Blue Mars

PART FOURTEEN Phoenix Lake

A gun shot, a bell rung, a choir singing counterpoint.

The third Martian revolution-was so complex and nonviolent that it was hard to see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in a ongoing argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium.

The takeover of the elevator was the seed of the crisis, but then a few weeks later the Terran military came down the cable and the crisis flowered everywhere at once. On the shore of the North Sea, on a small indentation of the coast of Tempe Terra, a cluster oflanders dropped out of the sky, swaying under parachutes or shimmering down on plumes of pale fire: a whole new colony, an unauthorized incursion of immigrants. This particular group was from Kampuchea; elsewhere on the planet other landers were descending, with settlers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, Japan, Venezuela, New York. The Martians did not know how to respond. They were a demilitarized society, with no idea that something like this could ever happen, with no way to defend themselves. Or so they thought.

Once again it was May a who pulled them into action, playing the wrist like Frank used to, calling everyone in the open Mars coalition and many others besides, orchestrating the general response. Come on, she said to Nadia. One more time. And so through the cities and villages the word spread, and people went down into the streets, or got on trains to Mangala.

On the coast of Tempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of their landers and went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them, just as the First Hundreds had two centuries before. And out of the hills came people wearing furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth, and their hair was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had bunched before one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down. We’ll show you where you are. You don’t need that kind of shelter, it’s an old design. That hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There’s already apple and cherry orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look, here are the plans for a disk house, that’s the best design for this coast. Then you’ll need a marina, and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor we’ll show you where the truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier disk house. It’s lovely to live out in the open air. You’ll see.

All branches of the Martian government had met in the assembly hall in Mangala, to deal with the crisis. The Free Mars majority in the senate, and the executive council, and the Global Environmental Court, all agreed that the illegal incursion of Terrans was an act of aggression the equivalent of war, which had to be responded to in kind. There were suggestions from the floor of the senate that asteroids could be directed at Terra, as bombs that would be diverted only if the immigrants returned home and the elevator went back to a system of dual supervision. It would only take one strike to have a KT event, and so on. UN diplomats on the scene pointed out that this was a sword that could cut boths ways.

In these tense days there came a knock on the door of the assembly hall in Mangala, and in walked Maya Toitovna. She said, “We want to speak.” Then she ushered in a crowd waiting outside, pushing them up onto the stage like an impatient sheepdog: first Sax and Ann, walking side by side; then Nadia and Art, Tariki and Nanao, Zeyk and Nazik, Mikhail, Vasili, Ursula and Marina, even Coyote. The ancient issei, come back to haunt the present moment, come back to take the stage and say what they thought. Maya pointed to the room’s screens, which showed images of the outside of the building; the group on the stage now extended in an unbroken line through the halls of the building out onto the big central plaza facing the sea, where some half-million people were assembled. The city streets were also stuffed with people, watching screens to see what was happening in the assembly hall. And out in Chalmers Bay there sailed a fleet of townships like a startling new archipelago, with flags and banners waving from their masts. And in every Martian city the crowds were out, the screens were on. Everyone could see everyone else.

Ann went to the podium and said quietly that the government of Mars in recent years had broken both the law and the spirit of human compassion, by forbidding immigration from Earth to Mars. The people of Mars did not want that. They needed a new government. This was a vote of no confidence. The new incursions of Tenon settlers were also illegal, and unacceptable, but understandable; the government of Mars had broken the law first. And the number of new settlers in these incursions was no greater than the number of legitimate settlers who had been illegally barred from coming by the current government. Mars, Ann said, had to be open to Tenon immigration as much as could be, given the physical constraints, for as long as the population-surge years might last. The surge years would not last much longer. Their duty now to their descendants was to get through the last of these packed years in peace. “Nothing on the table now is worth war. We have seen it, and we know.”

Then she looked over her shoulder at Sax, who stepped up next to her to the microphones. He said, “Mars has to be protected.” The biosphere was new, its carrying capacity limited. It did not have the physical resources of Earth, and much of its empty land would of physical necessity have to stay empty. Tenons had to understand that, and not overwhelm local systems; if they did, Mars would be no use to anyone at all. Clearly there was a severe population problem on Earth, but Mars alone was not the solution. “The Earth-Mars relationship has to be renegotiated.”

They began that renegotiation. They asked a UN representative to come up and explain the incursions. They argued and debated and expostulated; and shouted in each other’s faces. Out in the outback, locals confronted settlers, and some of them on both sides threatened violence; and others stepped in and started talking, cajoling, scolding, wrangling, negotiating; and shouting in each other’s faces. At any point in the process, in a thousand different places, things could have turned violent; many people were furious; but cooler heads prevailed. It remained, in most places, at the level of argument. Many feared this could not continue, many did not believe it possible; but it was happening, and the people in the streets saw it happening. They kept it happening. At some point, after all, the mutation of values has to express itself; and why not here, why not now? There were very few weapons on the planet, and it was hard to strike someone in the face, or stick them with a pitchfork, when they were standing there arguing with you. This was the moment of mutation, history in the making, and they could see it right before them, in the streets and on the human hillsides and on the Screens, history labile right there in their hands — and so they seized the moment, and wrenched it in a new direction. They talked themselves into it. A new government. A new treaty with Earth. A polycephalous peace. The negotiations would go on for years. Like a choir in counterpoint, singing a great fugue.

Eventually that cable was going to come back to haunt us, that’s what I said all along. You did not, you loved the cable. The only complaint you had was that it was too slow. You can get to Earth faster than you can get to Clarke, you said. That’s true, you can, it’s ridiculous. But not the same as saying the cable was going to come back and haunt us, you have to admit. Waiter, hey waiter! We’ll have tequilas all around, and some lime wedges. We were working the Socket when they came down, the inner chamber didn’t have a chance but the Socket is a big building, I don’t know if they had a plan and it didn’t work or if they didn’t have a plan at all, but by the time their third car came down the Socket was sealed off and they were the proud masters of a 37,000-kilometer dead end. It was stupid. It was a nightmare, these foxes kept coming in and at night only, so that they looked like wolves only a lot faster. And they went right for the throat. A plague of rabid foxes, man, it was a nightmare. Like 2128 all over again, I don’t know if that’s true or not but there they were, Terran police in Sheffield, and when people heard they all came out into the streets, the streets were packed, really packed, I’m short and sometimes my face was squished right into people’s backs or women’s breasts. I heard about it from a neighbor in the next apartment only about five minutes after it happened, she had heard from a friend living out near the Socket. The response of the people to the takeover of the cable’s lower facility was rapid and tumultuous. Those UN storm troopers didn’t know what to make of us, a detachment tried to take over Hartz Plaza and we just flowed around them, moving out from in front of them but shoving in at the sides so that it was like a kind of vacuum pull. This snarling foam-toothed rabid demon at my throat, it was a fucking nightmare. Took them right out to rim park and these goddamned starship troopers couldn ‘t have moved a centimeter at that point, not without slaughtering thousands of people. People in the streets, that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha! And there were hookups to all the other cities and giant street parties in every one of them. We were in Lasswitz and everyone went down to the river park and stood with candles in their hand, so that cameras could shoot down from the overlook and see this sea of candles, it was great. And Sax and Ann standing there together, it was amazing. Amazing. Unbelievable. They probably scared the UN to death saying each other’s lines like that, the UN probably thought we had brain-transfer devices all ready to zap them. • What I liked was later when Peter called for a new election for the Red party leadership, and challenged Irishka to hold it right then and there on the wrist. Those party things are basically heavyweight challenges, mano a mano, if Irishka had refused to call a vote then she would have been finished anyway, so she had to call it no matter what, you should have seen the look on her face. We were in Sabishii when we heard the call for a Red vote and when Peter won we went wild, Sabishii was an instant festival. And Senzeni Na. And Nilokeras. And Hell’s Gate. And Argyre Station, you should have seen it. Well wait a second, it was only about a sixty-forty vote, in Argyre Station it went crazy because there were so many Irishka backers spoiling for a fight. It’s Irishka who saved Argyre Basin and every dry low spot on this planet if you ask me, Peter Claybome is just an old nisei, he never did anything., Waiter, waiter! Beers all around, weiss beers, bitte. Bringing food out to these little Terrans, didn’t have any idea. Nirgal shaking hands with every one of them. So the doctor says, how do you know you’ve got the quick decline? It was a fucking nightmare. It was a surprise Ann working with Sax, that looked like a sellout. Not if you had paid attention, they been traveling together and everything, you must have been on Venus or something. Or something. The browns, the blues, it’s stupid. We shoulda done something like this a long time ago. Well, why worry so much, they’re goners, there won’t be a single one left in ten years. Don’tbe too sure about that. Don’tbe too happy about that, you’re only a few years younger than them, you idiot. Oh it was a most interesting week we have been sleeping in the parks, and everyone was most kind. Werteswandel, the Germans call it. They’ve got a word for everything. Bound to happen, that’s evolution. We’re all mutants at this point. Speak for yourself jack. Speak to the waiter. Six years! That’s great news, I’m surprised you’re sober. Oh I’m not, ah-ha-ha, I’m not! Little red people charging around on red ants, think they’re helping out, whoops, right over the edge of the rim, better hope they’re flying ants. No wonder I’ve been getting so many ants. So the man says, Well, doc — Yes, and? That’s the end of the joke, he only just gets to say Well doc and then he dies, quick decline get it? Very funny. That’s right it is funny! All right, all right, ha-ha, it’s not worth getting hot over it. Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you have to consider it less than successful, okay? Fuck you. Oh clever. So anyway there we were when the troops kind of make like they want to go back to the Socket. They go at it very gently, single file behind a little electric hotel cart they got their hands on, and everyone moves a little and lets them go, and they were passing through us looking nervous, and then people were shaking their hands like they were all Nirgal at the gates, and asking them to stay, leaving them alone if they couldn’t handle it, kissing them on the cheeks, leis piled up till they couldn’t see over them. Right hack into the Socket. And why not since they made their point and threatened us enough for the goddamned traitor government to fold without a fight? This joker doesn’t seem to understand the principles of jujitsu. Of what? What? Hey just who the hell are you? I’m a stranger in town. What? What? Excuse me miz, could you bring us another round ofkava? Well, yes, we’re still trying to get it into the parts-per-billion range, but no luck yet. Don’t give me Fassnacht, / hate Fassnacht, the worst day of the year to me, they killed Boone on Fassnacht. They firebombed Dresden on Fassnacht. No end of evil to atone for. They were sailing in Chryse when a howler picked up their boat and threw it all the way over the Cydonia Mountains. That’ll be the kind of experience that brings you closer together. Oh please, who is this guy. It’s no big deal there’s blimps every week get blown around a bit, it’s no big deal. We got caught out in that same howler, but we were just outside Santorini, I mean to tell you the water’s surface was torn to smithereens to a depth of about ten meters, I’m not kidding. The boat we were in the Algot scared and took us under right down into another boat that was already down there, so we banged into this boat and it was like the end of the world, boom, everything dark, the AI went insane, scared it to death I swear. It probably just broke. Well I broke my collarbone. That’ll be ten sequins please. Thanks. Those howlers are dangerous. I was in one in Echus and we all had to sit down on our butts and even then we were kind of scraping along. I had to hold on to my glasses or else they would have been torn right off my ears. Cars flipping like tiddlywinks. The whole marina cleared of every single boat, it was like some kid took his toy harbor and knocked it across the room. I too experienced this storm at its utmost fury. I was visiting the township Ascension, in the North Sea near Korolev Island. Hey that’s where Will Fort surfs. Yes, here as I understand it the waves on Mars reach their greatest heights, and in this storm they towered a hundred meters from trough to crest, no, I do not jest. Waves much taller than the sides of the township, which on these dire rolling black hills appeared no larger than a lifeboat to those of us on it. We were a veritable cork. The animals were unhappy. And to compound our difficulties, we were being cast onto the south point of Korolev. The waves were breaking completely over the final cape into the sea beyond. So every time we rose up the gigantic face of each wave, the pilot of the Ascension turned the township south, and it slid across the face of the wave for some distance before losing the crest and falling back into the next trough. On each wave we moved a little faster and farther, for as we approached the point of the island the wave faces grew steeper and bigger. The very tip of the point curves off to the east, so that the waves were breaking left to right as we looked ahead, crashing onto the rocks and then onto the reef offshore. On our final wave the Ascension was pitched down the steep face of the wave. At the bottom of the face the pilot turned the township right, and the great raft made the cut at the bottom and drifted back up onto the face, moving across it at a speed we could not calculate. It was like flying. Yes — we were surfing a hundred-meter-high wave, on a raft as big as a village, just over the rocks of the reef below. For a second we flew in the tube of the breaking wave. Then we were out, onto the shoulder of the wave, which was back in deep water, and no longer breaking. And so we passed the island. So the doctor says, how do you know? How? So pretty. Yes, it was a moment to remember. I’m going to take my fund and retire, it just ain’t the same anymore. These people are thugs. Heard she went out on one of those star-ships, that’s what I heard. You really saw her? You got to get you a better translator, I did not say Never mind doctor I am feeling better. What the hell kind of machine. Waiter! Villages just like the ones back home, except no caste. If they want caste they have to carry it in their heads. Some issei try but the nisei go feral. The way I heard it is that the little red people finally got sick of all our nonsense, and they were hot to do something having recently domesticated the red ant, and they started this whole campaign so that they could come charging to the rescue when the Terrans invaded. You might think they were being overconfident, but you have to remember that the biomass of red ants on this planet is closing in on a meter thick if averaged, so much biomass they’re going to throw us out of orbit they should try ants on Mercury, and every ant has a whole tribe of the little people riding around on it in howdah cities or whatever, and so they weren’t so overconfident after all. There’s strength in numbers. So they deliberately made the government act stupid to spark this confrontation. I wondered what excuse those fools had, they need an excuse, why it is that people go to Mangala and immediately turn into rapacious corrupt morons, it’s a mystery to me. Went down for us. Why is it always the little red people, whatever happened to Big Man, I hate these little red people and their twee little folktales, if you’re going to be so stupid as to tell folktales at all, the truth being much more interesting, then at least they could be big tall tales, Titans and Gorgons duking it out with spiral galaxies like razor-edged boomerangs, zip, zip, zip! Hey watch it there, slow down, guy, slow down. Waiter, get this mo-tormouth some kava, will you? He needs to mellow. Be calm, agitated sir. Be calm. Throwing nova bombs back and forth! Boom! Kapow! KA BOOM! Hey! Hey! Calm oneself oh agitated one. I’m sick of these little people. Get your hands off me. It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power. I told them to stick with tents, no global government, so there wouldn’t be so much power to suck, but did they listen to me? They did not. You told them. Yeah I told them, I was there. Nirgal, sure. Nirgal and I go way back. What do you mean, honored old one, are you not the Stowaway? Why yes, I am. So you are Nirgal’s father, you should go way back as you say. Yeah well in Zygote it didn’t always work that way. I tell you that bitch pulled the wool over your eyes your whole life if you let her. Have you living in a closet for years on end. Ah come on, you’re not Coyote. Well what can I say. Not many people recognize me. And why should they? I bet he is. You can’t be. If you’re Nirgal’s dad then why is he so tall and you’re so short? I’m not short. Why are you laughing? I’m five feet five inches tall. Feet? Feet? Holy ka, here’s a man measures his height in feet! In feet! Oh my God you must be kidding, five feet? Feet? Hey you look like it would take more feet than that, just how long were these feet? A foot was about a third of a meter, a little less. This is how they measured? A little less than a third of a meter? No wonder Earth is so messed up. Hey what makes you think your precious meter is so great, it’s just some fraction of the distance from Earth’s North Pole to its equator, Napoleon chose the fraction on a whim! It’s a bar of metal in Paris France and its length was determined by the whim of a madman! Don’t you be imagining you’re more rational than the old ways. Oh stop, please, I’ll die laughing, please. You people have very little respect for your elders, I like that. Hey give the old Coyote another drin\, what’re you having? Tequila, thanks. And some kava. Oh oh! This guy knows how to live. That’s right I do know how to live. These ferals got it figured out, as long as you don’t take it too far. They’re copying me but they’ve gone too far. Don’t walk, drive. Don’t hunt, buy. Sleep every night on a gel bed, and try to have two naked young native women as your blankets. Oh, oh, oh! Whoo! You old lecher! Oh honored sir. Indecent. Well, it works for me. I don’t sleep that well but I’m happy. Thanks, don’t mind if I do, thanks. I appreciate it. Cheers. Here’s to Mars.

She woke in a silenceso still she could hear her heart. She couldn’t remember where she was. Then it came back. They were at Nadia and Art’s house, on the coast of the Hellas Sea, just west of Odes’sa. Tap tap tap. Dawn; the first nail of the day. Nadia was building outside. She and Art lived at the edge of their beach village, in their co-op’s complex of intertwined houses, pavilions, gardens, paths. A community of about a hundred people, linked to a hundred more like it. Apparently Nadia was always working on the infrastructure. Tap tap tap tap tap! Currently building a deck to surround a Zygote bamboo tower.

In the next room someone was breathing. There was an open door between the rooms. She sat up. Drapes on the wall; she pulled them open a crack. Predawn. Grey on gray. A spare room. Sax was on a big bed in the next room, through the door. Under thick coverlets.

She was cold. She got up and padded through the door into his room. His face slack on a broad pillow. An old man. She crawled under the coverlets into bed with him. He was warm. He was shorter than she was, short and round. She knew that, she knew him: from the sauna and pool in Un-derhill, the baths in Zygote. Another part of their communal body. Tap tap tap tap tap. He stirred and she wrapped herself around him. He snuggled back into her, still deeply asleep.

During the memory experiment she had focused on Mars. Michel had once said it: Your task is to find the Mars that endures through all. And seeing the same hillocks and hollows around Underbill had reminded her intensely of the early years, when over each horizon had been a new thing. The land. In her mind it endured. On Earth they would never know what it was like, never. The lightness, the tight intimacy of the horizon, everything almost within touch; then the sudden immense vistas, when one of Big Man’s neighborhoods hove into view: the vast cliffs, the canyons so deep, the continent volcanoes, the wild chaos. The giant calligraphy of areological time. The world-wrapping dunes. They would never know; it could not be imagined.

But she had known. And during the memory experiment she had kept her mind focused on it, throughout the entirety of a day that had seemed to last ten years. Never once thought of Earth. It was a trick, a tremendous effort; don’t think of the word elephant] But she hadn’t. It was a trick she had gotten good at, the single-mindedness of the great refuser, a kind of strength. Perhaps. And then Sax had come flying over the horizon, crying Remember Earth? Remember Earth? It was almost funny.

But that had been Antarctica. Immediately her mind, so tricky, so focused, had said That’s just Antarctica, a bit of Mars on Earth, a continent transposed. The year they had lived there, a snatched glimpse of their future. In the Dry Valleys they had been on Mars without knowing it. So that she could remember it and it did not lead back to Earth, it was only an ur-Underhill, an Underbill with ice, and a different camp, but the same people, the same situation. And thinking about it, all of it had indeed come back to her, in the magic of the anamnestic enchantment: those talks with Sax; how she had liked someone as solitary in science as she was, how she had been attracted to him. No one else had understood how far you could walk out into it. And out there in that pure distance they had argued. Night after night. About Mars. Aspects technical, aspects philosophical. They had not agreed. But they were out there together.

But not quite. He had been shocked by her touch. Poor flesh. So she had thought. Apparently she had been wrong. Which was too bad, because if she had understood; if he had understood; if they had understood; perhaps all history would have changed. Perhaps not. But they had not understood. And here they were.

And in all the rush into that past, she had never once thought of the Earth farther north, the Earth before. She had stayed inside the Antarctic convergence. Indeed for the most part she had stayed on Mars, the Mars in her mind, red Mars. Now the theory was that the anamnestic treatment stimulated the memory and caused the consciousness to rehearse the associational complexes of node and network, bounding through the years. This rehearsal reinforced the memories in their physical tracery, such as it was, an evanescent field of patterns formed by quantum oscillation. Everything recalled was reinforced; and what was not recalled was perhaps not reinforced; and what was not reinforced would continue to fall prey to breakage, error, quantum collapse, decay. And be forgotten.

So she was a new Ann now. Not the Counter-Ann, nor even that shadowy third person who had haunted her for so long. A new Ann. A fully Martian Ann at last. On a brown Mars of some new kind, red, green, blue, all swirled together. And if there was a Terran Ann still in there, cowering in a lost quantum closet of her own, that was life. No scar was ever fully lost until death and the final dissolution, and that was perhaps the way it should be; one wouldn’t want to lose too much, or it would be trouble of a different kind. A balance had to be kept. Here, now, she was the Martian Ann, not issei any longer, but an elderly new native, a Terran-born yonsei. Martian Ann Clayborne, in the moment and the only moment. It felt good to lie there.

Sax stirred in her arms. She looked at his face. A different face, but still Sax. She had an arm draped over him, and she ran a cold hand down his chest. He woke up, saw who it was, smiled a sleepy little smile. He stretched, turned, pressed his face into her shoulder. Kissed her neck with a little bite. They held on to each other, as they had in the flying boat during the storm. A wild ride. It would be fun to make love in the sky. Not practical in a wind like that. Some other time. She wondered if mattresses were made the same way they used to be. This one was hard. Sax was not as soft as he looked. They hugged and hugged. Sexual congress. He was inside her, moving. She seized him and hugged him, hard, hard.

Now he was kissing her all over, nibbling at her, completely under the covers. Submarining around down there. She could feel it all over her. His teeth, occasionally, but mostly it was the licking of a tonguetip over her skin, like a cat. Lick lick lick. It felt good. He was humming, or mumbling. His chest vibrated with it, it was like purring. “Rrrr, rrrr, rrrrrrrrrr.” A peaceful luxurious sound. It too felt good on her skin. Vibration, cat tongue, little licks all over her. She tented the coverlet so she could look down at him.

“Now which feels better?” he murmured. “A?” Kissing her. “Or B.” Kissing a different place.

She had to laugh. “Sax, just shut up and do it.”

“Ah. Okay.”

They had breakfast with Nadia and Art, and the members of their family that were around. Their daughter Nikki was off on a feral trip into the Hellespontus Mountains, with her husband and three other couples from their co-op. They had left the previous evening in a clatter of excited anticipation, like kids themselves, leaving behind their daughter Francesca, and the friends’ kids as well: Nanao, Boone, and Tati. Francesca and Boone were both five, Nanao three, Tati two; all of them thrilled to be together, and with Francesca’s grandparents. Today they were going to go to the beach. A big adventure. Over breakfast they worked on logistics. Sax was going to stay home with Art, and help him plant some new trees in an olive grove that Art was establishing on the hill behind the house. Sax would also be waiting to meet two visitors he had invited: Nirgal, and a mathematician from Da Vinci, a woman named Bab. Sax was excited to be introducing them, Ann saw. “It’s an experiment,” he confided to her. He was as flushed as the kids.

Nadia was going to keep working on her deck. She and Art would perhaps get down to the beach later, with Sax and his guests. For the morning the kids were to be in the care of Aunt Maya. They were so excited by this prospect they couldn’t sit still; they squirmed, they bolted around the table like young dogs.

So Ann, it seemed, was needed to go to the beach with Maya and the kids. Maya could use the help. All of them eyed Ann warily. Are you up to it, Aunt Ann? She nodded. They would take the tram.

So she was off to the beach with Maya and the kids. She and Francesca and Nanao and Tati were crowded in the first seat behind the driver, with Tati on Ann’s lap. Boone and Maya were sitting together in the seat behind. Maya came in this way every day; she lived on the far side of Nadia and Art’s village, in a detached cottage of her own, on bluffs over the beach. She went in most days to work for her co-op, and stayed in many evenings to work with her theater group. She was also a habitue of the cafe scene, and, apparently, these kids’ most regular baby-sitter.

Now she was engaged in a ferocious tickle fight with Boone, the two of them groping each other hard and giggling unabashedly. Something else to add to the day’s store of erotic knowledge: that there could be such a sensuous encounter between a five-year-old boy and a two-hundred-and-thirty-year-old woman, the play of two humans both very experienced in the pleasures of the body. Ann and the other kids fell silent, slightly embarrassed to witness such a scene.

“What’s the matter,” Maya demanded of them in a breathless break, “cat got your tongue?”

Nanao stared up at Ann, appalled. “A cat got your tongue?”

“No,” Ann said.

Maya and Boone shrieked with laughter. People on the tram looked up at them, some grinning, some glowering. Francesca had Nadia’s curious flecked eyes, Ann saw. It was all of Nadia to be seen in her, she looked more like Art, but not much like either. A beauty.

They came to the beach stop: a little tram station, a rain shelter and kiosk, a restaurant, a parking lot for bikes, some country roads leading inland, and a broad path cutting through grassy dunes, down to the beach. They got off the tram, Maya and Ann laden with bags full of towels and toys.

It was a cloudy windy day. The beach proved to be nearly deserted. Swift low waves came in at an angle to the strand, breaking in the shallows just offshore, in abrupt white lines. The sea was dark, the clouds pearl gray, in a herringbone pattern under a dull lavender sky. Maya dropped her bags. She and Boone ran to the water’s edge. Down the beach to the east Odessa rose on its hillside, under a hole in the clouds so that all the tiny white walls glowed yellow in the sun. Gulls wheeled by looking for things to eat, feathering in the onshore wind. A pelican air-surfed over the waves, and above the pelican flew a man in a big birdsuit. The sight reminded Ann of Zo. People had died so young: in their forties, thirties, twenties; some in their teens, when they could just guess what they were going to miss; some at the age of these kids. Cut short like frogs in a frost. And it could still happen. At any moment the air itself could pick you up and kill you. Although that would be an accident. Things were different now, it had to be admitted; for barring accident, these kids would probably live a full span. A very full span. There was that to be said for the way things were now.

Nikki’s friends had said it would be best to keep their daughter Tati out of the sand, as she was prone to eating it. So Ann tried to keep her back on the narrow lawn between dunes and beach, but she broke away, howling, and trundled over and plopped back on her diaper on the sand, near the others, looking satisfied. “Okay,” Ann said, giving up and joining her, “but don’t eat any of it.”

Maya was helping Nanao and Boone and Francesca dig a hole. “When we reach water sand we’ll start the drip castle,” Boone declared. Maya nodded, absorbed in the digging.

“Look,” Francesca shrieked at them, “I’m running circles around you.”

Boone glanced up. “No,” he said, “you’re running ovals around us.”

He returned to discoursing with Maya about the life cycle of sand crabs. Ann had met him before; a year ago he had scarcely been talking, just simple phrases like Tati and Na-nao’s, Fishie! Mine! and now he was a pedant. The way language came to children was incredible. They were all geniuses at that age, it took adults years and years to twist them down into the bonsai creatures they eventually became. Who would dare to do that, who would dare deform this natural child? No one; and yet it got done. No one did it and everyone did it. Although Nikki and her friends, packing happily for their mountain trip, had still seemed a lot like kids to Ann. And they were nearly eighty years old. So perhaps it didn’t happen as much anymore. There was that too to be said for things as they were.

Francesca stopped her circling or ovaling, and plucked a plastic shovel out of Nanao’s hands. Nanao wailed in protest. Francesca turned away and stood on her tiptoes, as if to demonstrate how light her conscience was.

“It’s my shovel,” she said over her shoulder.

“Is not!”

Maya barely glanced up. “Give it back.”

Francesca danced off with it.

“Ignore her,” Maya instructed Nanao. Nanao wailed more furiously, his face magenta. Maya gave Francesca the eye. “Do you want an ice cream or not.”

Francesca returned, dropped the shovel on Nanao’s head. Boone and Maya, already reabsorbed in their digging, paid no attention.

“Ann, could you go get some ice creams from the kiosk?”

“Sure.”

“Take Tati with you, will you?”

“No!” Tati said.

“Ice cream,” Maya said.

Tati thought it over, worked laboriously to her feet.

She and Ann walked back to the tram-stop kiosk, hand in hand. They bought six ice creams, and Ann carried five of them in a bag; Tati insisted on eating hers while they walked. She was not yet good at performing two such operations at once, and they made slow progress. Melted ice cream ran down the stick, and Tati sucked ice cream and fist indiscriminately. “Pretty,” she said. “Taste pretty.”

A tram came into the station and stopped, then moved on. A few minutes later, three people biked down the path: Sax, leading Nirgal and a native woman. Nirgal braked his bike next to Ann, gave her a hug. She hadn’t seen him in many years. He was old. She hugged him hard. She smiled at Sax; she wanted to hug him too.

They went down and joined Maya and the kids. Maya stood to hug Nirgal, then shake hands with Bao. Sax biked back and forth on the lawn behind the sand, at one point riding with no hands and waving at the group; Boone, who was still using training wheels on his bike, saw him and shouted, flabbergasted: “How do you do that!”

Sax grabbed the handlebars. He stopped the bike and stared frowning at Boone. Boone walked awkwardly over to him, arms extended, and staggered right into his bike. “Something wrong?” Sax inquired.

“I’m trying to walk without using my cerebellum!”

“Good idea,” Sax said.

“I’ll go get more ice cream,” Ann offered, and left Tati this time, and trundled back up the sand to the grass path. It felt good to walk into the wind.

As she was returning with a second bag of ice-cream bars, the air suddenly turned cold. Then she felt a kind of lurch inside her, and a faintness. The sea surface had a glittery hard purple sheen, well above the actual surface of the water. And she was very cold. Oh shit, she thought. Here it comes. Quick decline: she had read about the various symptoms, reported by people who had been somehow resuscitated. Her heart pounded madly in her chest, like a child trying to get out of a black closet. Body insubstantial, as if something had leached her of substance and left her porous; she would collapse into dust at the tap of a finger. Tap! She grunted with surprise and pain, held on to herself. Pain in her chest. She took a step toward a bench beside the path, then stopped and hunched over at a new pain. Tap tap tap! “No!” she exclaimed, and clutched the bag of ice creams. Heart arrhythmic, yes it was bounding about, bang bang, bang bang bang bang, bang, No, she said without speaking. Not yet. The new Ann no doubt, but there was no time for that, Ann herself squeaked “No,” and then she was thoroughly absorbed in the effort to hold herself together. Heart you must beat! She held it so tightly she staggered. No. Not yet. The wind was a subzero frigidity, blowing right through her, her body ghostly; she held it together by will alone. Sun so bright, the harsh rays slanting right through her rib cage — the transparency of the world. Then everything was beating like a heart, the wind breathing right through her. She held herself together with every cramping muscle. Time stopped, everything stopped.

She took a short breath. The fit passed. The wind slowly warmed back up. The sea’s aura went away, leaving plain blue water. Her heart thumped with its old bump bump bump. Substance returned, pain subsided. The air was salty and damp, not cold at all. One could sweat in it.

She walked on. How forcibly the body reminded one of things. Still, she had held. She was going to live. For a while longer, at least. If it be not now … but not now. So here she was. Tentatively she walked on, one step after another. Everything seemed to work. She had gotten away. Brushed only.

From the sand castle Tati saw Ann and came trundling toward her, intent on the bag of ice creams. But she went too fast and fell right on her face. When she pulled herself up her face was coated with sand, and Ann expected her to howl. But she licked her upper lip like a connoisseur.

Ann walked over to help her. Lifted her to her feet, tried to wipe the sand off her upper lip; but she whipped her head back and forth to avoid the help. Ah well. Let her eat some sand, what harm could it do. “There. Not too much. No, those are for Sax and Nirgal and Bao. No! Hey, look — look at the gulls! Look at the gulls!”

Tati looked up, saw seagulls overhead, tried to track them, fell on her butt. “Ooh!” she said. “Pretty! Pretty! Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

Ann hauled her back to her feet. They walked hand in hand toward the group by its widening hole, its mound of sand topped with drip castles. Nirgal and Bao were down by the waterline, talking. Gulls planed overhead. Down the beach an old Asian woman was surf-fishing. The sea was dark blue, the sky clearing, pale mauve, the remaining clouds scrolling off to the east. The air all rushing by. Some pelicans glided in a line over the rising face of a wave, and Tati dragged Ann to a halt, pointing at them. “Innit pretty?”

Ann tried to walk on, but Tati refused to budge, tugged insistently at her hand: “Innit pretty? Innit pretty? Innit pretty?”

“Yes.”

Tati let go of her and trundled over the sand, just managing to stay on her feet, her diaper waddling like a duck’s behind, the backs of her fat knees dimpling.

But still it moves, Ann thought. She followed the child, smiling at her little joke. Galileo could have refused to recant, gone to the stake for the sake of the truth, but that would have been silly. Better to say what one had to, and go on from there. A brush reminded one what was important. Oh yes, very pretty! She admitted it and was allowed to live. Beat on, heart. And why not admit it. Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their kids. There was that to be said. The sand squeaked underfoot as she toed it. She looked more closely: dark grains of basalt, mixed with minute seashell fragments, and a variety of colorful pebbles, some of them no doubt brecciated fragments of the Hellas impact itself. She lifted her eyes to the hills west of the sea, black under the sun. The bones of things stuck out everywhere. Waves broke in swift lines on the beach, and she walked over the sand toward her friends, in the wind, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars, on Mars.