“Sixty-one,” Jackie cried, “it’s always sixty-one with you — the perfect excuse for doing nothing! Sabishii and Sheffield are shut down and Burroughs is close, and Hiranyag and Odessa will be next, and the elevator is bringing down police every day and they’ve got hundreds of people killed or imprisoned, like my grandmother who is the real leader of us all, and all you talk about is sixty-one! Sixty-one has made you a coward!”
Maya lunged out and slapped her hard on the side of the head, and Jackie leaped on her and Maya fell back into a table’s edge and the breath whooshed out of her. She was being punched but managed to catch one of Jackie’s wrists, and she bit into the straining forearm as hard as she could, really trying to sever things. Then they were jerked apart and held onto, the room bedlam, everyone shouting including Jackie, who shouted “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Murderer!” and Maya heard words grating out of her own throat as well, “Stupid little slut, stupid little slut,” between gasps for air. Her ribs and teeth hurt. People were holding hands over her mouth and Jackie’s too, people were hissing “Sssh, sssh, quiet, they’ll hear us, they’ll report us, the police will come!”
Finally Michel took his hand from Maya’s mouth and she hissed “Stupid little slut” one last time, then sat back in a chair and looked at them all with a glare that caught and stilled at least half of them. Jackie was released and she started to curse in a low voice and Maya snapped, “Shut up!” so viciously that Michel stepped between them again. “Towing all your boys around by the cock and thinking you’re a leader,” Maya snarled in a whisper, “and all without a single thought in your empty head—”
“I won’t listen to this!” Jackie cried, and everyone said “Ssssh!” and she was off, out into the hall. That was a mistake, a retreat, and Maya stood back up and used the time to castigate the rest of them in a tearing whisper for their stupidity — and then, when she had controlled her temper a little, to argue the case for biding their time, the excoriating edge of her anger just under the surface of a rational plea for patience and intention and control, an argument that was essentially unanswerable. All through this peroration everyone in the room was of course staring at her as if she were some bloodied gladiator, the Black Widow indeed, and as her teeth still hurt from sinking them into Jackie’s arm she could scarcely pretend to be the perfect model of intelligent debate; she felt like her mouth must be puffed up, it throbbed so, and she fought a rising sense of humiliation and carried on, cold and passionate and overbearing. The meeting ended in a sullen and mostly unspoken agreement to delay any mass insurrection and continue lying low, and the next thing she knew she was slumped on a tram seat between Michel and Spencer, trying not to cry. They would have to put up Jackie and the rest of her group while they were in Odessa — theirs was the safe house, after all. So it was a situation she wasn’t going to be able to escape. And meanwhile there were police officers standing in front of the town’s physical plant and offices, checking wrists before they let people inside. If she didn’t go to work again they very well might try to track her down to ask why, and if she went to work and got checked, it wasn’t certain that her wrist ID and Swiss passport would pass her. There were rumors that the post-’61 balkanization of information was beginning to collapse back into some larger integrated systems, which had recovered some prewar data; thus the requirement of new passports. And if she ran into one of those systems, that would be that. Shipped off to the asteroids or to Kasei Vallis, to be tortured and have her mind wrecked like Sax. “Maybe it is time,” she said to Michel and Spencer. “If they lock up all the cities and the pistes, what other choice do we have?”
They didn’t answer. They didn’t know what to do any more than, she did. Suddenly the whole independence project again seemed a fantasy, a dream that was just as impossible now as it had been when Arkady had espoused it, Arkady who had been so cheerful and so wrong. They would never be free of Earth, never. They were helpless before it.
“I want to talk to Sax first,” Spencer said.
“And Coyote,” Michel said. “I want to ask him more about what happened in Sabishii.”
“And Nadia,” Maya said, and her throat tightened; Nadia would have been ashamed of her if she had seen her at that meeting, and that hurt. She needed Nadia, the only person on Mars whose judgment she still trusted.
“There’s something odd going on with the atmosphere,” Spencer complained to Michel as they changed trams. “I really want to hear what Sax has to say about it. Oxygen levels are rising faster than I would have expected, especially on north Tharsis. It’s like some really successful bacteria has been distributed without any suicide genes in it. Sax has basically reassembled his old Echus Overlook team, everyone still alive, and they’ve been working at Acheron and Da Vinci on projects they’re not telling us about. It’s like those damn windmill heaters. So I want to talk to him. We have to get together on this, or else—”
“Or else sixty-one!” Maya insisted.
“I know, I know. You’re right about that, Maya, I mean I agree. I hope enough of the rest of us do.”
“We’re going to have to do more than hope.”
Which meant she was going to have to get out there and do it herself. Go fully underground, move from city to city, from safe house to safe house as Nirgal had been doing for years, without a job or a home, meeting with as many of the revolutionary cells as she could, trying to hold them on board. Or at least keep them from popping off too soon. Working on the Hellas Sea project wasn’t going to be possible anymore.
So this life was over. She got off the tram and glanced briefly through the park down the corniche, then turned and walked up to their gate and through the garden, up the stairwell, down the familiar hall, feeling heavy and old and very, very tired. She stuck the right key into the lock without thinking about it, and walked into the apartment and looked at her things, at Michel’s stacks of books, the Kandinsky print over the couch, Spencer’s sketches, the battered coffee table, the battered dining table and chairs, the kitchen nook with everything in its place, including the little face on the cabinet by the sink. How many lifetimes ago had she known that face? All these pieces of furniture would go their ways. She stood in the middle of the room, drained and desolate, grieving for these years that had slipped by almost without noticing; almost a decade of productive work, of real life, now blowing away in this latest gale of history, a paroxysm that she was going to have to try to direct or at least ride out, trying her best to nudge it in ways that would allow them to survive. Damn the world, damn its in-trusiveness, its mindless charge, its inexorable roll through the present, wrecking lives as it went… She had liked this apartment and this town and this life, with Michel and Spencer and Diana and all her colleagues at work, all her habits and her music and her small daily pleasures.
She looked glumly at Michel, who stood behind her in the doorway, staring around as if trying to commit the place to memory. A Gallic shrug: “Nostalgia in advance,” he said, trying to smile. He felt it too — he understood — it wasn’t just her mood, this time, but reality itself.
She made an effort and smiled back, walked over and held his hand. Downstairs there was a clatter as the Zygote gang came up the stairs. They could stay in Spencer’s apartment, the bastards. “If it works out,” she said, “we’ll come back someday.”
They walked down to the station in the fresh morning light, past all the cafes, still chairs-on-tables wet. At the station they risked their old IDs and got tickets without trouble, and took a counterclockwise train down to Montepulciano, and got into rented walkers and helmets, and walked out of the tent and down the hill and off the map of the surface world, into one of the steep ravines of the foothills. There Coyote was waiting for them in a boulder car, and he drove them through the heart of the Helles-pontus, up a forking network of valleys, over pass after pass in this mountain range that was just as chaotic as rock falling from the sky implied, a nightmare maze of a wilderness — until they were down the western slope, past Rabe Cra
ter and onto the crater-ringed hills of the Noachis highlands. And so they were off the net again, wandering as Maya never had before.
Coyote helped a lot in the early part of this period. He was not the same, Maya thought — subdued by the takeover of Sabishii, even worried. He wouldn’t answer their questions about Hiroko and the hidden colonists; he said “I don’t know” so often that she began to believe him, especially when his face finally twisted up into a recognizably human expression of distress, the famous invulnerable insouciance finally shattered. “I truly don’t know whether they got out or not. I was already out in the mound maze when the takeover started, and I got out in a car as fast as I could, thinking I could help the most from outside. But no one else came out from that exit. But I was on the north side, and they could have gotten out to the south. They were staying in the mound maze too, and Hiroko has emergency shelters just like I do. But I just don’t know.”
“Then let’s go see if we can find out,” she said.
So he drove them north, at one point going under the Sheffield-Burroughs piste, using a long tunnel just bigger than his car; they spent the night in this black slot, restocking from recessed closets and sleeping the uneasy sleep of spelunkers. Near Sabishii they descended into another hidden tunnel, and drove for several kilometers until they came into a small cave of a garage; it was part of the Sabishiians’ mound maze, and the squared stone caves behind it were like Neolithic passage tombs, now lit with strip lighting and warmed from vents. They were greeted down there by Nanao Nakayama, one of the issei, who seemed just as cheerful as ever. Sabishii had been returned to them, more or less, and though there were UNTA police in town and especially at the gates and the train station, the police were still unaware of the full extent of the mound complexes, and so not able to completely stop Sabishii’s efforts to help the underground. Sabishii was no longer an open demimonde, as he put it, but they were still working.
And yet he, too, did not know what had happened to Hiroko. “We didn’t see the police take any of them away,” he said. “But we didn’t find Hiroko and her group down here either, after things had calmed down. We don’t know where they went.” He tugged at his turquoise earring, obviously mystified. “I think they are probably off on their own. Hiroko was always careful to have a bolt-hole everywhere she went, that is what Iwao told me once when we drank a lot of sake down at the duck pond. And it seems to me that disappearance is a habit of Hiroko’s, but not of the Transitional Authority. So we can infer that she chose to do this. But come on — you must want a bath and some food, and then if you could talk to some of the sansei and yonsei who have gone into hiding with us, that would be good for them.”
So they stayed in the maze for a week or two, and Maya met with several groups of the newly disappeared. She spent most of her time encouraging them, assuring them that they would be able to reemerge onto the surface, even into Sabishii itself, quite soon; security was hardening, but the nets were simply too permeable, and the alternative economy too large, to allow for total control. Switzerland would give them new passports, Praxis would give them jobs, and they would be back in business. The important thing was to coordinate their efforts, and to resist the temptation to lash out too early.
Nanao told her after one such meeting that Nadia was making similar appeals in South Fossa, and that Sax’s team was begging them for more time; so there was some agreement on the policy, at least among the old-timers. And Nirgal was working closely with Nadia, supporting the policy as well. So it was the more radical groups that they would have to work hardest to rein in, and here Coyote had the most influence. He wanted to visit some of the Red refuges in person, and Maya and Michel went with him, to catch a ride up to Burroughs.
The region between Sabishii and Burroughs was saturated with crater impacts, so that they wound through the nights between flat-topped circular hills, stopping every dawn at small rim shelters crowded with Reds who were none too hospitable to Maya and Michel. But they listened to Coyote very attentively, and traded news with him about scores of places Maya had never heard of. On the third night of this they came down the steep slope of the Great Escarpment, through an archipelago of mesa islands, and abruptly onto the smooth plain of Isidis! They could see down the slope of the basin for a long way, all the way out to where a mound like the Sabishiians’ mohole mound ran across the land, in a great curve from Du Martheray Crater on the Great Escarpment, northwest toward Syrtis. This was the new dike, Coyote told them, built by a robot collection pulled from the Elysium mohole. The dike was truly massive, and looked like one of the basalt dorsa of the south, except that its velvety texture revealed it to be excavated regolith rather than harKyolcanic rock.
Maya stared at the long ridge. The cascading recombinant consequences of their actions were, she thought, out of their control. They could try to build bulwarks to contain them — but would the bulwarks hold?
* * *
Then they were back in Burroughs, in through the Southeast Gate on their Swiss IDs, and secured in a safe house run by Bog-danovists from Vishniac, now working for Praxis. The safe house was an airy light-filled apartment about halfway up the northern wall of Hunt Mesa, with a view out over the central valley to Branch Mesa and Double Decker Butte. The apartment above it was a dance studio, and many of the hours of the day they lived to a faint thump, thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. Just over the horizon to the-north an irregular cloud of dust and steam marked where the robots were working still on the dike; every morning Maya looked out at it, thinking over the news reports on Mangalavid.and in the long messages from Praxis. Then it was into the day’s work, which was entirely underground, and often confined to meetings in the apartment, or to work there on video messages. So it was not at all like life in Odessa, and it was hard to develop any habits, which made her feel jangly and dark.
But she could still walk the streets of the great city, one anonymous citizen among thousands of others — strolling by the canal, or sitting in restaurants around Princess Park, or on one of the less trendy mesa tops. And everywhere she went, she saw the neat red print of their stenciled graffiti: FREE MARS. Or GET READY. Or, as if she were hallucinating a warning made to her by her own soul: YOU CAN NEVER GO BACK. These messages were ignored by the populace as far as she could tell, never discussed, and often removed by.cleaning crews; but they kept popping up in their neat red, usually in English but sometimes in Russian, the old alphabet like a long-lost friend, like some subliminal flash out of their collective unconscious, if they had one; and somehow the messages never lost their little electric shock. It was strange what powerful effects could be created with such simple means. People might come to do almost anything, if they talked about it long enough.
Her meetings with small cells of the various resistance organizations went well, although it became clearer to her that there were profound divisions of all kinds among them, particularly the dislike that the Reds and Marsfirsters had for the Bogdanovists and Free Mars groups, whom the Reds considered green, and thus one more manifestation of the enemy. That could be trouble. But Maya did what she could, and everyone at least listened to her, so that she felt she made some progress. And slowly she warmed to Burroughs, and her hidden life there. Michel arranged a routine for her with the Swiss and Praxis, and with the Bogdanovists now tucked away in the city — a secure routine, which allowed her to meet groups fairly frequently without ever compromising the integrity of the safe houses they had established. And every meeting seemed to help a little. The only intransigent problem was that so many groups seemed to want to revolt immediately — Red or green, they tended to follow the radical lead of Ann’s Reds in the outback, and the young hotheads surrounding Jackie, and there were more and more incidents of sabotage in the cities, which caused a corresponding increase in police surveillance, until it seemed very possible that things could break wide open. Maya began to see herself as a kind of brake, and she often lost sleep worrying about how little people wanted to hear that message. On the other
hand she was also the one who had to keep the old Bogdanovists and other veterans aware of the power of the native movement, cheering them up when they got depressed. Ann in the outback with the Reds, grimly wrecking stations: “It’s not going to happen like that,” Maya told her over and over, though there was no sign that Ann was getting the message.
Still, there were encouraging signs. Nadia was in South Fossa, building a strong movement there which seemed under her influence, and closely aligned with Nirgal and his crowd. Vlad and Ursula and Marina had reoccupied their old labs at Acheron, under the aegis of the Praxis bioengineering company nominally in charge. They were in constant communication with Sax, who was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater with his old terraforming team, being supported by the Dorsa Brevia Minoans. The inhabitation of that great lava tube had extended north much farther than it had been during the time of the congress, and most of the new segments apparently were devoted to shelter for the refugees from the wrecked or abandoned sanctuaries farther south, and a whole string of manufactories. Maya watched videos of people driving about in little cars from segment to tented segment, working under the clear brown light pouring down from the filtered skylights, engaged in what could only be called military production; they were building stealth fliers, stealth cars, surface-to-space missiles, reinforced block shelters (some of which were already installed in the lava tube itself, in case it was ever broached) — also air-to-ground missiles, antivehicle weapons, handguns, and, the Minoans told Maya, a variety of ecological weapons Sax was designing himself.
This kind of work, and the destruction of the southern sanctuaries, had created what looked from a distance like a sort of war fever in Dorsa Brevia, and Maya was worried by that too. Sax, at the heart of it, was a stubborn secretive brilliant brain-damaged loose cannon, a bona fide mad scientist. He had still never spoken to her directly; and his strikes against the aerial lens and Deimos, while very effective, had in her opinion caused UNTA’s intensification of the assault on the south. She kept sending down messages advising restraint and patience, until Ariadne replied irritably, “Maya, we know. We’re working with Sax here, we’ve got an idea of what we’re up to, and what you’re saying is either obvious or wrong. Talk to the Reds if you want to help, but we don’t need it.”
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