mars, exiled to Earth, doomed to dodging Triple suits for the rest of their days.
2172, M.Y. 53
What was happening on Mars was an excellent example of politics in action in a "young" culture, my special area of study with respect to Earth history, and I should have been fascinated, but in fact I ignored much of the daily news.
My youthful ideals had been trodden on none too delicately, and I didn't know what to make of it. Before I could speck out the eventual course of my education and decide how to serve my family, I had to re-establish who I was. My mother supported my youthful indecision; my father gave in to my mother. I had some time away from commitments.
When UM restarted classes, I switched campuses and majors, going to Durrey Station, the third-largest town on Mars and home of UM's second-largest branch. I studied high humanities — text lit from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, philosophy before quantum mechanics, and the most practical subject in my list, morals and ethics as a business art. Four hapless souls shared my major, studying things most pioneering, practical Martians could not have given a damn about.
I needed a rest. So I decided to have fun.
* * *
I hadn't thought about Charles for months. I did not know he had gone to Durrey Station as well. When classes started, we did not run into each other immediately. I saw him in Shinktown over student break.
Seven hundred and ninety students fled UM Durrey at Solstice and either went to work on their farms, if from the local, more sober and well-established families of Mariner Valley, or took refuge in Shinktown. Some, already married, spread out to their half-built warrens, soon to become new stations, and did what married people do.
My family kept no farms and required little of me in the way of overt filial piety. They loved me but let me choose my own paths.
Shinktown was a not very charming maze of shops, small and discreet hotels, game rooms, and gyms, seventeen kilometers from Durrey Station, where students went to get away from their studies, their obligations to family and town; to blow it all out and kick red.
Mars has never been a planet of prudes. Still, its attitudes toward sex befitted a frontier culture. The goals of sex are procreation and the establishment of strong connections between individuals and families; sex leads to (or should lead to) love and lasting relationships; sex without love may not be sinful, but it is almost certainly wasteful. To the ideal Martian man or woman, as portrayed in popular LitVids, sex was never a matter of just scratching an itch; it was devilishly complicated, fraught with significance and drama for individual and family, a potential liaison (one seldom married within one's BM) and the beginning of a new entity, the stronger and dedicated dyad of perfectly matched partners.
That was the myth and I admit I found it attractive. I still do. It's been said that a romantic is someone who never accepts the evidence of her eyes and ears.
In this age, few were physically unattractive. There was no need and little inclination among most Martians to let nature take its uncertain course. That particular question had been hammered into a viable public policy for most citizens of the Triple seventy Martian years and more ago. I was attractive enough, my genetic heritage requiring little adjustment if any — I'd never asked my mother and father, really — and men were not reluctant to talk to me.
But I had never taken a lover, mostl
y because I found young men either far too earnest or far too frivolous or, most commonly, far too dull. What I wanted for my first (and perhaps only) love was not physical splendor alone, but something deeply significant, something that would make Mars itself — if not the entire Triple — sigh with envy when my imagined lover and I published our memoirs, in ripe old age . . .
I was no more a prude than any other Martian. I did not enjoy going to bed alone. I often wished I could lower my standards just enough to learn more about men; handsome men, of course, men with a little grit, supremely self-confident. For that sort of experimentation, beauty and physical splendor would be more important than brains, but if one could have both — wit and beauty and prowess —
So fevered my dreams.
Shinktown was a place of temptations for a young Martian, and that was why so many of us went there. I enjoyed myself at the dances, flirted and kissed often enough, but shied from the more intimate meetings I knew I could have. The one continuing truth of male and female relations — that the man attempts and the woman chooses — was in my favor. I could attract, test, play the doubtless cruel and (I thought) entirely fair game of sampling the herd.
In the middle of the break, on an early spring evening, a local university club held a small mixer following a jai alai game in the arena. I'd attended the game and was enjoying a buzz of frustration at lithe male bodies leaping and slamming the heavy little ball, uneasy with a mix of strong Shinktown double-ferment tea and a little wine, and I hoped to dance it off and flirt and then go home and think.
I spotted Charles first, from across the room, while dancing with a Durrey third-form. Charles was talking to ("chatting up" I said to myself) a tall, big-eyed exotique who seemed to me way out of his league. When the dance ended, I edged through the crowd and bumped into him by accident from behind. He turned from the exotique, saw me, and to my dismay, his face lit up like a child's. He fell all over himself to disentangle from the big-eyed other.