“Storm coming.”
“We keep bees too.”
“Maja is Nepali, Bahram is Farsi, Mawrth is Welsh. Yeah, it does sound like a lisp, but I’m probably not pronouncing it right. Welsh spelling is bizarre. They probably pronounce it Moth, or Mart, or Mars.”
Then word spread through the marketplace, leaping from group to group like a fire. “Nirgal is here! Nirgal is here! He’s going to talk at the pavilion—”
And there he was, walking fast at the head of a growing crowd, greeting old friends and shaking hands with people who approached him. Everyone in the hamlet followed him, jamming into the pavilion and volleyball court at the western end of the market. Wild howls rang out over the crowd buzz.
Nirgal stood on a bench and began to speak. He talked about their valley, and the other new tented land on Mars, and what it meant. But as he was getting to the larger situation of the two worlds, the storm overhead broke big-time. Lightning began to stab all the lightning rods, and in quick succession they saw rain, snow, sleet, and then mud.
The tenting over the valley was pitched as steep as a church roof, and dust and fines were repelled by the static charge of its piezoelectric outer layer; rain ran right off it, and snow slid down and piled up against the bottom of the sides, forming drifts that were blown away by huge robotic snowplows with long angled blower extensions, which rolled up and down the foundation road during snowstorms. Mud, however, was a problem. Mixed with the snow it formed cold, concrete-hard packs on the tenting just above the foundation, and this dense pack could get heavy enough’to cause tent failure — it had happened once before in the north.’
So when this storm turned ugly, and the light in the canyon was like the color of a branch, Nirgal said, “We’d better get up there,” and they all piled into the trucks and drove to the nearest elevator that ran up inside the canyon wall to the rim. Up on top the people who knew how took over the snowplows and drove them by hand, with the great blowers now spraying steam over the drifts to wash them off the tenting. Everyone else teamed up and took hand-pulled steam carts out, and worked on moving the piles of sludge brought down by the snowplows away from the foundation. This was what Nirgal helped with, running around with a steam hose like he was placing some strenuous new sport. No one could keep up his pace, but quickly they were all thigh-deep in cold swirling mud, with winds over J50, and solid low black clouds spitting more mud down on them all the time. The winds surged to 180 kilometers an hour, but no one minded; it helped clear the tent of the mud. They made sweep after sweep, moving east with the wind, pushing rivers of mud over the drop into uncovered Uzboi Vallis.
When the storm ended, the tenting was fairly clear, but the land on both sides of Nirgal Vallis was deep in frozen mud, and the crews were soaked. They piled back into elevators and dropped to the canyon floor,exhausted and cold, and when they got out at the bottom they looked at each other, entirely black figures except for their faceplates. Nirgal pulled off his helmet and there he was, laughing hard, irrepressible, and when he scooped mud off his helmet and threw it at them, the fight was on. Most found it prudent to keep their helmets on, and it was a strange sight there on the dark floor of that canyon, blind muddy figures throwing clumps of mud at each other and running out into the stream, slipping around as they wrestled and dove.
Maya Hatarina Toitovna woke in a foul mood, disturbed by a dream that she deliberately forgot as she rolled out of bed. Like flushing the toilet after that first trip to the bathroom. Dreams were dangerous. She dressed with her back to the little mirror over the sink, then went downstairs to the dining common. All of Sabishii had been built in its signature Martian/Japanese style, and her neighborhood had the look of a Zen garden, all pine and moss scattered among polished pink boulders. It was beautiful in a spare way that Maya found unpleasant, a kind of rebuke to her wrinkles. She ignored it as best she could, and concentrated on breakfast. The dead boredom of the daily necessities. At another table Vlad and Ursula and Marina were eating with a group of the Sabishii issei. The Sabishiians had all shaved their heads, and in their work jumpers looked like Zen monks. One of them turned on a tiny screen over their table and a Terran news show began, a metana-tional production from Moscow that had the same relationship to reality that Pravda had once had. Some things never changed. This was the English-language version, the speaker’s English better than her own, even after all these years. “Now the latest on this fifth day of August, 2114.”
Maya stiffened in her chair. In Sabishii it was Ls 246, very near perihelion — the fourth day of 2 November — the days short, the nights warmish for this M-year 44. Maya had had no idea what the Terran date was, and hadn’t for years. But back there it was her birthday. Her — she had to calculate … her 130th birthday.
Feeling sick, she scowled and threw her half-eaten bagel on her plate, stared at it. Thoughts burst in her head like birds scattering out of a tree; she couldn’t track them; it was like being blank. What did it mean, this horrible unnatural age? Why had they turned on the screen at just that moment?
She left the half-moon of bread, which had taken on an ominous look, and walked outside into’the autumn morning light. Down the lovely main boulevard of Sabishii’s old quarter, green with streetgrass, red with broad-topped fire maples — there was one maple blocking the low sun, and flaring scarlet. Across the plaza outside their dorm she saw Yeli Zudov, playing skittlebowl with a young child, perhaps Mary Dunkel’s great-great-granddaughter. There were a lot of the First Hundred in Sabishii now, it was working well as their demimonde, all of them tucked into the local economy and the old quarter, with false identities and Swiss passports — everything amazingly solid, enabling them to live surface lives. And all without the need for the kind of cosmetic surgery that had so altered Sax, because age had done that surgery for them: they were unrecognizable just as they were. She could walk the streets of Sabishii and people would see only one ancient crone among many others. If Transitional Authority officials stopped her they would identify one Ludmilla Novosibirskaya. But the truth was, they would not stop her.
She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself. From the north end of the tent she could see outside the town to the great mound of rock that had been brought up out of Sabishii mohole. It formed a long sinuous hill, running uphill to the horizon, across the high krummholz basins of Tyrrhena. They had designed the mound so that from above it formed the image of a dragon, clutching the egglike tents of the town in its talons. A shadowed cleft crossing the mound marked where a talon left the scaled flesh of the creature. The morning sun shone like the dragon’s silver eye, staring back over its shoulder at them.
Her wristpad beeped, and irritably she took the call. It was . Marina. “Saxifrage is here,” she said. “We’re going to meet out in the western stone garden in an hour.”
“I’ll be there,” Maya said, and cut the connection. .
What a day it was turning out to be. She wandered west along the city perimeter, abstracted and depressed. One hundred thirty years old. There were Abkhasians down in Georgia, on the Black Sea, who were reputed to have lived to such ages without the treatment. Presumably they were still doing without — the gerontologi-cal treatments had been only partially distributed on Earth, following the isobars of money and power, and the Abkhasians had always been poor. Happy but poor. She tried to remember what it had been like in Georgia, in the region where the Caucasus met the Black Sea. Sukhumi, the town was called. She felt she had visited it in her youth, her father had been Georgian. But she could call no image to mind, not a scrap. In fact she could scarcely remember anything of any part of Earth — Moscow, Baikonur, the view from Noyy Mir — none of it. Her mother’s, face across the kitchen table, laughing blackly as she ironed or cooked. Maya knew that had happened because she rehearsed the words of the memory from time to time, when she was feeling sad. But the actual images … Her mother had died only ten years before the treatment became’ available, or she might be alive yet. She would b
e 150, not at all unreasonable; the current age record was around 170, and rising all the time, with no sign that it would ever stop. Nothing but accidents and rare diseases and the occasional medical mistake were killing the treated these days. Those and murder. And suicide.”
She came to the western rock gardens without having seen any of the neat narrow streets of Sabishii’s old quarter. That was how the old ended up not remembering recent events — by not seeing them in the first place. Memory lost before it ever came to be, because one was focusing so intently on the past.
Vlad and Ursula and Marina and Sax were seated on a park bench across from Sabishii’s original habitats, which were still in use, at least by geese and ducks. The pond and bridge, and banks of riprap and bamboo, were straight out of an old woodblock or silk painting: a cliche. Beyond the tent wall the great thermal cloud of the mohole billowed whitely, thicker than ever as the hole got deeper, and the atmosphere more humid.
She sat down on the bench across from her old companions, stared at them grimly. Mottled wrinkled codgers and crones. They looked almost like strangers, people she had never met. Ah, but there were Marina’s sultry hooded eyes, and Vlad’s little smile — not surprising on the face of a man who had lived with two women, apparently in harmony and certainly in a completely isolated intimacy, for eighty years. Although it was said that Marina and Ursula were a lesbian couple, and Vlad only a sort of companion or pet. But no one could say for sure. Ursula too looked content, as always. Everybody’s favorite aunt. Yes — with concentration, one could see them. Only Sax looked utterly different, a dapper man with a broken nose that he still had not had straightened. It stood in the middle of his newly handsome face like an accusation against her, as if she had done it to him and not Phyllis. He did not meet her eye, but only stared mildly at the ducks clacking around his feet, as if studying them. The scientist at work. Except he was a mad scientist now, wreaking havoc with all their plans, completely beyond rational discourse.
Maya pursed her lips and looked at Vlad.
“Subarashii and Amexx are increasing the number of Transitional Authority troops,” he said. “We got a message from Hiroko. They’ve bulked up the unit that attacked Zygote into a kind of expeditionary force, and it’s now moving south, between Argyre and Hellas. They don’t seem to know where most of the hidden sanctuaries are, but they’re checking hot spots one by one, and they entered Christianopolis, and took it over as a base of operations. There’s about five hundred of them, heavily armed and protected from orbit. Hiroko says she’s only just barely keeping Coyote and Kasei and Dao from leading the Marsfirst guerrillas in an attack on them. If they find many more sanctuaries the radicals are bound to call for an attack.”
Meaning the wild youngsters of Zygote, Maya thought bitterly. They had brought them up poorly, the ectogenes and that whole sansei generation — almost forty now, and itching for a fight. And Peter and Kasei and the rest of the nisei generation were nearing seventy, and in the ordinary course of things should have long since become the leaders of their world; and yet here they were always in the shadow of their undying parents, and how did that make them feel? How might they act on those feelings? Perhaps some of them were figuring that another revolution would be just the thing to give them their chance. Perhaps the only thing. Revolution was the empire of the young, after all.
The old ones sat around watching the ducks in silence. A somber, dispirited group. “What happened to the Christians?” Maya asked.
“Some went to Hiranyagarbha. The rest stayed.”
If the Transitional Authority forces took over the southern highlands, then the underground might have infiltrated the cities, but to what purpose? Scattered so thinly they couldn’t budge the two-world order, based as it was on Earth. Suddenly Maya had the ugly feeling that the whole independence project was no more than a dream, a compensatory fantasy for the decrepit survivors of a losing cause.
“You know why this step-up in security has happened,” she said, glaring at Sax. “Those big sabotages were what did it.”
Sax showed no sign of hearing her.
Vlad said, “It’s too bad we couldn’t have fixed on some sort of plan of action at Dorsa Brevia.”
“Dorsa Brevia,” Maya said scornfully.
“It was a good idea,” Marina said.
“Maybe it was. But without a plan of action, agreed on by all, the constitutional stuff was just—” Maya waved a hand. “Building sandcastles. A game.”
“The notion was that each group would do what it thought best,” Vlad said.
“That was the notion in sixty-one,” Maya pointed out. “And now, if Coyote and the radicals start a guerrilla war and it touches things off, then we’re right back in sixty-one all over again.”
“What do you think we should do?” Ursula asked her curiously.
“We should take over ourselves! We make the plan, we decide what to do. We disseminate it through the underground. If we don’t take responsibility for this, then whatever happens will be our fault.”
“That’s what Arkady tried to do,” Vlad pointed out.
“At least Arkady tried! We should build on what was good in his work!” She laughed shortly. “I never thought I would hear myself say that. But we should work with the Bogdanovists, and then everyone else who will join. We have to take charge! We are the First Hundred, we are the only ones with the authority to pull it off. The Sabishiians will help us, and the Bogdanovists will come along.”
“We need Praxis too,” Vlad said. “Praxis, and the Swiss. It has to be a coup rather than a general war.”
“Praxis wants to help,” Marina said. “But what about the radicals?”
“We have to coerce them,” Maya said. “Cut off their supplies, take away their members—”
“That way leads to civil war,” Ursula objected.
“Well, they must be stopped! If they start a revolt too soon and the metanationals come down on us before we’re ready, then we’re doomed. All these uncoordinated strikes at them ought to stop. They accomplish nothing, they only increase the levels of security and make things more difficult for us. Things like knocking Deimos out of its orbit only make them more aware of our presence, without doing anything else.”
Sax, still observing the ducks, spoke in his odd lilting way: “There are a hundred and fourteen Earth-to-Mars transit ships. Forty-seven objects in Mars obit — Mars orbit. The new Clarke is a fully defended space station. Deimos was available to become the same. A military base. A weapons platform.”
“It was an empty moon,” Maya said. “As for the vehicles in orbit, we will have to deal with those at the appropriate time.”
Again Sax did not appear to notice she had spoken. He stared at the damned ducks, blinking mildly, glancing from time to time at Marina.
Marina said, “It has to be a matter of decapitation, like Nadia and Nirgal and Art said in Dorsa Brevia.”
“We’ll see if we can find the neck,” Vlad said drily.
Maya, getting angrier and angrier at Sax, said, “We should each take one of the major cities, and organize people there into a unified resistance. I want to return to Hellas.”
“Nadia and Art are in South Fossa,” Marina said. “But we’ll need all the First Hundred to join us, for this to work.”
“The first thirty-nine,” Sax said.
“We need Hiroko,” Vlad said, “and we need Hiroko to talk some sense into Coyote.”
“No one can do that,” Marina said. “But we do need Hiroko. I’ll go to Dorsa Brevia and talk to her, and we’ll try to hold the south in check.”
“ Coyote’s not the problem,’ Maya said.
Sax jerked out of his reverie, blinked at Vlad. Still not a glance for Maya, even though they were discussing her plan. “Integrated pest management,” he said. “You grow tougher plants among the weeds. And then the tougher plants push them out. I’ll take Burroughs.”
Furious at Sax’s snubbing of her, Maya got up and walked around the little p
ond. She stopped on the opposite bank, gripped the railing by the path in both hands. She glared at the group across the water, sitting on their benches like retired pensioners chatting about food and the weather and ducks and the last chess match. Damn Sax, damn him! Would he hold Phyllis against her forever, that vile woman —
Suddenly she heard their voices, tiny but clear. There was a curving ceramic wall behind the path, running almost all the way around the pond, and she was almost precisely across the pond from them; apparently the wall functioned as a sort of whispering gallery, she could hear them in perfect miniature, the airy voices a fraction of a second behind their mouths’ little movements.
“Too bad Arkady didn’t survive,” Vlad said. “The Bogdanovists would come around a lot easier.”
“Yes,” said Ursula. “Him and John. And Frank.”
“Frank,” Marina said scornfully. “If he hadn’t killed John none of this would have happened.”
Maya blinked. The railing was holding her up.
“What?” she shouted, without thinking. Across the pond .the little figures jerked and looked at her. She detached herself from the railing one hand at a time, and half ran around the pond, stumbling twice.
“What do you mean?” she shouted at Marina as she neared them, the words bursting from her without volition.
Vlad and Ursula met her a few steps from the benches. Marina remained seated, looking away sullenly. Vlad had his hands out and Maya tore right through them to get at Marina. “What do you mean saying such foul things?” she shouted, her voice painful in her own throat. “Why? Why? It was Arabs who killed John, everyone knows that!”
Marina grimaced and shook her head, looking down.
“Well?” Maya cried.
“It was a manner of speaking,” Vlad said from behind. “Frank did a lot to undermine John in those years, you know that’s true. Some say he inflamed the Moslem Brotherhood against John, that’s all.”
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