“I thought you knew.”
“Come on. Don’t treat me as if I was stupid.”
“I don’t, Maya. Anyway, it’s all we can do, unless we hide entirely.”
“I’m not proposing to do that! What do you think I am, a coward?”
A sour expression crossed his face, and he said something in French. Then he took a deep breath and shouted at her in French, one of his curses. But she could see that this was a deliberate decision on his part — that he had decided the fights were good for her, and cathartic for him, so that they could be pursued, when inevitable, as a kind of therapeutic method — and this of course was intolerable. An act, a manipulation of her — without another thought she took a step into the kitchen area and picked up a copper pot and heaved it at him, and he was so surprised that he barely managed to knock it away.
“Putaine!” he roared. “Pourquoi ce fa? Pourquoi?”
“I won’t be patronized,” she told him, satisfied that he was genuinely angry now, but still blazing herself. “You damned head-shrinker, if you weren’t so bad at your job the whole First Hundred wouldn’t have gone crazy and this world wouldn’t be so fucked up. It’s all your fault.” And she slammed out the door and went down to the cafe to brood over the awfulness of having a shrink as a partner, also over her own ugly behavior, so quick to leap out of her control and attack him. He did not come down and join her that time, though she sat around till closing.
And then, just after she had gotten home and lain down on the couch and fallen asleep, there was a knock at the door, rapid and light in a way immediately frightening, and Mic’hel ran to it and looked through the peephole. He saw who it was and let her in. It was Marina.
Marina sat down heavily on the couch beside Maya, and with shaking hands holding theirs, said, “They took over Sabishii. Security troops. Hiroko and her whole inner circle were there visiting, as well as all the southerners who had come up since the raids. And Coyote too. All of them were there, and Nanao, and Etsu, and all the issei …”
“Didn’t they resist?” Maya said.
“They tried. There were a bunch of people killed at the train station. That slowed them down, and I think some people might have gotten into the mohole mound maze. But they had surrounded the whole area, and they came in through the tent walls. It was just like Cairo in sixty-one, I swear.”
Suddenly she started to cry, and Maya and Michel sat down on each side of her, and she put her face in her hands and sobbed. This was so out of character for the usually severe Marina that the reality of her news hit home.
She sat up and wiped her eyes and nose. Michel got her a tissue. Calmly she went on: “I’m afraid a lot of them may be killed. I was out with Vlad and Ursula in one of those outlying hermitage boul-d “rs, and we stayed there for three days, and then walked to one of the hidden garages and got out in boulder cars. Vlad went to Burroughs, Ursula to Elysium. We’re trying to tell as many of the First Hundred as we can. Especially Sax and Nadia.”
Maya got up and put on her clothes, then went down the hall and knocked on Spencer’s door. She returned to the kitchen and put on water for tea, refusing to look at the photo of Frank, who watched her saying I told you so. This is the way it happens. She took teacups back into the living room, and saw that her own hands were shaking so much that hot liquid was spilling down over her fingers. Michel’s face was pale and sweaty, and he wasn’t hearing anything Marina was saying. Of course — if Hiroko’s group had been there, then his entire family was gone, either captured or killed. She handed out the teacups, and as Spencer came in and had the story told to him, she got a robe and draped it over Michel’s shoulders, excoriating herself for the miserable timing of her assault on him. She sat by him, squeezing his thigh, trying to tell him by touch that she was there, that she was his family too, and that all her games were over, to the best of her ability — no more treating him as pet or punching bag… That she loved him. But his thigh was like warm ceramic, and he obviously didn’t notice her hand, was scarcely even aware she was there. And it came to her that it was precisely in the moments of greatest need when people could do the least for each other.
She got up and got Spencer some tea, avoiding looking at the photo or the pale image of her face in the dark kitchen window, the pinched bleak vulture eye that she could never meet. You can never look back.
For the moment there was nothing to do but sit there, and get through the night. Try to absorb the news, to withstand it. So they sat, they talked, they listened to Marina tell her story in greater and greater detail. They made calls out on the Praxis lines, trying to find out more. They sat, slumped and silent, caged in their own reflections, their solitary universes. The minutes passed like hours, the hours like years: it was the hellish twisted spacetime of the all-night vigil, that most ancient of human rituals, where people fought without success to wrench meaning into each random catastrophe.
Dawn when it finally came was overcast, the tent spattered with raindrops. A few painfully slow hours later, Spencer began the process of contacting all the groups in Odessa. Over the course of that day and the next they spread the news, which had been suppressed on Mangalavid and the other infonets. But it was clear to all that something had happened, because of the sudden absence of Sabishii from the ordinary discourse, even in matters of common business. Rumors flew everywhere, gaining momentum in the absence of hard news, rumors of everything from Sabishii’s independence to its razing. But in the tense meetings of the following week Maya and Spencer told everyone what Marina had said, and then they spent the subsequent hours discussing what should be done. Maya did her best to convince people that they should not be pushed into acting before they were ready, but it was hard going; they were furious, and frightened, and there were a lot of incidents in town and around Hellas that week, all over Mars in fact — demonstrations, minor sabotage, assaults on security positions and personnel, AI breakdowns, work slowdowns. “We’ve got to show them they can’t get away with this!” Jackie said over the net, seeming everywhere at once. Even Art agreed with her: “I think’civil protests by as much of the general population as we can muster might slow them down. Make those bastards think twice about doing anything like this again.”
Nevertheless, the situation stabilized after a while. Sabishii returned to the net and to train schedules, and life there resumed, although it was not the same as before, as a big police force stayed in occupation, monitoring the gates and the station, and trying to discover all the cavities of the mound maze. During this time Maya had a number of long talks with Nadia, who was working in South Fossa, and with Nirgal and Art, and even with Ann, who called in from one of her refuges in. the Aureum Chaos. They all agreed that no matter what had happened in Sabishii, they needed to hold back for the moment from any attempt at a general insurrection. Sax even called in to Spencer, to say he “needed time.” Which Maya found comforting, as it supported her gut feeling that the time was not right. That they were being provoked in the hopes they would try a revolt prematurely. Ann and Kasei and Jackie and the other radicals — Dao, Antar, even Zeyk — were unhappy at the wait, and pessimistic about what it meant. “You don’t understand,” Maya told them. “There’s a whole new world growing out there, and the longer we wait, the stronger it gets. Just hold on.”
Then about a month after the closing of Sabishii, they got a brief message on their wrists from Coyote — a short clip of his lopsided face, looking unusually serious, telling them that he had gotten away through the maze of secret tunnels in the mohole mound, and was now back in the south, in one of his own hideouts. “What about Hiroko?” Michel said instantly. “What about Hiroko and the rest of them?”
But Coyote was already gone.
“I don’t think they got Hiroko either,” Michel said instantly, walking around the room without noticing he was moving. “Not Hiroko or any of them! If they had been captured, I’m sure the Transitional Authority would have announced it. I’ll bet Hiroko has taken the group undergro
und again. They haven’t been pleased with things since Dorsa Brevia, they’re just not good at compromise, that’s why they took off in the first place. Everything that has happened since has only confirmed their opinion that they can’t trust us to build the kind of world they want. So they’ve used this chance and disappeared again. Maybe the crackdown on Sabishii forced them to do it without warning us.”
“Maybe so,” Maya said, careful to sound like she believed it. It sounded like denial on Michel’s part, but if it helped him, who cared? And Hiroko was capable of anything. But Maya had to make her response plausibly Mayalike, or he would see she was only reassuring him: “But where would they go?”
“Back into the chaos, I would guess. A lot of the old shelters are still there.”
“But what about you?”
“They’ll let me know.”
He thought it over, looked at her. “Or maybe they figure that you’re my family now.”
So he had felt her hand, in that first horrible hour. But he gave her such a sad crooked smile that she winced, and caught him up and tried to crush him with a hug, really crack a rib, to show him how much she loved him and how little she liked such a wan look. “They’re right about that,” she said harshly. “But they ought to contact you anyway.”
“They will. I’m sure they will.”
Maya had no idea what to think of this theory of Michel’s. Coyote had in fact escaped through the mound maze, and he was likely to have helped as many of his friends as he could. And Hiroko would probably be first on that list. She would certainly grill Coyote about it next time she saw him; but then he had never told her anything before. In any case, Hiroko and her inner circle were gone. Dead, captured, or in hiding, no matter which it was a cruel blow to the cause, Hiroko being the moral center for so much of the resistance.
But she had been so strange. A part of Maya, mostly subconscious and unacknowledged, was not entirely unhappy to have Hiroko off the scene, however it had happened. Maya had never been able to communicate with Hiroko, to understand her, and though she had loved her, it had made her nervous to have such a great random force wandering about, complicating things. And it had been irritating also to have another great power among the women, a power that she had had absolutely no influence over. Of course it was horrible if the whole of her group had been captured, or worse, killed. But if they had decided to disappear again, that would not be a bad thing at all. It would simplify things at a time when they desperately needed simplification, giving Maya more potential control over the events to come.
So she hoped with all her heart that Michel’s theory was true, and nodded at him, and pretended to agree in a reserved realistic way with his analysis. And then went off to the next meeting, to calm down yet another commune of angry natives. Weeks passed, then months; it seemed they had survived the crisis. But things were still degenerating on Earth, and Sabishii, their university town, the jewel of the demimonde, was functioning under a kind of martial law; and Hiroko was gone, Hiroko who was their heart. Even Maya, initially pleased in some sense to be rid of her, felt more and more oppressed by her absence. The concept of Free Mars had been part of the areophany, after all — and to be reduced to mere politics, to the survival of the fittest…
The spirit seemed gone from things. And as the winter passed, and the news from Earth told of escalating conflicts, Maya noticed that people seemed more and more desperate for distraction. The partying got louder and wilder; the corniche was a nightly celebration, and on special nights, like Fassnacht or New Year’s, it was jammed with everyone in town, all dancing and drinking and singing with a kind of ferocious gaiety, under the little red mottoes painted on every other wall. YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. FREE MARS. But how? How?
New Year’s that winter was especially wild; it was M-year 50, and people were celebrating the big anniversary in style. Maya walked with Michel up and down the corniche, and from behind her domino she watched curiously as the undulating dance lines passed them by, she stared at all the long young dancing bodies, the figures masked but naked to the waist for the most part, as if out of an ancient Hindu illustration, breasts and pecs bobbing gracefully to nuevo calypso steel-drum ponking… Oh, it was strange! And these young aliens were ignorant, but how beautiful! How beautiful! And this town she had helped to build, standing over its dry waterfront… She felt herself taking off inside, past the equinox and into the glorious rush to euphoria, and maybe it was only an accident of her biochemistry, probably so given the grim situation of the two worlds, entre chien et loup, but nevertheless it existed, and she felt it in her body. And so she pulled Michel into a dance line, and danced and danced until she was slippery with sweat. It felt great.
For a while they sat together in her cafe — quite a little reunion of the First Thirty-nine, as it turned out: she and Michel and Spencer, and Vlad and Ursula and Marina, and Yeli Zudov and Mary Dunkel, who had slipped out of Sabishii a month after the shutdown, and Mikhail Yangel, up from Dorsa Brevia, and Nadia, down from South Fossa. Ten of them. “A decimation,” Mikhail noted. They ordered bottle after bottle of vodka, as if they could drown the memory of the other ninety, including their poor farm crew, who at best had just disappeared on them again, and at worst had been murdered. The Russians among them, strangely in the majority that night, began to offer up all the old toasts from home. Let’s pig up! Let’s get healthier! Let’s pour behind the cellar! Let’s get glassed! Let’s get fucked! Let’s fill the eyes with it! Let’s lick it out! Let’s wet the back of the throat! Let’s buy for three! Let’s suck it, pour it, knock it, grab it, beat it, flog it, swing it — and so on and so on, until Michel and Mary and Spencer were looking amazed and appalled. It’s like Eskimos and snow, Mikhail told them.
And then they went back out to dance, the ten of them forming a line of their own, weaving dangerously through the crowds of youngsters. Fifty long Martian years, and still they survived, still they danced! It was a miracle!
But as always in the all-too-predictable fluctuation of Maya’s moods, there came that stall at the top, that sudden downturn — tonight, begun as she noticed the drugged eyes behind the other masks, saw how everyone was on their way out, doing their best to escape into their own private world, where they didn’t have to connect with anyone except that night’s lover. And they were no different. “Let’s go home,” she said to Michel, who was still bouncing along before her in time to the bands, enjoying the sight of all the lean Martian youngsters. “I can’t stand this.”
But he wanted to stay, and so did the others, and in the end she went home by herself, through the gate and the garden and up the stairs to their apartment. The noise of the celebration was loud behind her.
And there on the cabinet over the sink the young Frank smiled at her distress. Of course it goes this way, the youth’s intent look said. I know this story too — I learned it the hard way. Anniversaries, marriages, happy moments — they blow away. They’re gone. They never meant a thing. The smile tight, fierce, determined; and the’ eyes … it was like looking in the windows of an empty house. She knocked a coffee cup off the counter and it broke on the floor; the handle spun there and she cried out loud, sank to the floor and wrapped her arms around her knees and wept.
Then in the new year came news of heightened security measures in Odessa itself. It seemed that UNTA had learned the lesson of Sabishii, and was going to clamp down on the other cities more subtly: new passports, security checks at every gate and garage, restricted access to the trains. It was rumored they were hunting the First Hundred in particular, accusing them of attempting to overthrow the Transitional Authority.
Nevertheless Maya wanted to keep going to the Free Mars meetings, and Spencer kept agreeing to take her. “As long as we can,” she said. And so one night they walked together up the long stone staircases of the upper town. Michel was with them for the first time since the assault on Sabishii, and it seemed to Maya that he was recovering fairly well from the blow of the news, from that awful night af
ter Marina’s knock on the door.
But they were joined at this meeting by Jackie Boone and the rest of her crowd, Antar and the zygotes, who had arrived in Odessa on the circumHellas train, on the run from the UNTA troops in the south, and rabidly angry at the assault on Sabishii, more militant than ever. The disappearance of Hiroko and her inner group had sent the ectogenes over the edge; Hiroko was mother to many of them, after all, and they all seemed in agreement that it was time to come out from cover and start a full-scale rebellion. Not a minute to lose, Jackie told the meeting, if they wanted to rescue the Sa-bishiians and the hidden colonists.
“I don’t think they got Hiroko’s people,” Michel said. “I think they went underground with Coyote.”
“You wish,” Jackie told him, and Maya felt her upper lip curl.
Michel said, “They would have signaled us if they were truly in trouble.”
Jackie shook her head. “They wouldn’t go into hiding again, now that things are going critical.” Dao and Rachel nodded. “And besides, what about the Sabishiians, and the lockup of Sheffield? And it’s going to happen here too. No, the Transitional Authority is taking over everywhere. We have to act now!”
“The Sabishiians have sued the Transitional Authority,” Michel said, “and they’re all still in Sabishii, walking around.”
Jackie just look disgusted, as if Michel were a fool, a weak over-optimistic frightened fool. Maya’s pulse jumped, and she could feel her teeth pressing together.
“We can’t act now,” she said sharply. “We’re not ready.”
Jackie glared at her. “We’ll never be ready according to you! We’ll wait until they’ve got a lock on the whole planet, and then we won’t be able to do anything even if we wanted to. Which is just how you’d like it, I’m sure.”
Maya shot out of her chair. “There is no they anymore. There are four or five metanationals fighting over Mars, just like they’re fighting over Earth. If we stand up in the middle of it we’ll just get cut down in the crossfire. We need to pick our moment, and that has to be when they’ve hurt each other, and we have a real chance to succeed. Otherwise we get the moment imposed on us, and it’s just like sixty-one, it’s just flailing about and chaos and people getting killed!”
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