Frontera

a novel by

lewis shiner

subterrannean press

© 1984 by Lewis Shiner.

Interior design and map by Lewis Shiner Set in Bembo

Author photo © 2008 by Orla Swift Grail photo © 2005 by iStockphoto.com/Donald Johansson Astronaut and shuttle launch photos courtesy nasa Mars surface photo courtesy nasa/jpl-Caltech Mars from space © esa 2007 mps for osiris Team mps/upd/lam/ iaa/rssd/inta/upm/dasp/ida

Cover design by Lewis Shiner

isbn 978-1-59606-338-9

Subterranean Press PO Box 190106 Burton, MI 48519

www.subterraneanpress.com www.lewisshiner.com

original dedication:

For E.

With less than five minutes left, Kane tugged nervously at his shoulder harness and tried to remember gravity.The feel of his arms dragging by his sides, the blood pooling in his legs, his head jerking forward in fatigue—it all seemed distant, clumsy, irrelevant.

“You’ve gone soft, Kane,” Lena whispered, but her eyes were afraid of him. She locked her cleats into the gridded floor, peeled the plastic sheath from a hypo, and pushed 15 milligrams of Valium into his left arm.“You look like hell.You’re about nine-tenths crazy and you haven’t got any muscle tone at all. I don’t think you’re going to make it.”

“Four minutes,” Takahashi said.

“I’ll make it,” Kane said.

Not just gravity, he thought, but eight Gs, wrenching, crushing, suffocating him while the ship threw off 10,000 feet per second of velocity by diving into the thin atmosphere of Mars.The ship’s computer would sail them through a narrow, invisible corridor, balancing air drag against the strength of their reinforced carbon-carbon aeroshell, slowing them just enough to put them into a high, elliptical orbit around the planet and not send them crashing into the frozen Martian wastes.

All because the corporation didn’t have the booster stages to slow them down any other way.

He knew Lena had put him off, not caring if she had time to give him the shot, not caring if his muscles had the elasticity to ride out the re-entry. Reese had been first, of course: the senior astronaut, the father figure.Then she’d taken care of Takahashi and after that herself, floating where Kane could see her, easing the needle into the soft flesh of her thigh.

In the first weeks of the mission, she and Kane had struggled through a brief, sweaty affair; it ended when Lena, fingers stiffening in orgasm, drew blood from Kane’s chest and triggered his defensive reflexes.

1

Kane’s erection had vanished, and his hands had closed around her wrist and neck in a killing grip.

Within a second he was in control again, but Lena had panicked. Nerves, he’d explained, but she was already dressing, afraid to take her eyes off him.The next day they’d both started taking sex suppressants.

Kane had gone off them two days ago, hoping to clarify his muddled thoughts and desires. Now he found himself remembering her thin, angular body, the bones like negative shadows under the darkness of her skin, her breath moving against the underside of his jaw.

“Three minutes!”Takahashi said.“Kane, you’d better punch in.”

Kane’s crt swam with concentric circles, the ship’s path projected onto the vortex of Mars’ gravity well. He reached for the bank of knobs and switches in front of him, as familiar now as the M37 he’d carried in North Africa, and hit Control-C on the keyboard.At least once a week for the last nine months he’d been strapped to this couch or one of the others, working through endless computer simulations of the landing.

He remembered the morning he’d drifted in to find Reese buckled into one of the slings, jacked out of his skull on psilocybin, banging his massive fists into the control panel and screaming,“We’re crashing, oh Jesus, we’re crashing!” They had been six months out of Earth at the time, weightless, drifting, lights rheostatted down to save the fuel cells. Plague-carrying buboes on Reese’s neck would have been no more terrifying than his hysteria. Kane had fled from it, back to the wedge-shaped coffin of his quarters, and spent two days in a tranquilized fog.

And now, he thought.Were they really braking for orbit? Or was this just another simulation? If he turned this switch, would it fire a braking rocket or would it just force a branch in the computer’s program?

He remembered childhood nightmares of sitting in the back seat of a moving, driverless car.

“One minute,” Takahashi said.

The Valium washed over him like a lullaby.The blinking time display slowed as he watched, and the muscles in his shoulders and neck began to loosen.

An attitude jet, fired by the computer, went off with a noise like a machine-gun burst. Kane’s heart stammered for a second, then recovered as his brain identified the sound.

And then he was falling.

The air of Mars whimpered and then screamed as the aeroshell started to burn. Kane’s Valium calm vaporized, and he was sure he was going to die. He’d looked at death before, sometimes gone out of his way to see it, but he’d never had so little control over the outcome. He felt as if he’d been thrown out of a helicopter with a mountain tied to his back. His vision narrowed to a gray, viscous tube, and he prayed he wouldn’t have to take manual control of the ship because he couldn’t lift his arms back up to the keyboard.

One minute, he thought. I only have to take this for sixty seconds. He tried to see the time readout on his crt, but his eyes refused to focus.

The screaming turned into a metal icepick, driving into Kane’s ears. He fought for air, imagining his windpipe collapsing like a soda straw. His lungs burned and he tasted blood.

He kept waiting for it to be over, and the pressure kept getting worse. He felt thumbs gouging his eyes, blood pumping into his feet like water into balloons.And then something stabbed him in the chest.

A rib. I just lost a rib.

He felt the second one break.At first it was just the pressure, focused, inexorable, bearing down over his heart.Then he felt the muscles ripping and the sudden jerk as the bone snapped and bent inward.The pain knifed through his chest and for a long moment his own scream melted inaudibly into the shriek of the burning shield.

The G forces pushed the broken bones deeper into his flesh. He wanted to pass out, but the pain was too intense. He could visualize the points of the ribs, the claws of some giant roc from mythology, digging deep into his heart. Killing him.

And for nothing, he thought. For a rescue mission that’s ten years too late and too screwed up to do any good anyway.A broken-down ship full of losers, raving across 40 million miles to add their dead, burned bodies to the corpses of the Martian colonists.

He was convinced that something had gone wrong.The computers had lost control and the ship was obviously dropping straight out of the sky like a meteor.The deceleration had gone on an impossibly long time, could only end in blazing ruin.

And then the pressure fell away and the gray tunnel closed down into darkness.

When he opened his eyes again, the crt showed that two minutes had elapsed since orbital insertion.They were weightless, and the air was stale and flatulent.Above the time hack an irregular blue egg, dotted

with four or five major craters, filled the screen.

Deimos, Kane thought.They were alive, then. In orbit around Mars.

He sucked a careful breath through the hot bands of pain around his chest. He could hear the ship creak softly as it cooled, the rattle of an off-balance fan in the vent over his head.

“Kane?” Lena’s voice. He managed a grunt in reply.

“Keep still,” she told him.

He knew that.They weren’t even supposed to try to move for two hours.“Broke something,” he managed.“Ribs.”

“Oh, Christ.Any blood? From the lungs, I mean?”

He wasn’t sure. He had blood in his throat, but it could have been from his nose, which was still blowing a fine red mist when he exhaled.

He couldn’t seem to sustain any serious interest in the source of the bleeding. It was nothing compared to the shrapnel fragment that had opened the back of his skull near Dongola and left him nearly helpless between bouts of surgery. Now he was tired of complications, of moods, of dealing with Lena. He felt like a coiled spring that had been carrying a maximum load for nine months, the strain building beyond all tolerance levels, the coils starting to fray and shift out of line.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.“I can manage.”

“I’ll get to you when I can,” Lena said.“Anybody else?”

“I’m all right,”Takahashi said.“Reese is still out.”Of course Takahashi had come through, Kane thought.Three to five hours every day at the treadmill and the bicycle and the rowing machine had kept him precision-tuned, lean and rippling with health. Kane thought him deranged, obsessive, a robot programmed for masochism.Takahashi had been spit out of the factories of the New Japan, gleaming and flawless, blaming his ancestors’ suffering on their excessive spirituality.

“Like Reese,” Takahashi had said once, three months out of Earth, bent over the rowing machine, his muscles flowing like sine waves down his arms. It was the only image Kane had of him from the entire outward flight: there in the wardroom, the air alive with pinpoint dots of his sweat. “All that Ch’an crap of his,” he had said.“Zen. Looking for illumination or cosmic purpose in this. It’s a job. It’s work.That’s all there is to it.”

And now his hands were moving over the keyboard in swift, precise gestures while Kane lay hostile and broken.“Is somebody going to call Houston?” Takahashi asked.

“Go ahead,” Lena told him.“You’re in command.”

“You want to tell him about Kane?”

Him, Kane noticed. It wasn’t Houston they were talking about anymore, it was Morgan. Morgan: Chairman of the Board of Pulsystems, economic king of Houston, the man who had bought all this slightly used hardware from the foundering US government.

“No,” Kane said.“I’ll be okay. Just leave me out of it.” It wasn’t that he was worried about Morgan delaying the mission. It was all the history between the two of them, between him and Morgan. Morgan had raised him since Kane’s father died, ostensibly the benevolent uncle, in fact a ruthless business rival, more concerned with the block of stock that Kane had inherited than with the boy himself.

Kane worked for Morgan, had fought for him in North Africa, but their private struggle had never let up.

Takahashi’s fingers kept rattling on his console as he dictated a mechanical report:“Orbital insertion at 1823 Zulu...”

Kane let his eyes drift back to the bright husk of Deimos on his crt, cold, malformed, impassive. Mars was Ares to the Greeks, the god of war and mindless brutality, running red with blood.They hated him, and they hated his bastard sons, Deimos and Phobos, Fear and Terror. Mars had sired them on Aphrodite and they followed him like vultures over the battlefields to burn and mutilate the dead and dying.

He’d come to know the Greeks better than he’d wanted to, five impossibly long years ago, studying mythology at Rice University.They’d read meaning into everything they saw, humanized an inanimate universe with bloodthirsty zeal.What did they know, Kane wondered, that we don’t?

As Takahashi droned on, Kane drifted in and out of a hazy, painful sleep.When the beeping of an incoming transmission woke him, he saw that he’d lost another half hour.

The cratered oval of Deimos faded into Morgan’s face, the two images nightmarishly superimposed for an instant. Morgan’s hair, dyed unnaturally black, stood straight out from the back of his head where his fingers had repeatedly pushed it. His face was webbed with deep lines and his mouth couldn’t seem to hold a smile. It was early afternoon in Houston, but he had obviously been up the entire night before.

“Our telemetry says you have a successful Mars insertion,” he said. The 18-minute time delay each way gave him the awkwardness of someone speaking into a telephone recorder.“Congratulations, uh, a little late.” Behind him Kane could see five or six white-shirted techs at their consoles in the trench in Mission Control.The picture flickered and Morgan seemed to shift his attention back from something just beyond the camera.“Nothing really to say except we’re all proud of you here, and we’re hoping for good luck ahead, an operable lander, and a safe touchdown.”

The screen flickered again and Kane felt a chill. Subliminals.The son of a bitch was putting subliminals in the broadcast. He jerked his eyes away from the screen and looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed it.What was Morgan up to? What the hell was going on?

“I, uh, guess that’s it for now.We’ll be back in touch after we hear from you.” Kane heard him clear his throat, then saw the screen darken at the edge of his vision.

Morgan had, Kane thought, a lot to be worried about.The lander, for one thing.There hadn’t been a complete Mars Excursion Module left anywhere on Earth or in orbit, and even if there had been, there weren’t enough propellant stages to get it to Mars. Morgan had been willing to gamble that at least one of the abandoned landers on Deimos could be refitted. If not, it meant a nine-month trip back to Earth, empty-handed, and Kane didn’t think they’d make it without at least one murder or suicide.

Whatever their individual strengths, they didn’t seem to be able to function as a unit.Takahashi was distant and patronizing; he seemed always to be taking mental notes of the crew’s behavior, comparing them against some hypothetical limits of social and biological disrhythm. Kane felt he’d been singled out for the worst of it. He suspected paranoia on his own part, but couldn’t convince himself.

Lena considered the trip out just another nine wasted months to be added to the five years she’d spent looking for a chance to practice medicine again. She’d been the first to lose interest in the nasa regime of exercise and simulations; her moods shifted unpredictably within a narrow range of emotions.The one constant, since that early incident, seemed to be her fear and distrust of Kane.

If anyone could have pulled them together it should have been Reese. Even Takahashi had been a little awed by him at first.They all carried in their memories the image of Reese planting the American flag on Mars, back when there had still been an America, back when Mars had seemed like something important to everybody, if only because the Russians had gotten there first.

For Kane the memories had been even more potent, of adolescent weekends at nasa’s Johnson Space Center, Morgan’s privilege as a major government contractor buying Kane a ride in the shuttle trainer, a front-row seat inside Mission Control, lunch at the Central Cafeteria with the astronauts. Reese had seemed more than human then, a transcendent being who had actually touched an alien world.

Because of that Kane had expected some kind of spiritual leadership from him, a moral center that failed to materialize. Instead Reese had spent most of the nine months in his triangular sleeping area, floating in a lotus position, his circled thumb-and-forefingers just touching his knees. He never talked about his own reasons for going back to Mars, or why, at age 60, he was willing to risk aerobraking and nasa’s antique hardware for a man like Morgan, whom he clearly disliked.

Kane’s own motives were nearly as difficult for him to put into words. At one time being part of the Mars expedition seemed an obvious career move, a theatrical gesture to regain some of the momentum he’d lost after the war.The timing was right; he was unmarried and uninvolved, the doctors had cleared him, and his position in Labor Relations at Pulsystems was far from crucial.

Now it seemed a mistake, a costly retreat from the front line of the business, something near to professional suicide—or even a literal one.

North Africa had been the beginning, his head wound the sharp dividing line that separated him from the obvious and natural course his life had been following. He was lucky to be alive at all, they told him, said the headaches and the dizziness and the occasional failure of a motor nerve were minor side effects of a brain lesion that should have been fatal. He’d been unconscious for a month and had been kept in a private ward at the Pulsystems clinic for over a year.

What he couldn’t understand was the atrophy of his ambition, his sudden inability to reach a threshold of drive and desire that would bring him into the highest echelon of the company. His intelligence was unimpaired; his memory was perfect, frighteningly so at times.Yet in the three years that he’d been back at work, he’d hesitated over the smallest decisions, unable to focus his thoughts, intimidated by the endless chain of consequences that each one provoked.

And in those years Morgan had seemed to lose interest in him, had become cool, preoccupied, indifferent. Before the war, before the wound, there had been a moment, an instant, when Kane had seen fear in Morgan’s eyes, fear of what Kane was becoming, of his growing power in the company, of the physical strength and competence he’d developed in basic training.

But not since. Even when Morgan had first suggested the Mars mission, it was offhand, as if he didn’t care whether Kane went or not. Kane himself had brought it up the second time, and pursued it.

And so, he thought, this was where it had brought him. Lying on a canvas sling, a sack of raw nerve endings and sublimated combat training, knowing that if they couldn’t come up with a working lander, if they had to turn around for another endless, horizonless, destinationless trip, he would be the first to crack.

He closed his eyes again.

Sometime during the two hours it took them to catch up to Deimos, Reese recovered. He said he was unhurt, but to Kane his voice sounded old and strained.

Kane himself had developed a savage headache that burned the backs of his eyes and seemed to deform his skull. He’d had others like it over the past three years, but this was the worst yet.When he managed to find a few minutes of sleep, he was assailed by vivid dreams of a blue ocean and a hot wooden deck beneath his feet, the smells of salt and sunlight, a high murmuring of voices.

The gentle tug of braking rockets finally brought him back.The gravity of the tiny moon was negligible, less than a thousandth that of Earth, and Takahashi had to guide them in with dozens of tiny course adjustments, more of a docking maneuver than a landing.

Deimos occupied barely six cubic miles, and as they drifted toward the surface, Kane was reminded of the garbage dumps on the outskirts of Houston.With the exception of a melted patch near the domes and tunnels of the base, the entire visible surface was littered with castoff technology. Propellant tanks, some empty, some fully charged, lay around like oversized soup cans.Abandoned shelter halves were scattered randomly among plastic bags, tripods, and scraps of crumpled foil. The conical outline of one complete lander and the ruins of a second were visible from the ship, the exposed metal sparkling cleanly in the faint sunlight.

The ship bumped to a stop. For the first time in nine months, he was actually at rest compared to another object in the universe, but to Kane the change was imperceptible. It could have been no more than another trick of perspective, another elaborate simulation.

Lena moved him gingerly to Health Maintenance while Reese and Takahashi started closing down the ship.The sickbay was not designed for even the minimal gravity of Deimos, and Kane had to lean against a suddenly vertical wall while Lena took X-rays and taped his ribs.

“It’s not serious,” she said.“Comparatively.You’re going to be in a lot of pain, but it should heal up cleanly enough. I’d give you something for it if you didn’t still have all that Valium in your system.”

“Right,” Kane said. His voice had turned scratchy and his face glowed with a light fever. He had become excruciatingly aware of the structure of his chest, of the muscular contractions that raised his ribs as he inhaled, the flattening of his diaphragm, the abrupt collapse as his breath spurted out again.

Lena pulled herself back up to the Command Center and a moment later Reese and Takahashi came down the same ladder, carrying their suits. Reese’s face was the color of dirty concrete and he lagged behind as Takahashi disappeared below the level of the deck.

“You all night?” Reese asked.

Kane nodded.“You?”

“Sure.”

“You look like hell, Reese.Angina?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Get Lena to—”

“No. I’m fine, dammit. I’m fine.”

“At least rest a minute.”

“There’s no time. I have to know if that lander is going to work. It’s important.”

“To Morgan, yeah.”

“It’s important to me,” Reese said.“Just leave it at that for now, okay?”

“Sure,” Kane said.

Reese dropped through the hatch. Kane worked his fingers nervously, feeling the tension again.The wails of the ship constricted him, seemed to be pressing in on his ribs. His head was all right now and the chest pain was nothing he couldn’t handle. If he didn’t get out of the ship he might explode.

To hell with it, he thought. If Reese can keep going, so can I.

He poked his head into the Command Center and said,“I’m going out.” He had to raise his voice to get it to carry in the low pressure of the ship.

“You’re crazy,” Lena said. She seemed to push him away with the intensity of her stare.

“That’s right,” Kane said. He let himself fall through the center of the ship, braking himself against the gentle pull of the moon with open hands on the sides of the ladder.There was a way to breathe, he was sure, that wouldn’t hurt so badly. He just had to find it, that was all.

Takahashi was already in the airlock by the time Kane got to the quarters level. Reese was tightening the straps of his Portable Life Support System and reaching for his helmet.The atmosphere of the ship was pure oxygen, so they could use standard shuttle suits at 4 psi and not worry about nitrogen bubbles and the bends.

Kane pulled the lower torso of a suit over his trousers and then squatted and stood up inside the upper half, which was still racked to the wall. Raising his arms brought a new onslaught of pain, but Lena had said it wasn’t that serious, and he chose to believe her.

“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Reese asked, still holding his helmet.

“Yeah,” Kane said. He put on his black rubber gloves and locked the metal wrist-rings.

“Do something for me?”

“Like what?”

“See if you can get into the base.Takahashi and I can check out the lander by ourselves.”

“And if I can?”

“Just wait there for me.All right?”

“Sure.”

Reese’s head disappeared under the helmet as the airlock light went green. Kane closed the hatch after him and got into his own plss and helmet and waited while Reese cycled through.

Finally he was sealed into the narrow cylinder of the lock.The controls were clustered on a small box, painted off-white like every other inch of the room. Each switch was protected by an aluminum cap on a chain, and Kane screwed them back in place as he finished.

The hatch opened, and he fell gently to the surface of Deimos, his legs flexing slightly to take up his momentum, then straightening to send him halfway back into the lock.

He lowered himself more carefully and looked around.

Outside the burned, khaki-colored slab where they’d landed, the entire surface of the moon was pocked with craters, some of them smaller than Kane’s thumbnail, some fresher than the oldest footprints, whose familiar wide bars overlapped each other in a heavy crosshatching. His visor cut down the glare of the sun on the metal and the white powder of the surface, but made the black of the shadows impenetrable.

Lena’s voice cut into the silence.“Kane, uh, we’re showing the hatch still open...”

Kane slammed the hatch and moved away from the ship.The drastically foreshortened horizon gave him the feeling that he was standing in a low spot in some terrestrial desert; at the same time the ground seemed to slope away from him, confusing his spatial perceptions.

He took a few cautious steps toward the airlock of the base, then had trouble controlling his forward momentum.With a good run, he thought, he could probably jump into orbit.

Puffs of dust hung around his feet with every step. Even in the negligible gravity the dust seemed to weigh him down.After-effects of the aerobraking, he realized.According to the book, none of them should even be moving around yet, let alone trying to work.

He made it to the base entrance, a half-buried section of corrugated pipe that led to a cluster of metal and durofoam structures that looked as solidly built as a child’s tree house.

He held on to the hatch valve to get his breath, then looked back toward the ship.

Mars filled the sky.

For an instant he felt he was falling into the vast dark side of the planet. He groped behind him, found the edge of the steel tunnel, and clung to it.

He hung by his feet and hands over a brilliant yellow and white and orange crescent, suspended in absolute black. On the right-hand tip Kane could see the Argyre Planitia, white with frost; to the left was the great inflamed wound of the Valles Marinaris, torn from the upper right edge down to the center of the crescent, disappearing into the dawn along the Tharsis Ridge.Ascreus Mons, the only one of the Tharsis volcanoes touched by the rising sun, trailed a thick plume of ice crystals down toward the west.The Lunae and Chryse plains glowed ghostly white against the orange of the surrounding high ridges.

If Kane stood there long enough, the sun would reach Pavonis and the third volcano,Arsia Mons. He wondered if the ruins of the base would be visible from this far away, if the great foil mirrors would catch the sunlight. He could point to the spot where they’d be, there, northeast of Arsia Mons, toward Pavonis, still in darkness.

The speakers in his helmet buzzed and Reese said,“We’re inside. We’ve got power and the pressure’s coming up...looks good.”

“Oh, man,” Lena said.“Oh, man. I’m just starting to figure out how scared I’ve been.”

“Don’t break out any champagne,” Reese said.“There’s a ways still to go.”

Kane himself felt the first stirrings of relief, the easing of a knot of tension in his stomach that had been there so long he’d lost his awareness of it.

He turned his back on Mars and concentrated on the mechanics of the hatch.The station’s power was on standby and none of the automatic controls functioned. He finally found the manual release set into the recessed spokes of the cover, the flat of the handle barely wide enough to grip with his fingertips.The lever resisted the strength of his hands, but he finally forced the toe of his boot into the opening and threw the mass of his body against it.

The hatch swung open, and Kane scrambled to hold on to the lip of the tunnel above it.

Just a few more minutes, he thought, and I can go sleep this off.The light on his chest pack revealed the standard switches inside the air-lock, with an additional set for bringing the main power on line. He ran through the sequence, and a moment later the caged bulb overhead came to life.

“Reese,” he said.“I’ve got power up in here, too. Now what?”

“Go on in,” Reese said.“Check it out.”

“What’s going on?”Takahashi broke in.“Kane? Where are you? Are you inside the base?”

Kane lied without stopping to think about it, instinctively protecting Reese.“Morgan wanted to know if it was still habitable.”

“He didn’t say anything to me about it.”

“Come off it,Takahashi,” Kane said.“What difference does it make who he told?”

Takahashi let the silence drag on for a few seconds, and then said,“All right. But be careful.And you can make your report to me, and I’ll pass

it on. Understood?”

“Sure,” Kane said.

The telltales for internal pressure all showed green, so Kane gave his helmet a quarter-turn and pulled it off.With the servos operating, the inner hatch swung open easily, and Kane stepped inside.

The auxiliary generators had kept the air above freezing, but only slightly. Kane’s breath puffed out in thick clouds, and it took a second or two for the smell to penetrate.When it did, he fumbled his helmet back into the collar and turned the plss up to high.

Beneath the odors of rot and decay had been a dry, alkaline smell like moldy bread.As he coughed the last of the foul air out of his lungs, he saw that it was mold, thick and bluish gray, growing up to shoulder height on the foam walls. Oily water dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the floor, which felt spongy under Kane’s feet.

He slogged through the tunnel and crossed a bulkhead into the Control Center.At first glance the damage didn’t seem so bad, but Kane found rust on the chrome surfaces and greenish corrosion on the solder points. He brought up the drives on the main computer and tried booting an operating system, but nothing came up on the lead crt. It could have been anything from rom failure to bad cabling, and Kane didn’t see the value of trying to pinpoint it.

The astrometry processor, attached to a wire grid telescope on the far side of the moon, was still running, its red map lights still winking into new patterns as Kane watched.The gauges on the little fusion pile were stable as well, and with a little work the place could be used again. But it would be a long time before the smell was gone.

Kane turned back to the astrometry unit. It was one of Pulsystems’s most sophisticated computers, designed to measure the universe with a combination of light, radio, and neutrino detectors, so sensitive that it could calculate the motion of planets around nearby stars.

As a teenager he’d seen it being tested in the basement of the company’s downtown Houston office, encased in glittering black aluminum and plastic, promising answers to questions that no one had even thought of asking. Now it lay in the ruins of a deserted outpost, part of another era. Kane felt like a Goth at the sack of Rome, watching his stream of piss wash the delicate paints from a piece of Grecian marble.

No, he thought, not as bad as that.The fact that he was standing there at all proved that it hadn’t been completely forgotten, that the riots and hunger and brutality of the last ten years might be no more than a temporary setback. Now that the worst of it was over, the human race had a genuine chance to start fresh, to make a blind, quantum leap into an unimaginable future.

Maybe it was already happening; maybe this expedition of Morgan’s would be the first step. For once Morgan might have seen past his anachronistic squabbling over the division of the world’s spoils, but Kane found it hard to believe. For Morgan, self-interest was everything, and sooner or later Kane expected to find the short-term payoff that Morgan was counting on.

A shame, Kane thought. Once he’d seen himself as the answer to Morgan’s greed, a new program for a new age, but now he wondered if he had the conviction to bring it off.

He was pulling a clogged filter from the ventilator when Reese broke in on the radio.“I’m in the airlock. How bad is it?”

“Not good. Leave your helmet on.”

A few seconds later, Reese came through the bulkhead. Kane noticed the gray stains on his suit where surface dust had turned to mud in the hallway. Reese clicked his radio off and waited for Kane to do the same. Then he crouched in front of the astrometry unit and pulled a diskette out of the drive.

Kane stood next to him so they could touch helmets.“What the hell are you doing?”

“I need this.”

“That’s the map, isn’t it?” Kane asked.

“Yeah,” Reese said.“It’s the map.” For twelve years the processor had been updating and refining the state vectors of every object it could perceive, storing not only position but direction and speed of relative motion.

“What for?”

“I can’t tell you that. Maybe later, but I can’t tell you right now.”

“Okay, Reese. If that’s how you want it.”

“I didn’t take this, okay? We looked around and then went back outside.”

“Sure, Reese.Whatever you say, man.” He pulled away and turned his radio back on.“The place needs some work.”

Reese switched on.“Too much to do anything about it now. Let’s get back to the ship.” Reese slipped the diskette into a zip pocket on his thigh.“The lander looks tight.The computer came right up, and it seems to think it’s okay.There’s nothing it can’t check out better than we can anyway.”

“A piece of luck, then,” Kane said.“We were about due for some.”

“Not luck,” Reese said.“It’s a good piece of hardware.Takahashi’s gassing it up right now, and we’re going to go ahead and get out of here.”

“Suits me,” Kane said, grateful not to have to spend another night in the Mission Module. It’s happening, he thought. In a few hours he would be on Mars.

“Get your stuff together,” Reese told him,“and take it on over to the lander. Bring Lena with you.We should be ready to lift inside an hour.”

He nodded, not caring that Reese couldn’t see it, and stayed behind to shut off the lights. Before he left, he put a fresh diskette into the astrometry processor and reloaded its program.

Just in case, he thought, shutting the outer hatch of the base. In case we’re back this way some time.

Back inside the ship, he hung his helmet on the wall outside the airlock and wore the rest of his suit into his quarters. Dirty clothes were slotted into neoprene knobs along the wall, and he wadded them into his fist, wondering what he should bother to bring. Somewhere in his overhead locker was a duffel bag that he’d unloaded when he first came aboard and hadn’t looked at since. He pulled it out and tore open the Velcro fasteners.

A Colt .38 Police Positive, huge, steel-blue, and menacing, tumbled out of the bag.

It spun end over end as it drifted toward the gridded floor, bounced once and hung there, the hammer snagged in a metal hexa-gon.The barrel of the gun slowly wobbled in a parabola and then stopped, the muzzle pointed accusingly at Kane’s chest. He jammed his palms into his temples and held on as a yellow beam of pain arced through his skull.

“No,” he said out loud. It had to be a hallucination. It was the same gun he’d found in Houston, hidden underneath his cot in the Project Management Building. But he’d gotten rid of it then, put it in a dumpster or something...hadn’t he?

Tiny hemispheres of sweat clung to his forehead. He bent over and touched the steel, its hardness palpable even through his thick gloves.

Not an illusion, then. But he had no memory of packing it, would in fact have been insane to bring a gun into this fragile tin can of a ship.

“Kane?” Takahashi’s voice came from just outside the cubicle.We’re closing the ship,” he said in Japanese.“Hurry up. Isoide kudasai!” The polite form, Kane noticed, but his use of Japanese instead of English was uncharacteristically rude.

Kane’s hand closed over the pistol barrel, shoved it into the duffel bag, and pushed a layer of clothes in over it.“Yeah, okay, for Christ’s sake. Kite! I’m coming.”

His hands shook. He felt an eerie, disembodied compulsion urging him to bring the gun along; at the same time he was terrified of bringing it, wanted somehow to break the chain of events already forming around it.

He had no time left to decide.Takahashi, already suspicious and irritable, might take it on himself to search Kane’s quarters. Nearly frantic, Kane stuffed the rest of his clothes into the bag and ducked into the hallway to put on his helmet. He could see Takahashi’s feet through the open gridlock of the floor above him, making a last pass through the ship.

He cycled through the airlock and followed Lena’s retreating suit toward the mem.

Without conscious intent, his eyes moved upward for another look at Mars.The sunrise had reached Pavonis Mons, to the north and east of the colony. Frontera.

It had been ten years since the last ship had left there for Earth. Fifty-seven colonists ignored the recall order from the collapsing US government. For two years messages trickled out sporadically: grim stories of nitrogen shortfalls, radiation-induced cancers, famine, and suicide. One of the last told of the failure of the Russian settlement at Marsgrad, on Candor Mesa in the Valles Marineris.The survivors had arrived at Frontera over a period of weeks, starving, crippled, irradiated, and no one knew how long they’d last.

Then the messages had stopped altogether. nasa’s last official act had been the launch of a final shuttle, deploying a lightsail vehicle full of medicine, electronic components, food, and chemicals. But a solar flare had scrambled the drone’s guidance system and sent it hurtling off into the asteroid belt.

The sight of the decaying Deimos base had turned Kane’s imagination loose, conjuring endless hideous details of the disaster on Mars: cryptic, desperate messages typed into video terminals, slaughtered livestock, tiny deformed skeletons.

Sleep, he thought. Just get through these next few minutes and sleep.

The entry module was only a little larger than the old Apollo spacecraft Kane had seen at nasa, but with its fuel tanks and conical shielding, the descent vehicle stood over thirty feet tall. Reese, who had obviously taken over for Takahashi, was uncoupling the flox hose that led to the tank of fluorine/liquid oxygen built into the base’s refinery complex. He held up one thumb and Kane managed to acknowledge him with a wave of the hand.

A ramp led up inside the cowling, and from there Kane climbed three rungs to the open cockpit. He stowed his duffel under the canvas slings and then crawled in next to Lena. She didn’t ask how he was and he didn’t volunteer any conversation. It was enough to close his eyes for a few minutes.

His nerves kept him from falling completely asleep.As Reese and Takahashi strapped themselves in, he gave up and opened his eyes again. He waited in cold silence while Lena and Takahashi ran through the pre-flight checklist, and then, with no more than a sort of throat-clearing “de wa,” Takahashi lifted them gently off Deimos’s surface and turned them toward the “high gate,” the point where they would hit the Martian atmosphere.

Kane forced himself to focus on the pranayama exercises Reese had taught him, separating his breathing into outgoing, incoming, and the long kumbhaka between them.

The shielded bottom of the capsule brushed the outer layers of the atmosphere and the screaming started again. Kane opened his eyes to columns of data scrolling down the screen in front of him. The capsule bucked as the braking rockets fired and Kane ground his teeth together. No more than two Gs this time, Kane told himself. It’s almost over.

Within a minute or two, Kane could feel the pressure easing.As the mem hit terminal velocity, the gravity stabilized at Mars normal and the module began to fall straight toward the caldera of Arsia Mons.

When the soft, female voice came through his helmet speakers, Kane was too startled to manage a reaction.

“This is Frontera Base. Since you’re obviously not going to turn around and go home, why don’t you set down southeast, repeat, south

east of the dome.We’ll send somebody out for you.” “Reese?” Lena said.“Reese, did you hear that?” Jesus Christ, Kane thought. They’re alive.

With a whine like a muezzin’s call to prayer, the eastern mirror opened to the light of the Martian dawn. After twelve years I should be used to it, Molly thought, holding a pillow over her ears against the noise, able to sleep right through it.

She rolled onto her left side and watched a rectangle of muted light crawl across Curtis’s smooth, depilated scalp. He slept flat on his back, the breath rasping quietly in his open mouth. Nothing bothered him, not noises in the night or bad dreams or life-and-death decisions. She could remember when she used to admire him for it.

She tried to go back to sleep but it was no use; she felt alternately like she was waiting for Christmas morning or for a final exam. It had been this way since they first picked up the signals from Reese’s ship, and today was the worst.Today they would be landing.

The phone rang and Molly got noiselessly out of bed to pick it up.“Yes?”

“They’re coming in.” The awkward Slavic consonants told her it was Blok, on night duty at the monitors.

“And the others?”

“At least another day away. No signals.”

“All right.” She looked down, saw that she had instinctively covered her breasts with one arm, as if she could feel a stranger’s eyes on her. It’s starting, she thought.Already they’re an alien presence, already they’re changing things, and they haven’t even landed yet.“I’ll be right there,” she said, and put the phone back on the table.

She got into her T-shirt and her last, worn pair of jeans from the night before. Blue used to be my favorite color, she thought, and now look. No oceans, the sky a sickly green on a clear day, and these jeans faded nearly white. Maybe, she thought, maybe they brought new blue jeans with them, like the tourists used to take to Russia.

Sure they did. Blue jeans and French wines and Vogue magazines. They don’t even know we’re alive.

She slid her feet. into moccasins and debated, just for a second, waking Curtis and letting him deal with it. But they’d been over it and over it, and there was nothing he could do that she couldn’t. He’d be furious, of course, but he’d survive.

She closed the bedroom door behind her and took her mask and oxygen tank off the hook by the front door. She stifled a yawn behind the mask and stepped out into the warm co2 under the dome.

The clear plastic walls rose over her like the sides of a giant bottle buried in the sand.The components of the western mirror, like huge foil shades pulled down the curvature of the dome, scattered morning sunlight into the gardens below. To her left and right, durofoam living modules alternated with fields of crops in various stages of ripeness.The corn outside her bedroom window stood two meters tall, ready for harvest, and the fields behind her kitchen had just been sown with sugar beets.

She squatted for an instant on the dirt path, trying to really see the colony, to reduce it to some kind of single, simple image, but the vision eluded her. She had been here too long, become too bogged down in the details. She could only find distance through an effort of will, putting herself, for example, in Reese’s position, coming in from above.

First there would be the volcano, leveling off to no more than a persistent slope of the rocky land.Then his eyes would find the dome, a cylindrical bubble half a kilometer long and over two hundred meters wide, capped at the southern end by the main airlock and garage, and at the northern end by the greater thickness of the machine shops and the compressors and solar furnaces that mined the Martian atmosphere.

Closer still and he could see the land under the dome divided into two chessboards, one due north of the other, with ten squares on a side instead of eight.What would have been the white squares held the houses, the living modules, one- and two-bedroom cottages sculpted from durofoam at the whim of the original occupant.The black squares were green, most of them anyway, planted with wheat or cotton or pineapples and not, thank God, with radishes anymore. In the beginning, radishes had been the only crop that would grow in the salty Martian soil, and they had always tasted to Molly of failure.

Between the two chessboards lay the inverted bowl of the Center, bracketed by the animal pens where the colony’s goats and chickens fought for their few centimeters of space.The Center was the only two-story building under the dome. Some well-intentioned planner back on Earth had meant for it to be the focus of the colony’s bustling social life, a shopping mall in space complete with video theaters, a bar, a gym, and a row of shops where the docile colonists were supposed to sell their handicrafts to each other.

The problem was the colony’s social life didn’t bustle, and the one thing most of them wanted was a little privacy, a little time completely alone.

Molly herself was not immune to the feeling; as she looked around she felt crowded, constricted by the half-dozen people around her, just off the late shift at the Industrial Complex, or watching the sunrise from a bench along the wall of the dome, or still drunk from the night before and wandering aimlessly.Arctic syndrome, the psychologists called it: the sense of lost privacy that came from the knowledge that there was nowhere else to go, no chance to get away from the structures of the society, except in the confines of a rigid pressure suit.

Or, of course, in one of the isolation tanks.

They’d started building them two years after the break with Earth, heavy cellulose coffins made of processed leaves and stalks.The upper floor of the Center, with its Nautilus machines and ping pong tables and basketball hoops, had been walled off down the middle and. the tanks lined up and filled with ten-percent magnesium sulfide solution.

Molly had tried a few hours in the warm darkness, but she couldn’t deal with the disorientation afterward, the luminescent colors and undulating walls. She wanted a solid reality, unlike the others, like Curtis, who couldn’t get enough time in isolation, who claimed it purified and crystallized their thoughts.

As far as she could tell, it had only made Curtis stranger.

She stood up and shuffled toward the Center, ignoring the people she passed.The years had taught them a kind of Japanese politeness that retreated from physical existence, that tried not to intrude with meaningless conversation.

The concrete walls of the Center were a dirty reddish-gray, cast from Martian sand mixed with salty contaminants from the fields.A long time ago somebody had painted Tharsis Hilton across the front of the building. Molly went through the double doors just under the faded letters and pulled her mask down around her neck.

Astronomy was the first office on the left.The walls inside were covered with printouts, charts, and notes thumbtacked directly to the durofoam. Dirt and shreds of paper had been ground into the carpet beyond the saturation point.

Blok didn’t look up as she sat in the swivel chair next to his.“They came through the high gate about two minutes ago,” he said.“They’re headed right for us.”

His eyes were bloodshot over his heavy mustache and stubbled chin. Many of the Russians from Marsgrad had hair all the way down their backs, the men growing thick beards and the women experimenting with permanents and peroxide. But Blok had kept his hair short and his chin shaved, almost as if he expected the Party to check in with him any day.

Molly patched in a microphone, then hesitated. She had too many questions: what were they after, how had Morgan talked Reese into working for him, what condition were they in, how long were they planning to leach off the colony’s meager resources? Static popped on the line, making her jump. Say something, she thought.

She switched the mike on, gave them landing instructions, then pulled the plug.The rest could wait.

“Get sickbay mobilized, will you?” she asked Blok, rubbing her forehead, trying to plan the contingencies.“We’ll probably need some stretchers to bring them in, depending on how beat up they are.”

“This is the biggest thing that’s happened in eight or ten years,” Blok said, his hands stretched like talons.“Don’t you even care?”

“I care,” she said.“I care so much I hope they burn up on re-entry, even with Reese on board.We don’t need them, not any more. Haven’t you thought it through? They want something from us, and they’re coming here to get it.Whatever it is.” She was a poor liar, she knew, and she was afraid Blok would see through her, through to her knowledge of the machine in the cave, the thing the Earthmen wanted.“Can’t you see that? Do you think this is going to be some kind of high school reunion or something?”

“I just want things to be different,” Blok said.“I don’t even care how, anymore. I’m sick of that plastic sky overhead, of goat meat and goat milk and goat cheese, sick of wearing a mask every time I go out of my own house—”

“They’re not going to change any of that.What, do you think they’re going to take you back to Earth with them? Forget it.You know better than that. Earth’s gravity would kill you, cripple you at the very least.

You’ve been here too long.”

“You don’t have to remind me.”

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, and she was.“I know how you feel. It’s just... not the answer, that’s all. It’s going backward, looking for help from Earth.We have to find our own way, by ourselves.”

“Eight years ago, when I came in out of the desert, I might have believed that. I would have looked for a Martian flag to wave and I would have waved it. But I don’t believe it any more.”

How many others were like him, she wondered? Most of them seemed to feel the way she did: bitter, betrayed, abandoned. But was she just seeing what she wanted to see?

She stood up.“I have to go talk to the kids,” she said.

“The kids,” Blok said, nodding, knowing which kids she meant.And then, a little hesitantly, he added,“Good luck.”

She shrugged, taking extra care not to slam the door on her way out. Diplomacy was a survival trait here, and she refused to let him know how much his attitude hurt and angered her.As far as she knew he’d never had any children of his own; afraid, probably, they’d turn out like Molly’s daughter and so many of the others.

It was the risk you took when you got out from under the barriers of Earth’s atmosphere and left yourself open to the hard radiation of space: the cosmic primaries, the solar flare protons, the solar X-rays, doses of ten to thirty rads a year.The dome cut out the worst here on Mars, but during solar maximum or heavy flares they had nowhere to hide.

The adults paid for it with cancer and miscarriages, and the kids paid for it with birth defects and the rarest, strangest price of all: genetic change.

Of the nearly fifty children born on Mars, the ones who made it all the way to term, most were perfectly normal. Of the fifteen or so who weren’t, the damage was usually insignificant or easily correctable—a vestigial sixth toe, cleft palate, malfunctioning kidney.

Usually.

What Blok would never understand was what it felt like to carry a child for nine months and feed her with your breasts and diaper her and love her and still not be able to look at her without a shadow of fear and sadness and even, on the worst days, just the slightest trace of hatred. It changed you. Even though you were one of the top fraction of a percentile that had been judged stable enough to be here in the first place, let alone one of the tough ones who had stayed behind when the failures shipped back to Earth.

And then sometimes it seemed like leaving had been the only sane decision, that the rest of them were all crazy, from the borderline paranoids like Curtis with his shaved head and power obsessions to the extreme psychotics who were sent out to work the fields with their pre-frontal lobes chemically numbed.

She stopped and put one hand on a crumbling wall of durofoam that had once twisted and curved in an ornate imitation of the onion domes of Moscow. These had been the last living modules to go up, back before the final ship to Earth and the casualties of the next two years, before Curtis put things back together.And after those years the survivors had lost their desire for durofoam crystals and Mayan pyramids and giant, abstract igloos.They’d pulled back to the center, to the comfortable cottages and geodesics that, whether they wanted to admit it or not, reminded them of Earth.

Somebody had thrown a rock through the onion dome, maybe one of the Russians, maybe one of the normal kids who roamed the fields in packs, chafing at the limits of their existence.The morning condensation that fell from the inside of the dome, the local equivalent of rain, had started to rot the foam and nobody had bothered to stop it.The decay had been gradual enough that she hadn’t really noticed it before, but she was still seeing things through the eyes of the Earthmen who would be coming in through the south locks.Through Reese’s eyes.

Forget it, she thought. By the time they’ve recovered enough to notice our slums or our kids they’re going to have other things to worry about.

A pack of half a dozen five- to ten-year-old kids raced past her, following the dirt track around the inside walls of the dome.When they got bored enough, they would work for a while with their parents, helping out in the fields or the machine shops, studying at night on computers. Healthy, normal kids, except for a tendency towards fat—the Martian gravity never seemed to burn up the calories their appetites demanded—but Molly still found them strange.They had so little sense of history, such vague, contradictory notions of Earth that she wondered what they would pass on to their own children.

She crossed the track and shut herself in the changing room, put on a suit and went outside.

To her right, the great volcano Arsia Mons climbed gently into the sunrise. In the clear morning, she could see the lip of the caldera, twenty kilometers high and nearly a hundred kilometers away. She’d climbed it once; most of them had, at one time or another. It had taken her three days to reach the top, leaping over fissures in the rock with a recklessness unimaginable on Earth, climbing glacial sheets with only a rock hammer to support her, sliding down the shallower inclines on the hard plastic seat of her suit.

The effort had been worth it. In those three days she had literally walked into outer space. She had stood on a knob of ragged brown basalt at midday, the sun blazing down on her, and looked up to see a sky of unwinking stars overhead.

Curtis had been the first, of course, and he’d symbolized his conquest by draining his urine collection bag over the lip of the crater.That had been his “hero thing” in the tradition of the Antarctic explorers, and at least three of his subordinates had killed or crippled themselves trying to follow his example, skiing down a glacier or running naked between the garage and the air lock.

She knew some kind of pressure valve was necessary, but the adolescent macho tone of it all offended her.Their current fad was the “sapping expedition,” where five or six of them would take off in jeeps and blow up underground ice deposits with lasers. Of course they were “releasing valuable volatiles” and “contributing to the density of the atmosphere,” but she knew they did it just to watch the ground explode.

She started for the cave, watching a small pocket of ice glitter faintly from a rift high on the volcano’s flank. Curtis had promised they would melt that ice and be swimming in it within their lifetimes, back when people had wanted to hear that kind of thing.

It could still happen, she thought. But it would be because of the kids, not Curtis.

The entrance to the cave was invisible from the locks, a few hundred meters up the rocky slope and concealed behind a lip of frozen lava, bright orange with iron oxides and silica.The airlock was a cylindrical unit pulled off of one of the early mission modules, cemented in place with durofoam and painted to blend with the background. Molly and the other adults had to crawl on their hands and knees to get into the cave.The kids liked it that way.

As she pushed the inner hatch open, a large white rat scrambled past her into the lock. It took her a minute to corner it and carry it back into the cave, by which time she felt her temper beginning to unravel.

The room smelled of the lab animals they left running around, and looked even worse than it smelled. Reese, she thought, would not understand how it could have happened.The cave had been the first permanent habitation on Mars, used while Frontera was being built, and by all rights should have been some kind of monument. .

But they’d needed a physics lab, one far enough away that an accident wouldn’t take the entire dome with it.And maybe more importantly, they’d needed a place for the kids that couldn’t or wouldn’t fit in, the deformed, the strange, the unwanted. Friction had been building since the first years of the settlement, and the decision just seemed to happen, more and more of the kids spending the night in the lab, until a dozen or so of them were hardly home at all.

This morning they had the red lights on, barely illuminating the distant corners where the durofoam floors and ceilings met the natural walls of the cave.The rats had dragged used computer paper across the floor for their nests, leaving what they didn’t need in crumpled heaps. Children slept on mattresses on the floor, in niches along the walls, some of them under the desks and tables in the front area of the huge room.

“Verb?” she said.The girl had been named Sarah, once, but five years ago the children had come up with their own names for each other and had stopped answering to the ones their parents had given them.“Verb, are you here?”

A head of close-cut blonde hair, just a little too large for the body it rested on, lifted itself from one of the desks.“Mom?”

“How’s it coming?” Molly asked, hearing the unnatural cadence of stress in her voice.

“Okay. I’ve got some new math to show you.”

Molly picked her way carefully to the desk. In a distant corner one of the children gave a brief, strangled scream in its sleep and then went quiet.

On the girl’s crt screen, Molly saw the calculation for quantum shifts in the apparent mass and charge of an electron in an electromagnetic field. In quantum mechanics the solution produced divergent integrals, but Verb’s equation balanced.

There had been a time when Molly had to choose between the doctoral program at the University of Texas and a slot on one of the Mars missions. She opted for Mars because she thought it could give her science and adventure, and besides, grant money had dried up and universities, even state universities, were folding as fast as the steel mills. She couldn’t have guessed that she was going to end up at the cutting edge of a new physical theory.

She watched the numbers scroll by. Like all the great ideas, she thought, the math was beautiful in itself, elegant, symmetrical, not just in the flow of logic but in the very patterns of the numbers.

“Look Ma,”Verb said,“no infinities.”

Molly smiled at the obscure, ingrown humor, resisted an impulse to touch her daughter’s hair. None of them liked to be touched, even by each other.Too much like sex, Molly thought, the imperfect chromosomal dance that had spawned them.“It’s beautiful,” Molly said.“It’s almost there, isn’t it?”

“Almost,” the girl said.

It had better be, Molly thought. For the thousandth time she almost said it, almost let the words out: Sarah, I have to talk to you. But they wouldn’t come. She’d waited too long, could not just blurt out the fact that her daughter was dying and that she had waited this long to tell her. Waited because she was afraid, waited because she’d kept hoping they were wrong, waited because she didn’t want to interfere with the work.

She told herself it was for the girl’s sake, that the work meant so much to her. But it meant as much to Molly, to all of them, because if Verb really could harness antimatter, if she really could build a working transporter, then all their lives depended on her.

Verb sat back, revealing the heavy, flat lines of her body, the stains on her dull yellow shift.“It’s almost finished.All but a few of the transitions. I can see where it’s going but I can’t always...can’t quite see how to get there.Why don’t you tell me what it is you’re afraid of ?”

The girl’s startling intuition of quantum physics seemed to be part of some larger, more general empathy. She can’t really read your mind, Molly told herself. She’s just reading your emotions.

“Remember I told you about the ships from Earth?” It wasn’t the whole truth, maybe not even half, but it was the reason she’d come. “One of them is about to land.”

“Is it the one with Reese?”

“That’s right. It’s Reese.” Molly crouched beside the desk, putting both hands on the arm of the girl’s chair.“Listen. I know you don’t care much about this kind of stuff. But it’s very important to me and the rest of the grownups here. Okay? If the people from Earth find out what we’re doing up here, they’re going to try to take it away from us. It means people will get hurt, maybe even killed. So I want you to promise you won’t talk to anybody about the transporter, or about the antimatter, or any of that stuff.Will you do that?”

The girl pushed the screen-erase key, and the equations vanished into blackness.

“Please?”

“Is this for Curtis?”Verb said at last. Molly at least she would call “Mom” but her father was always “Curtis.”

“No,” Molly said.“It’s for me.And for your friends. I don’t want the Earth people to hurt your friends.” Christ, Molly thought, this is low. Why not tell her they have long, forked tails and eat babies?

Verb pressed a function key, covering the screen with winking graphics. She stared at the shifting patterns as if she could read meaning in them, refusing to look at Molly.“All right. I won’t break it to anybody. Do we have to come back to the dome?”

“That’s up to you. Reese is probably going to want to see you, sooner or later, but we can work that out.When you do come...”

“Yeah, I get it. Don’t say anything about the cave.”

“Is that okay?”

“Yeah, sure, it’s okay.”

Molly stood up. It was the best she could hope for, really.“I’ll let you talk to the others.You’ll know how to explain it to them.” She worked with three or four of them every day, a boy with an uncanny knack for integrated circuit design, a girl who could think in hexadecimal machine code, but she couldn’t penetrate their rigid, exclusive culture.

“Sure.”As Molly walked away, she could hear the girl’s fingers clicking over the keys again.

She made it outside without any rats or monkeys following her.As she rounded the jut of rock that cut her off from the base, she saw the medics lining up at the south airlocks, stretchers ready.

The mem was a bright flare to the east, coming in out of the sun. She hurried down the slope, taking long, floating strides, and stood next to Blok as the lander made its final descent, lost in billowing dust.

For reese it had started in Mexico. In the dead heat of the afternoon, even the birds had gone quiet. The swimming pool, deep blue and wide as a lake, threw blades of sunlight into Reese’s eyes. He drained the last flat, salty swallow of Bohemia and dropped the bottle in the sand next to the others. The Hotel Casino de la Selva was the end of the earth, the last place Reese ever expected to see. Some mornings he would walk down the Calle Carlos Fuero to the baranca, the steep-sided canyon full of garbage and blooming flowers that separated the eastern third of Cuernavaca from downtown. He could get as far as the narrow bridge, but he couldn’t seem to cross it. In the mornings he drank beer, at night mescal. Once a week he would buy a few magic mushrooms, psilocybe cubensis, from the kid who trucked in fresh vegetables from town.The mushroom changed the decaying pleasure palace into a fairyland, made sense of the vines and wild grasses growing over the jai-alai courts, the crumbling concrete heliports, the circular casino like a stranded alien spacecraft awash with dust and splintered furniture. At night he could see Mars. He was beyond remembering how many nights he’d spent in the hotel, beyond caring about the expense.The money he’d milked out of his days as a public hero was secure, all of it invested in the multinationals that had succeeded the big governments. Enough, he figured, to drink himself to death or to sobriety, and he didn’t particularly care which it turned out to be. Footsteps crunched toward him across the sandbox, the artificial beach that was no more preposterous than any other of the hotel’s excesses. Reese, eyes closed, assumed it was the impassive waiter who seemed to be the only other inhabitant of the hotel. He extended his thumb and little finger in the time-honored Mexican signal for liquor and said, “Otra, por favor.” “Reese?” He forced his eyes open.A young Northamerican stood just out of arm’s reach, wearing a collarless blue shirt, khaki pants, and mirrored sunglasses.The man’s dark hair was razored within a quarter inch of his skull, and he stood with the unconscious tension of the corporate mercenary.

“Jesus Christ,” Reese said, pushing himself to a higher center of gravity.“Kane? Is that you?”

“It’s been a long time, Reese.” The man did not offer his hand or relax his expression.

“Jesus Christ.” Reese felt addled and clownish, unprepared, a little frightened by Kane’s lack of emotion.“What are you doing here? How did you find me?”

Kane shrugged. Smooth, Reese thought, professional.The last time Reese had seen him, Kane had been no more than sixteen, still in high school, full of inarticulate wonder at being inside the restricted areas of nasa.With an effort, Reese came up with other pieces of information, something about Kane’s father dying in a car wreck and Morgan, the boy’s uncle, adopting him.All of it seemed impossibly long ago.

“I’m here on business,” Kane said.“I’ve got a proposition for you, if you want to listen to it.” Reese noticed that Kane had nervously chewed at his lips, leaving dry flecks of skin protruding over raw, red welts.

“Okay,” Reese said.“Just give me a second.” He walked as steadily as he could to the edge of the pool and dove in. He swam the entire oversized length of it, and by the time he started back his lungs burned and his feet thrashed spasmodically at the water. Back at nasa he’d always had trouble with the weight limit because of his big bones and heavy build. Now he was just fat, out of shape.

Swim, he told himself, and he cupped his hands and dug his strokes in deep, put his head down and his ass up and pumped with his legs.When he got back to the edge of the pool, he pushed himself up on his arms and swung his legs out and stood up.

“All right,” he said.“Let’s talk.”

They moved into the bar. Reese had another Bohemia, and Kane ordered Tehuacan water.“You remember Pulsystems,” Kane said.“My uncle’s company.”

“Of course,” Reese said.“I own a block of their stock. I consulted with them when they had the principal contract on the Mars hardware.”

That was only part of it, and he didn’t volunteer the rest. In fact he had worked in Pulsystems’s downtown Houston office for a few months after the collapse of the government, looking for information. He’d used a phony identity to keep from attracting Morgan’s attention; with a full beard and long hair he’d felt reasonably inconspicuous.

Houston had been the obvious step after Washington, where one job after another had disappeared as the government tried desperately to cut itself down to a size that its tiny budget could support. For two years he’d burrowed through the Washington underground, searching for tapes or transcripts or some kind of communication from the colonists that had stayed behind at Frontera.

He’d had no better luck in Houston, and after a few months he’d developed a paranoid fear of Morgan.

During his nasa days he’d thought Morgan a posturing fool, the sort of clown that gravitated to public office to feed his ego on privilege and publicity. He remembered Morgan’s hearty backslapping in the vip lounge at Mission Control in Houston, the load of lapel pins he’d pressured one of the astronauts into taking to Mars and back, his endless posing for photographs with nasa celebrities.

But once inside Morgan’s home ground, Reese had seen another side to the man, a sense of destiny that he kept hidden from the rest of the world. From the moment Reese sat down at a terminal in a corner of the Quality Control department, he was inundated with company propaganda: how Pulsystems fed the unemployed, rebuilt public roads, brought law and order back to the city. In all of it Reese saw a sort of messianic madness that had no regard for individual lives, only for image, cash projections, and the vindication of history.

What a wonderful piece of pr I would make for him, Reese had realized. Ex-astronaut brought low, rescued and sustained by the corporate dream.Within a few days of the thought he’d packed his clothes and moved on.

“Right,” Kane said,“of course you know him.Well, when the government went under, Pulsystems was the major creditor against nasa. They bought off the other parties and ended up with the entire Johnson Space Center in Clear Lake, two shuttles, launch privileges at the Cape, and certain specific hardware already in orbit.” Kane’s mineral water came and he used it to wash down a small green pill.“That hardware includes a working Mars spacecraft.”

Reese said,“Go on.”

“Pulsystems is going to sponsor a Mars expedition. Chairman Morgan wants you to train the crew and direct the mission from Houston.”

Reese set the beer bottle on the table, pushed it away.“They’re all dead, you know.”

“Sorry?”

“The colonists. Nobody’s heard anything from them in over seven years.”

“He’s not expecting to find them alive.This is just the beginning. If this works out, there’ll be a space program again, with the companies sharing the expense and pooling the results. It could be a new age.”

“Who’s the crew supposed to be?”

“Me, for one.There’s a doctor, and three pilots.”

“So,” Reese said.“After all these years.You finally get your shot. How did you talk Morgan into it?”

“I work for him now. Foreign security.”

In other words, Reese thought, Morgan’s corporate mercenaries. In the last days of the government, the US Army had become a parody, two officers for every enlisted man, obsolete weapons, no morale or fighting experience.The corporations had hired the best strategists and munitions people for their own use, protecting overseas investments from terrorists and rebel governments.

“You were in North Africa, then,” Reese said.

Kane nodded.

Nobody in the States really understood what had happened there—at least no one outside the boards of directors of the companies involved. All anyone knew was that the Red Chinese had moved on the un biotechnology lab in Luxor—Biotek Afrika—and the US government hadn’t been in any shape to stop them. Instead the multinational corporations and zaibatsus had sent their own troops, and when the shooting was over, the corporations were in control, all over the world.

“Tell him it’s no,” Reese said. His stomach was jumping, and his blood ran icy and thin. He forced himself to stand up, draining the rest of his beer for moral support.“I have to go along, or it’s no.Tell him that.”

“Reese.”

He turned back.

“I’ve seen the mission profile.This isn’t nasa.This is a stripped-down, high-risk, low-redundancy mission.Antique hardware, not even our own excursion module.Aerocapture. Do you think you could handle that?”

“Tell him,” Reese said, and walked out.

Outside the sun smoldered and flowers ran riot over the guest cabins.

Reese had never seen so many flowers in his life; Mexico seemed a nation of flowers, obsessed with them, drunk on their color and perfume.

Not like Mars, he thought. On Mars, there were only edible flowers; no trees, no wood, no yards, no swimming pools.

He climbed two steps into his cabin, kicked off his damp bathing suit, and stood under the shower.When he finished, he put on real clothes for the first time in days, black cotton pants and a black pullover shirt. In the mirror he saw jowls and puffy, sunken eyes.

The kid is right, he told himself.You’d never make it.

He took out his I Ching and the envelope with his three coins.They were copper pennies from the year he graduated high school, dark brown and corroded now from the acids in his fingers. He tried to focus his thoughts, failed, threw the coins anyway.

He built hexagram 34, the Power of the Great. Not, as he’d hoped, something obvious and straightfoward, like Sheng, Pushing Upward.The oracle was enigmatic, as always.The judgment, minimal, was merely “Perseverance furthers.” The interpretation tantalized him with bits of relevance:“inner worth mounts with great force and comes to power... one may rely entirely on one’s own power and forget to ask what is right...greatness and justice must be indissolubly united.”

His change line in the third position gave him:“The inferior man works through power.The superior man does not act thus.”

Morgan, Reese thought. It’s trying to warn me about Morgan.And sure as hell, if he’s involved with this, he’s up to something. He put the book away, restless and uncomfortable, and stepped out into the blazing sunlight.

Without conscious thought, his feet took him down the Calle Cuaglia to Carlos Fuera and across the baranca. His diaphragm hurt and his eyes burned, the first physical pain he could remember in weeks. Like the pain, he thought, when the blood starts moving again in a leg that’s gone to sleep.

He crossed over to Avenida Morelos with its long, whitewashed, windowless walls and downhill to the Borda Gardens. Maximillian and Carlotta had used it for a summer retreat in the 1860s, but now it was just another elaborate ruin, a walled maze of garden paths, stagnant ponds, and crumbling outbuildings. For a while the government had charged admission, with a pretense of repairing it, but the charade was dropped when the socialistas took over. Now that pemex was the de facto ruler of the country, there was little interest in the past.

The gardens covered five or six city blocks, but only the immediate area near the entrance had been kept up.Towards the northwest the park disintegrated into dying trees and ruined fountains.

Another message, he thought, this one from my subconscious.A metaphor for Frontera, its gardens and fields and buildings all walled in by the dome. Like this now, gone, crumbling, ruined.

And yet, he thought. Perseverance furthers.“A movement in accord with heaven, producing great power.” He bent his legs into a lotus, straining the shortened muscles. In front of him was a crumbling adobe wall, beyond that the hills of the city, and beyond that the pine-covered mountains. In time his mind began to clear, and he sat for over an hour, feeling the sun move in the sky overhead.

From the gardens he took Lopez Rayon toward the zocalo, his sense of calm evaporating. He wanted to go back to the hotel and see if Kane had talked to Morgan. Instead he forced himself to keep walking, past the dilapidated theater and its endlessly recycled kung fu movies, past the steeply climbing streets and the tiled hotels.

Mirrored glasses winked at him from the shadows of El Portal, an open-fronted restaurant across from the Hotel del Parque. Kane sat calmly at a side table, watching, making no effort to attract Reese’s attention.A clever piece of tradecraft, Reese knew, designed to work on his nerves, impress him with Kane’s omniscience.

He sat down at Kane’s table without speaking.Together they watched a party of Japanese tourists posing for pictures on the steps of the hotel across the street.Without looking at him, Kane said,“I talked to my uncle. He says it’s your ass.You can kill yourself if you want to.Those were his words.”

Reese stood up.

“Reese.”

“Yeah?”

Kane took off his glasses, folded them carefully, and put them in his shirt pocket. His eyes were dark, emotionless. Reese wondered if he could trust someone with eyes as dark as that.

“When I was a kid,” Kane said, and then looked down at the street. “When I was a kid, it meant a lot to me that you did what you did. Showed me around.Talked to me. I used to think what it would have been like if you were my father.”

“I hardly remember any of that.”

“I suppose. But it doesn’t matter.The thing is, if you insist on this, it’s going to kill you. I don’t want to be responsible for that.”

Reese shook his head.“It’s not your responsibility. Okay? It’s something I want more than anything. More than anything.That means I take the risks I have to in order to get it.”

Kane put his glasses back on.“Okay,” he said.

Reese left him there. He was suddenly tired and took a taxi back to the hotel to pack. In the nearly empty room he found the scrap of paper with his hexagram and followed the change line: the old yang would move to a yin, becoming Kuei Mei, the Marrying Maiden. It was, in a vague sort of way, supposed to be his future.“Undertakings bring misfortune. Nothing that would further.” Too late now, he thought, dropping the book into his bag.

They caught an Estrella de Oro bus for the short ride to Mexico City; from there Kane had them booked on an evening flight to Houston.

Reese sat back in the plush red seat of the airliner, relaxed, watching the lights moving below him. It was almost, he thought, like checking into a hospital. He was no longer making decisions, had been relieved of responsibility for his own existence for the first time in eight years. He’d heard of ex-convicts who’d deliberately put themselves back in jail, and for a second he understood the logic.

The flight came in to Houston Intercontinental a little after ten pm. Kane had left his car in the parking lot, a large V-8 gasoline-powered sedan.To Reese it seemed almost as cumbersome as the aircraft they’d just left. He sank helplessly into the heavily cushioned seats and flinched as Kane power-locked the doors.

He hadn’t seen much of the city during his brief stint at Pulsystems, had not, in fact, spent any time there since his nasa days before his first Mars flight.The changes were sweeping and dramatic.

Kane drove them over a nearly deserted Gulf Freeway, avoiding gaping holes in the overpass and the worst of the broken chunks of pavement.Twice he swung off the freeway altogether and sped past collapsed interchanges.The barricades blocking the mounds of shattered concrete and twisted rebar were themselves falling apart, obviously temporary precautions that had become permanent.

“From the riots,” Kane said as Reese turned to stare out the rear window. “There’s probably a hundred people in each of those piles.

Kids set off some bombs at rush hour.That was about the last rush hour

Houston ever had.”

“You were here then?”

“Hospital,” Kane said. Reese raised an eyebrow but didn’t want to press him.“It was right after North Africa. I was laid up for a while.”

Reese’s memories superimposed themselves on the dark screen of the city: streetlights that burned all night long, the brilliant, tangled geometries of the Houston skyline at night, the hundreds of thousands of cars—now rusting and abandoned at the edges of the expressway.

Reese could see no details once they passed through the deserted downtown, only a few ragged pines and collapsing tilt-wall warehouses blurred by the speed of their relative motion.They passed South Houston and the old white-on-green signs for nasa shot by with increasing frequency. Finally, after nearly an hour in the car, they roared off at the nasa/Alvin exit and screamed left onto nasa Road 1. Kane’s driving had the intensity of a compulsion, but with the scarcity of cars on the road it seemed harmless, almost childish.

Clear Lake City had virtually dried up and blown away. Reese remembered the long lines of convenience stores and gas stations, burger joints and boutiques that had lined the highway. Hardly a pane of glass had survived.

Finally they swung left into the Johnson Space Center, past the paint-flecked Saturn V shell, then right past Visitor’s Parking and into the restricted lot behind Building 1, the Project Management Building.At nine stories it was the tallest in a matched set of concrete-and-smokedglass boxes scattered over the 1600 acres of the complex.

“No security?” Reese asked.

“Surveillance,” Kane said. “They know we’re here.”

Kane released the locking mechanism and Reese got out of the car.A breeze from the lake, a few hundred yards to his right, touched his face and rustled the high grass all around them.

“The place has gone to hell,” Kane said.“But cut grass doesn’t launch a shuttle.” He brought Reese’s bag around from the trunk, and Reese took it absently. How long had it been? Nine years since he left Mars, and they didn’t even debrief him when he got back from that one.A year on Mars and almost another year getting there, so that made it eleven.

It had all happened so suddenly. He hadn’t had time to prepare himself, to anticipate these sudden attacks of memory. He wanted a bath and a drink and a chance to meditate.

Kane unlocked the door of the building and led the way to the elevators.At the top floor they got off,and Kane pointed to the end of the hall.“The last office on the left has been fixed up for you.There’s a shower in the bathroom next door, refrigerator and hot plate in the room.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Somebody will call us in the morning for a briefing.”

Reese tried the door of the room, found it unlocked.The air inside was stifling. He flicked on a light and went straight to the window, letting in more thick, humid air. It wasn’t until he threw his suitcase on the bed that he noticed the man in the far corner of the room.

“Hello, Reese,” Morgan said. He slouched in an armchair, legs stretched out in front of him, and Reese saw with some relief that he wasn’t going to offer to shake hands. He looked just as Reese had remembered him, over six feet tall with the physique of a drugstore cowboy: broad shoulders, no hips, and a convex stomach with a belt cinched underneath. His dyed hair shone like black patent leather.

“So,” Reese said,“you’re the welcoming committee?”

“We need to talk.”

The furniture, Reese noted, was plain but comfortable.A double bed, chest of drawers, and a portable closet. He took a stack of shirts out of his suitcase.“Then let’s talk.”

“I want you to know I’m serious about this.We have all the hardware we need, and I’ve got a lot of the old Mission Control people back on board.We can pull this off.”

“Maybe you can.The question is why you want to bother.You don’t think they’re still alive up there, do you?”

Morgan stood up and walked over to the window, hands at his waist, theatrically straightening his back.After a long moment he said,“No. It wouldn’t be realistic to expect to find any survivors. But there are reasons enough to put a mission together without any of that. Hell, man, the climatology alone paid for that first Mars mission, paid for it when they broke that drought in the Midwest. Look at history, look what happened to the Chinese when they shut themselves off back in the fifteenth century. If a company the size of Pulsystems stops growing and stops taking chances, it dies in its tracks. Christ, Reese, I don’t have to tell you how important it is to have a space program.”

Reese finished unpacking and closed up the suitcase.“Only if you intend to keep it going,” he said.“And that’s a hell of an investment for one company to take on.”

“What if I told you,”Morgan said,“that I’m prepared to take that risk? Things have been stable for almost five years now. The corporations have divided up the world, and it’s back to business as usual. Somebody needs to make a gesture, to take the lead, to try something new.What if I told you that once things got rolling,other corporations will want in, that the momentum will take us...well, as far as we want to go.”

I’d say, Reese thought, that you were lying.

“There’s another reason,” Morgan said, sitting down in the armchair again, twisting sideways and throwing both legs over the arm.“The Russians seem to be over their hard times as well. It looks as though Aeroflot is going to be trying for Mars too.”

“Another space race? Come on, Morgan. Nationalism is finished. Aeroflot is just another zaibatsu; they’ve got branches all over the world, just like you do.”

“But they’re Russians, Reese.The people running that company all grew up under the Soviet, they all played war games in grade school where Americans were the bad guys.The first generation to grow up without nationalism is barely out of its diapers. Don’t forget that. Don’t underestimate the old factionalism.They beat us to Mars before, and I don’t plan to let it happen again.”

Reese stretched out on the bed.“Whatever you say.”

“You sound awfully skeptical, Reese. Especially for a man who insisted he get to go along.The same man who was so desperate for information that he went to work for me under a false name five years ago.”

Shit, Reese thought.

“I didn’t find out till you’d already disappeared again,” Morgan said. “But I must say, it hurt my feelings. I wish you’d just talked to me.”

“Look, Morgan. I don’t trust you.We’ve got what they call an adversary relationship. I’m going to be trying to get your people to Mars, and you’re going to be trying to make money.Anything else you say is just a smokescreen, just so much bullshit. I don’t see any point in our trying to be friends, or your trying to sway me with a lot of outmoded politics and noble-sounding rationalizations.”

“If that’s the way you want it, Reese, that’s okay with me. I’ve always admired you, and I would like to have your respect. But I can’t force you to be my friend, and I’m not going to try.”

The hell of it is, Reese thought, he’s probably sincere.Whatever view he has of himself, whatever he sees when he looks in the mirror, is probably a lot like the way he sees me.As if we were brother pioneers.

“I’m a little tired,” Reese said, the closest he could come to an apology.“Let’s just put the personalities aside for now.What can you tell me about the crew? How long have I got?”

Morgan cleared his throat.“Kane didn’t tell you?”

“No.”

“Um.There’s a bit of pressure, because of the Russians, you see. I’m afraid you’ve only got six weeks.”

“Six weeks?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“No way,” Reese said.“It’s impossible.”

Morgan leaned forward, his eyes glittering.“I don’t like that word, Reese. If we’re going to be working together, you’ll find it’s to your advantage not to tell me something’s impossible. Ever. Do you understand?”

Reese nodded, almost involuntarily.The force of the man’s will was frightening, almost psychotic. He thought of Kane’s driving, wondering if the entire family was unstable.

“Fine,” Morgan said, relaxing again.“nasa used to train mission specialists for the shuttle in five weeks.And my people are in top condition, all of them with pilot experience. Most of the lander training can be done with the on-board computers in simulator mode anyway, give them something to do on the trip out. Now if you’re worried about not getting yourself in shape in that amount of time, that’s no problem. You can pull out any time you want.”

He is not, Reese thought, the clown he played for so many years. It was not just intensity that Morgan shared with Kane but an aura of danger, the dark, flat, predator’s eyes that were alert for the slightest weakness in their prey.

“I can handle it,” Reese said.

Morgan stood up, smiling, and stopped by the door.“Sleep on it. I’m sure you’ll come through for me.”

In fact Reese cleared his mind and let himself sleep deeply and well. The phone woke him at 8:15, and he did a hundred sit-ups before he got dressed.

At breakfast Kane introduced him to Lena,Takahashi, and the other two pilots:Walker, a thirtyish woman with hooded brown eyes and leonine hair, and Phut, a slight Vietnamese who took Reese’s hand with barely repressed hostility. Five of them, Reese thought, and only five places on the ship. I’m putting one of them out of a job.

Theirs was the only occupied table in the long, sunlit room, and Morgan’s absence allowed Reese to eat in relaxed silence.As soon as he comfortably could, he excused himself and wandered through the room, ending up at the souvenir counter. Between the T-shirts and the plastic shuttles was a small hologram unit. Reese switched it on and saw himself in miniature, planting the American flag in the rusty soil where the Frontera dome would be built.

That morning he put them on the wheel.

The centrifuge had a building to itself, the Flight Acceleration Facility, just north of Building 5 and its Link Shuttle Trainer. Even after all these years, he still felt nauseated at the sight of the curved gray walls and the radial concrete struts across the roof. He thought of the Hotel Casino de la Selva as his footsteps echoed across the dusty, slick-troweled floor under the fifty-foot arm of the centrifuge.

He remembered the techs talking about some trainee who’d ridden the wheel “eyeballs out,” lying on his belly, hemorrhaging all the capillaries in both eyes, turning the whites bright red for a month. He remembered his first sight of an Apollo spacecraft, how amazed he’d been by the sheer, clumsy, mechanical weight of switches and latches and levers and knobs.Then, as now, the very idea of space travel seemed ludicrous, beyond the capability of the equipment.

But the power plant started, and the centrifuge turned, and one by one he took them up to five Gs and let Lena watch their signs.Then it was Lena’s turn, and then it was his, and he had to climb into the gondola and let Kane control the wheel, thinking, I can’t be afraid of him, I have to learn to trust him, I have to learn to trust them all.

And after all, it was only five Gs, not even enough to bring out the purple splotches of petichiae on his back. He remembered the breathing technique, filling his lungs and sipping air off the top, not letting his chest muscles relax.And then it was over, almost before it started.

Easy, he thought, no problem. But he knew that it didn’t get hard until it got over eight Gs, and he knew that ten Gs were going to be very hard indeed.

In the afternoon he left them with Takahashi for a full workout and tried to round up the material he would need for the classroom work. Six weeks seemed pathetically short to teach them upper atmosphere physics, flight mechanics, guidance and navigation, systems and hardware, not to mention some kind of hands-on simulation and escape and contingency drills.

Which left the outbound flight for all of the lander instruction and simulations, training on the onboard medical and science equipment, preparation and rehearsal of the Mars surface excursions, as well as diagnostics, housekeeping, communications and exercise.

So many things, he thought, so many ways to go wrong.

After supper he took them to the auditorium in the Visitor’s Center and ran them the films he’d been able to find, keeping the volume low, correcting the affable announcer’s voice on the soundtrack when he had to.Around eight o’clock, Morgan took a seat in the back row and stayed for the remaining two hours.

In the flickering light of the projector, Reese watched the recruits. Kane and Takahashi were both impassive, Lena very serious-looking, and only Walker seemed openly enthusiastic. Phut was restless, bored, and seemed to fall asleep a little after nine.

When the others had left, Reese sat back in a red-plush chair, one seat away from Morgan, and closed his eyes.

“Well?” Morgan said.

“Where did you find these guys?”

“What’s wrong with them?”

“Walker and Takahashi seem okay. But Lena doesn’t know a damn thing outside her specialty, Kane is probably a borderline psychotic, and Phut thinks I’m here to do him out of his job, which in a way I guess I am.What happened to the nasa people? They can’t all be too old.”

“The best ones I need for my shuttle pilots. Don’t forget, you can’t even get to the spacecraft without a shuttle ride.And the short-range economy is going to be in Earth orbit for a while.”

“So these are the dregs, in other words.”

“As a matter of fact,Takahashi is a pretty high-ranking officer of this company, and the oldest son of the head of the Tokyo office. His loyalty is impeccable, and he’s one of my strongest and smartest people. Kane is family, and there is nothing wrong with his mind. He and Phut both showed great loyalty and courage in the war, and they’re two of the best helicopter pilots in Texas. Lena and Walker are strong, capable, bright,

and physically fit.”

“But the risks involved...”

“We’ve been over that.You said we were in an adversarial position, and this is an example. Some of the decisions you’re unhappy about may be company decisions, which is to say decisions made in a larger framework than the one you’re responsible for.Those are the kind of decisions you’re just going to have to live with.”

“Even if it jeopardizes the mission?”

“I’m sure you’ll manage,”Morgan said.“I have every confidence in you.”

On the third day, Reese took them to 15 Gs. Phut’s trachea blocked with vomit and Lena had to clear it with her finger and give him mouth-to-mouth. Morgan had been watching from the doorway, lurking, Reese thought, just like he did in the old days.

“I’m washing him out,” Reese said, and Morgan only nodded.

Phut’s dismissal broke the tension in the crew, and for the first time Reese began to think they might make it.That afternoon he let them on the Mars Mission Module in Building Five. Reese had asked Morgan to have it fixed, and Morgan had done so, quietly and invisibly, taking away the blue painted exterior stairs that the tourists had used, stripping out the plastic sheets that sealed off the Command Center, patching the cutaway sections of the hull.

Reese watched them crawling through the four hideously familiar levels, quarters at the bottom, then Wardroom, Health Maintenance, and Command, each just twelve feet in diameter, knowing how soon they would all learn to detest the sight of the light-brown walls, the gridded metal floors. Reese had spent three years of his life, nine months at a time, in various duplicates of the Mission Module, and still at least three or four times a month he had claustrophobic, slow-motion dreams of drifting between the levels.

At the end of the second week, exhausted by the fourteen-hour days, Reese gave them the evening off.They could only learn so much, he told himself, and even Takahashi was starting to show signs of stress, confusing his right and left hands while running the shuttle trainer, questioning the relevance of graviton theory in the classroom.

Reese was collapsed sideways across his bed when Kane knocked on his door.“I’m going in to town,” Kane said.“You want to come along?”

He was back behind his mirrorshades, as close to relaxed as Reese had seen him in the last two weeks, wearing a loose cotton-knit pullover and fatigue pants.

“Sure,” Reese said impulsively.“What are we doing?”

“Bringing in some stuff from the downtown office. Maybe get a bite to eat while we’re down there.”

They took the elevator to the roof, where a late-model four-seat helicopter was moored.

“You fly these?” Kane asked, and Reese shook his head.“It’s nice,” Kane said.“A real power trip. Planes just go fast.This’ll do anything you want it to.”

Kane took them up smoothly into the fading sunlight. Gray, four-lane highways squared the jsc; beyond it, Clear Lake’s muddy water picked up muted blues from the sky.As Kane heeled the copter over, Reese could finally see what happened to Clear Lake City.The residential areas were mostly burned to the ground, and the storefronts were glassless and hollow.

“I didn’t know the riots spread this far,” Reese shouted, over the thudding of the rotors.

“Used to be a rich neighborhood.That’s all it took. Somebody finally figured out that nobody gave a shit if the people who were starving just burned down their own houses.This piece of work got them a lot of attention, but no food. By that time the government didn’t have any money to give them.”

“What’s the population now?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Probably around a million five or so.”

“Jesus.”

“A lot of that’s because of people moving out to Smithville and LaGrange and getting the hell away from here.There’s farmland out there and cattle and it’s a lot easier to get by. I mean, a million people didn’t die here.A lot, but less than a million.”

Kane tilted the rotors into the wind, and the copter shot forward, making for the cluster of reflective-glassed buildings to the north and west. Underneath them flowed a procession of warehouses, factories, and swamps, all of them flanked by scraggly pines and scrub brush.

“Looks like Morgan’s the only corporation in town.”

“There are others,” Kane said.“The worst part was currency— nobody wanted dollars and we had to get changed over to an electronic transfer system before things could get rolling again. Of course, we make the computers to handle those transfers.”

The “we” surprised Reese, giving him a sudden insight into Kane’s character. Kane might be the only one of the crew, he realized, who saw Pulsystems as more than just Morgan.

“A lot of these places,” Kane went on, waving his hand,“belong to the majors now. They’ll be up and running again in a couple years.”

The industrial wasteland gave way to poorer neighborhoods, the hulks of rusting cars cluttering the streets or sitting up on blocks in front yards, icons of an obsolete god.A few trash fires smoldered weakly, spreading a faint haze through the evening and blurring the knots of people on the corners who drank from refillable beer bottles and leaned against light poles that had lost any other usefulness.

On the average, Reese knew, less than half of them had jobs and the rest collected what Pulsystems and the other major corporations euphemistically called a “pension,” paid out of a fund that all the corporations supported. During his days on the line at Pulsystems, Reese had heard one management trainee refer to it as the “riot prevention tax.”

The result was a supposedly temporary phase of cable tv addiction that would eventually give way to a new age of cottage industry and informed consumerism. Reese did not expect the new age in his lifetime, not on Earth.The entire planet seemed in decay and he wanted away from it, back into space where he belonged.

As they began to thread their way into downtown Houston through the jungle of gold- and blue- and brown-tinted glass, Reese noticed that only the smaller buildings were missing panes, that the largest were clean and intact. Kane brought the helicopter down onto a yellow-painted target on the roof of one of the nearly identical towers in the center of the city.

Reese waited while Kane called the elevator, using both a laser key and a combination typed into the elevator console.When they finally got inside they dropped to the second floor quickly enough to simulate low gravity.

Morgan’s’ office seemed cluttered and lived-in, with no sign of imposed aesthetics.The wooden desk was old and stained, while the chair behind it was a modern sculpture of chrome and steel. One set of bookshelves had been built into the wall while another was bolted together from perforated metal.

The paneled walls were hung with framed photographs, most of them the obvious shots of Morgan with assorted celebrities; a few of them, though, showed a clear mountain stream with a cabin in the background.They seemed to go with a shelf of books on fly-fishing.The other shelves held bound printouts, self-help books from Machiavelli to Dale Carnegie, biographies of astronauts, the usual dictionaries and references. Most of the books were paperbacks, with broken spines and dogeared pages, victims of hard use.

Kane dropped into the desk chair and propped his feet on the oversized blotter.“He’s got another office, all steel and glass.That’s where he cultivates the image.”

Reese noticed that the early photographs of Morgan showed him in a somber suit and short hair.“Morgan’s not even from Texas, is he?” he asked.

“That’s right. Born in Detroit.The accent comes and goes, you probably noticed that.All part of the protective coloring.”

Reese sat by the door, trying to reconcile this image of Kane with the others: the eager teenager, the detached mercenary, the makeshift astronaut.“It’s funny,” Reese said.“You look like you belong here.”

“I’m the crown prince,” Kane said, with an irony that Reese couldn’t quite believe in.“I was brought up to do just this. Sit behind this desk.”

“Instead you’re going to Mars.”

“Yeah, well.The crown prince is out of favor at the moment. I could use a few points with the Board. I could use something.” He pushed a button that brought a console up from the desk top. He punched in a complex sequence of numbers and a moment later a large portion of the wall to Reese’s left swung out into the office. “Et voila,” Kane said.

The three inside walls of the vault held three further doors. Kane stood inside the cubicle and entered another combination, opening one of the doors to a thin cloud of steam. Slipping one hand into an insulated mitten, he pulled out a small gray cylinder labeled “Cryogenic Material” in red letters. He put the cylinder into an insulated carrier that looked like an ordinary briefcase, then resealed both doors.

“This’ll keep for a couple of hours,” Kane said.“Can I buy you a beer?”

“Sure.What’s in there?”

“Christ knows. Something Morgan wants. I didn’t even bother to ask him—he would have lied to me anyway.”

They took the elevator down to the basement and followed signs saying “To The Tunnels.” They came out in a tiled, fluorescent-lit underground mall full of travel agencies and boutiques.

Reese had to hurry to keep up with Kane’s natural pace.“Is it safe to be carrying that around?”

“No,” Kane said.

Reese shook his head.“I’m sorry. I don’t get it.”

“It’s simple.This is Morgan’s. If something happens to it, I don’t really care. He should have sent one of his couriers after it if he was that worried. Not me.”

Kane seemed nearly irrational on the subject of Morgan, and Reese decided to let it go. In fact he could see too many similarities between them, from their chameleon qualities to their flat, deadly eyes.

The bar Kane took them to was aboveground, converted from a parking garage.A ramp at one end led to a crude cement patch; the low ceiling and huge floor space made Reese feel disoriented and out of proportion.An autosynth at the far end of the club played neowebern at high volume, the repetitious, atonal phrases adding to his unease. Most of the other customers were young, poor, and faddishly dressed in hiparis or full Arab drag, complete with black-rimmed sunglasses.

Kane ordered sushi and Tsing-Tao beer for both of them, talking easily about the woman who owned the bar and the details of its renovation. Reese watched the tension in Kane’s fingers as he raised his glass, the pressure of his ankle that held the briefcase against a leg of the table.

When the fish came, Reese couldn’t eat it, repelled by the oily sheen of the skin on a piece of tuna belly, the insectile curl of the shrimp. Kane speared the pieces with a recklessness that seemed exaggerated, inappropriate, but it was only when he finished eating, as Kane paid with his plastic Pulsystems id and they stepped outside, that Reese understood.

Night had transformed the city. Here in the heart of the business district there were streetlights, but they only deepened the shadows on the high, tan walls of concrete. People moved in the darkness with carnivorous stealth, and Reese could feel their attention concentrate on the two of them, on the briefcase in Kane’s hand, the potent symbol of affluence and oppression. Reese loosened his shoulders reflexively, clearing his mind and speeding his pulse rate.

Something brushed him, knocking him off balance. He saw Kane spin halfway around, saw a shadow reaching for the briefcase, speared and flung away by a lightening movement of Kane’s knee.Then the briefcase was in Reese’s hands and Kane was using both of his, throwing the broken body of a teenage boy into the wall.The boy hit face first and slowly slid to the ground.

“Kane?” Reese said. He held the briefcase with both hands, expecting another attack, waiting for the flash of gunfire. Instead a blinding spotlight swept over them and stopped, freezing them in position.

“Hands straight up and away from your bodies. Drop that case.”

Reese set the briefcase at his feet and then straightened slowly, still unable to see where the voice came from.

“id?” it said, and Kane took out the same card he’d used in the bar, making careful, broad gestures.

As Reese went for his own nasa id, Kane said,“Don’t bother.” He handed the bit of plastic to a bulky silhouette in the spotlight and said, “Kane. Pulsystems.”

The cop did something with the card, then handed it crisply back. “Very good, sir. I’ll take care of this for you.Are both of you okay?”

“Fine,” Kane said.“Thanks.”

On the elevator to the roof Reese asked,“Doesn’t it scare you?”

“What?”

“The cop. How did he know you weren’t just working over some innocent kid?”

“He didn’t. But he works for us. It’s not his job to ask us a lot of annoying questions.” Kane’s voice was flat, unemotional.

They got in the copter. Kane started the motor, then took his hands off the controls.They were shaking.

“Shit,” he said.

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Kane said.“Fine. Shit. I hate this. I asked for it, carrying something valuable around on the streets at night. Begging for trouble because my uncle pissed me off. Now that kid is dead, or worse, and it’s my fault.” He held his hands out in front of him until they were steady again.“It just pisses me off, is all. I’m fine.” He put the rotor in gear and they lifted off.

Reese saw that the entire evening had been meant as a humanizing gesture on Kane’s part, an attempt to bridge some sort of gap between Reese and himself. But the attempted mugging had soured it, and Reese could feel Kane’s disappointment.

But I can’t do it, Reese wanted to tell him. I can’t be your father, I can’t be responsible for what you are or for what you want to be.

For the next two weeks Reese pushed them harder than before. At night, before sleeping, he focused his mind on a memory of Earth from shuttle orbit, 115 miles up, the cities reduced to simple color and geometry.

Kane missed two days in the second week for an “unavoidable” medical checkup. Reese assumed it had something to do with the wound Kane had received in North Africa; his suspicions were borne out by a freshly shaved patch on the back of Kane’s skull when he returned to training.“I’m clean,” was all he would tell Reese about it.“Everything checked out okay.” For a couple of days he seemed sluggish and a bit confused, but Reese didn’t have time to worry about him.

With nine days left until the launch, Reese could feel the tension start to build in his chest, like the pressure inside a rocket engine between ignition and the time they blew the bolts that held it onto the pad. It was shakti, spiritual thrust, and he’d felt it rush out of him every time he’d gone up.

That was the night Walker came to him where he sat under the siv-b, the third stage of the SaturnV booster,now rotting in drydock by the visitor’s parking lot. He’d brought his last bottle of Gusano Rojo mescal, Red Worm brand—though the traditional worm floating near the bottom of the bottle was yellow. He remembered how the mescal could work on the brain’s color map like a psychedelic drug, until the sky and the grass and the inside of his own eyelids turned flaming crimson.

He’d been remembering his early days in nasa, the parties in sprawling, tasteless mansions along Memorial Drive, the perfumed and tinted society wives with hairline surgical scars on the undersides of their breasts, the cable interviews and charity luncheons and expensive scotch in plastic motel glasses.

“You come out here a lot?” she asked him.

“Just restless,” he said, and offered her the mescal.

“That’s awful,” she said, tasting it.“Like a bile-and-vodka cocktail.”

He literally could not remember the last time he’d been alone with a woman. Even the professionals had avoided the Hotel Casino and its deserted bar, and before that he’d just been traveling aimlessly, by bus and train, hardly speaking to anybody. He felt a sudden, familiar stab of desire and chased it with the mescal.

“Were you looking for me?” Reese asked.“Or just passing by?” The words came out more dismissively than he’d intended, but he let them stand.

“Wandering. I don’t sleep much. I’m out a lot at night.” She leaned back, her mane of dark hair catching the moonlight, tension bringing out the clean lines of the muscles in her neck.“I heard somebody over here and thought it might be you. So it seemed like a good chance to talk to you about something, something I didn’t want Morgan to overhear.”

“You don’t think we’re going to make it, is that it? I don’t blame you. I feel that way myself about half the time.”

“It’s not that. It’s something I found.” Her eyes were nervous, her mouth a thin, hard line.“Like I said, I’m out a lot at night.There’s a lot of history here, stuff Morgan keeps locked up, stuff I wanted to look at. Like the moon rocks over at the Lunar Receiving Lab, and that big padded room—”

“The anechoic chamber.Where they test the communication stuff.”

“Yeah.And Mission Control. He’s got some kind of recorder there, and it’s still running.”

“What?” Reese could still taste the bitter oiliness of the mescal, but his brain was suddenly clear.

“A tape recorder, it looks like.You want to see it?”

“Show me,” Reese said.

She led him across the courtyard to Mission Control. She looked good, wearing loose trousers and a delta top that left her sides bare instead of the baggy coveralls from training, but Reese’s heart was no longer in it. She hesitated at the corner of the north wing, and Reese walked past her, eager to get inside.

“Wait!” she whispered, and he stopped.

“What’s the—”

“Camera!” she said, and he looked up to see the eye of a video recorder sweeping toward him. He ducked back out of sight, wondering if he’d been quick enough.

“This way,”Walker said, and took him around the side to a fire exit. She pulled a folding knife from her pants pocket and slid back the tongue of the lock.“Watch your step,” she said.“It’s dark in here.”

Every fifty feet or so a single fluorescent light burned; fire regulations, Reese remembered.They took stairs to the second-floor mission operations room, and Reese switched on a single bank of lights by the door.

The outlines of the continents were just visible on the darkened mission board, navy blue against a black-on-black grid.The rows of crts were gray-faced and silent, the film of dust on the floor hardly visible.

Except, Reese noticed, where a path was worn through it, leading to the communications station at the back of the room. He hurried to the console, afraid to hope, staring at the frequency on the digital display, the band reserved for incoming broadcasts from Frontera Base, not sure if he was really seeing it or just imagining it so strongly that even his eyes were deceived.

“Do you know what it is?”Walker asked him.“What does it mean?”

“It means,” Reese said, ejecting the cassette that was locked in the mechanism, already half recorded,“it means maybe, possibly, somebody is still alive up there.” He put a fresh cassette into the receiver and fed the other one into a playback unit in the next console. He backed it up, pushed play, listened to the tape shriek and squeal.

“From some satellite?”Walker asked.

“It’s from Mars,” Reese said.“From Frontera. It has to be.They’re using some kind of high-speed dump.” Reese found the dial that controlled the tape speed and spun it down from 1-7/8 to 5/16 ips.

The scream dropped to a woman’s voice:“need to change our schedule on the reply to fit with the new shifts up here...” Reese pushed the rewind button and wound the tape all the way back. He knew the voice, the soft, breathless whisper. He shut his eyes and could see her face, lean and tanned, with hair a colorless shade between brown and blonde.“Dian,” he said. She was one of the physicists working with Molly, with engineering expertise that let her turn abstract ideas into physical reality.

“You know her?”

“Yeah. She’s one of them.They’re alive, and Morgan knew about it!” He forced down his excitement and started the tape, pulling up a rolling armchair and easing down into it.

The tape ran for nearly fifteen minutes.

There were six different transmissions, probably boring to Morgan and barely comprehensible to Walker, who paced back and forth tirelessly while it played. But to Reese they were maddening glimpses of a world he’d given up for dead years before, enigmatic references that sent his imagination spinning.And the names—names he’d thought he’d never hear again.

“Molly’s alive,” he said.“I can’t believe it.”

“Who’s she? Old girlfriend?”

“No,”Reese said.“She’s my daughter.”He looked up at her quickly.“Jesus, that slipped right out, didn’t it? It’s not something I ever told anybody before. Except Molly. Her mother was married to somebody else.”

Not just somebody else, of course, but to one of the other astronauts, compulsively unfaithful while Jenny, with her physics degree and her national recognition, her red-gold hair and freckled shoulders, had nothing left but an empty Houston apartment and a stable of quarter horses in a pine forest outside Clear Lake.

That was where Molly had been conceived, on a red plaid blanket spread over pine needles, a thick Gulf mist dripping from the branches overhead, a week before Reese’s first shuttle flight.Their hot, guilty desire had built through an afternoon of riding and gentle, brushing contact, culminating in the electric touch of her fingernails on his nipples, the smell of leather and horses still on them as he buried himself in her body, promising himself that this first time would be the last, not dreaming the promise would come true.

Jenny’s husband had transferred out of nasa, and Reese found out about Jenny’s pregnancy in a scrawled note on the bottom of their Christmas card, a note that told him the child was his.There was no return address.

It had taken him two years to find them again, another year of phone calls to persuade Jenny to let him see the child. In stolen meetings, he had watched Molly grow up, a chubby little girl with calm eyes and an amused tolerance for the affection of this large, awkward man that her mother watched on television.And through it all Jenny had been cold, distant, with no more for him than a tired smile or the gentle pressure of her arms around his back.

Molly was thirteen when Jenny and her husband died in the fire in the Gerard K. O’Neill orbiting colony. He didn’t see her again until she showed up at nasa ten years later, transformed somehow into graceful womanhood, applying for a slot on the next colony ship to Mars.

That first meeting was an uncomfortable mixture of Molly’s childhood memories and Reese’s guilty search for traces of Jenny in her daughter. But within days they found themselves locked in a sudden, genuine friendship that surprised them both.They’d flown to Mars together on that colony mission, a crowded, hectic nine months that were the happiest Reese ever spent in space.

Curtis had been part of that mission, of course, a younger, more dynamic Curtis, and Reese had watched with more than a hint of jealousy as Molly fell in love with him. Reese had been best man at their wedding, only days before he had to return to Earth.

Curtis’s name was on the tape as well. Reese rewound the cassette and started listening to it again.

“Uh, listen,”Walker said.“Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”

“This is unbelievable,” Reese said.“Something’s going on, something really big.”

The first message made guarded reference to it.“Verb is toying around with some kind of matter transporter. She’s got a couple of the other kids working on it, and Molly and I are getting pieces for her out of the machine shop. I’d think it was a joke, but she’s already accomplished so much.”

The second message didn’t add anything, but the third said that Curtis was “getting suspicious.” Dian went on to say, “The political situation up here is getting weird. Curtis is coming down on everybody, and we’re now smuggling stuff up here from the machine shop. Molly doesn’t want him to know what we’ve got going, and I think she’s right.”

Reese had never liked Curtis; he was too self-consciously good looking, too much like Jenny’s husband. He didn’t like the idea of Curtis being in a position of power at Frontera, was desperate to know what was happening there, who this Verb person was.

The next transmission had more details:“...she thinks it’s really going to work.With enough information about the terminus, she’s going to be able to deliver anyplace within ten or twenty light years. If it works, it could be a way out of here for all of us.”

But by the next broadcast, a week later, something had gone wrong. Dian sounded drunk, despondent.“The first test was a flop, and Verb doesn’t seem as interested as she was...She doesn’t care how much it means to the rest of us...Christ, I want out of here.When are you going to start keeping up your end of this? Curtis would kill me if he knew I was leaking this stuff to you. I want a ship out of here...”

The tape had run into the last message, something about shift changes and a detailed description of the power panel for the transporter, when Morgan’s voice came from the door.

“Heard enough?” he said. He flicked on the overheads, and Reese blinked in surprise.“This is certainly cozy,” Morgan went on.“Sneaking around in the dark, spying—”

“Cut the bullshit,” Reese said.“They’re alive.You’ve known all along and still you lied to me about it.”Walker moved away from Reese, her frightened eyes fixed on Morgan.

“We’ve been over this, Reese,” Morgan said.“That was a management decision.”

“Goddamn it!” Reese shouted.“Those are my friends up there! It was just bad luck I was on rotation when the recall came or I’d still be with them, right now.And I wouldn’t be putting up with your bullshit counterplots and corporate images and lies.”

“That’s enough, Reese.”

“It is fucking well not enough! I want to know what’s going on. I want to know everything you can tell me about Frontera and what’s happening up there. I want to know what this matter transporter is they were talking about.”

“Or?” Morgan said.

Reese took a breath.“Or I’m finished here.” Morgan turned his head, a quick, predatory movement like a bird’s or a lizard’s. His eyes locked on Walker and she stepped forward.“Get the tape,” he told her, and she ejected it from the deck.“Bring it,” he said, and she did. Her helplessness made Reese feel a little sick.

“Think about it,” Morgan said, one hand on the woman’s upper arm.“If you walk out,the mission goes without you.You lose your last chance to get back to Mars, and all I lose are a few percentage points on the odds of this thing working.” He turned to go, then stopped in the doorway.

“One more thing.You’re now in possession of stolen information, whether you stay or not.The gold standard is dead, and we’re on the data standard now. That means that what you’ve got is extremely valuable and if you try to pass it on to anybody, and I mean Kane or Lena or anybody, then you die.You and anybody you tell it to.”

It had started in Mexico and it changed that night, changed the moment that Reese tried to bluff his way past Morgan and lost. He’d gone back to the mescal but been unable to finish it, its brutal anesthesia too much like the dark, slick edge of a long fall into nothingness.

Walker, of course, was gone the next day. Dead, brainwashed, or transferred; Reese never knew which.The four of them, Morgan said, would be perfectly adequate to fly the ship.

For the next eight days Reese worked them with cold precision, his brain shut down during the day, at night replaying the soft, breathless voice he’d heard on the tapes.“Ten or twenty light years,” she’d said, “with enough information.”

He slept badly. Faceless shadows dodged through his dreams while he flailed at gelatinous air. In the training sessions, his concentration faltered and his reflexes turned erratic. On the last morning of instruction, he crashed the mem simulator, and as he walked away he could feel waves of doubt and hostility move through the crew.

But none of it mattered.That afternoon they took one of Morgan’s private jets to Cocoa Beach, with Kane as co-pilot and Lena in the left seat, claiming it would help her nerves. Morgan had his own cabin in the rear of the plane and stayed in it for the entire flight;Takahashi slept, or at least pretended to.That left Reese to stare out the window by himself, watching the fertile soil of Earth turn under the plane, wondering if he would ever see it again.

At five the next morning they drove from the Sands Motel to the Cape, Reese in one car with Lena and Takahashi, Kane and Morgan alone in the second. By six o’clock they had changed to blue coveralls and were walking out to the shuttle on pad 39A.

The sky over the ocean was turning gray; overhead Reese could still see Vega and Altair. His stomach had the light, quivering feeling of hunger, excitement, and too little sleep.The Cape had barely changed, had been built to stand up under the exhaust of a Saturn V, and against its solidity he felt like a pretend astronaut, an astronaut who’d just spent the night in a motel, an astronaut who was being laughed at somewhere, by somebody, as he stopped at the foot of the service and access tower for a last look.

The orange shell of the shuttle’s external tank seemed unlucky to him; the orange girders of the floodlit tower were harsh and jangling. He pushed past the others into the pad elevator, and together they rode up to the white room, where Morgan’s shuttle pilots were waiting.

Reese nodded to the pilots and they gave him a thumbs-up signal and crawled through the small, square hatch into the orbiter.A technician fitted Reese with a soft white flight helmet, the dark ovals of the inset speakers protruding like cartoon ears.Then he swung into the middle deck of the ship.

The orbiter was designed for level flight and now, sitting on end on the launch pad, everything was on its side. Reese climbed awkwardly up to the flight deck and into one of the two seats in the back of the module, just in front of the on-orbit station.Takahashi, the mission commander, would take the other one, and Lena and Kane would ride out the takeoff from the middle deck.The gray-green nylon seat covers reminded Reese of army surplus air mattresses; the four separate seat belts and buckles were clumsy and oversized beyond any necessity.

He plugged in his headphones and they filled instantly with the jabbering of Morgan’s imported technicians, flown in from Houston two weeks before, less than half of them with any real launch experience. He wanted to pull the plug out again, knew it instantly for a disturbed and dangerous impulse, yet still had to struggle to resist it.

Only the pilots had window seats.Through the front of the spacecraft Reese could see nothing but the reds and grays of the Florida dawn. He listened to the pilots move through the pre-flight check, relieved that he wasn’t having to gamble on his own nerves and reflexes.

At T minus three minutes they switched onto internal fuel tanks, and at minus two minutes they cleared the warning memory.At minus one minute 20 seconds they had flight pressure on the liquid hydrogen. Eyes closed, Reese followed them through the sequence from memory.At T minus 55 seconds the hydrogen igniters were armed and at minus 30 the hydraulics went on.Then the long count, and at minus five seconds the main engines ignited.

The ship began to vibrate, massive bolts holding it to the pad while the pressure built to full thrust, 375,000 pounds from each engine, and then the Solid Rocket Boosters cut in with five million more, and then the bolts exploded, and Reese felt the thrust press him gently down-ward.The smoke from the exhaust, billowing up from the fire pits on either side of the pad, was visible through the front windows, shimmering in the blazing heat.

The real view, Reese knew, was from the pursuit planes following them, planes that Morgan was sure to have laid on to get the maximum publicity from his expense.They would be shooting footage now of the launch pad, falling away until it became a neat gray hexagon against the greenish-brown land and the distant blue of the sea.The long teardrop of flame from the boosters would be too bright to watch with the naked eye, but Morgan’s cameras would get it all, piping it into the cable and onto tv screens around the world as soon as he decided they weren’t going to be consumed in a humiliating fireball.

“Okay, Enterprise, we’ve got nominal performance.”

Nominal being nasa-ese for letter-perfect, Reese thought. So far, so good.

“Roger. Main throttle at 104 percent.All three main engines go at throttle up.”

The sky deepened into violet and at 30 miles the exhausted srbs were blown away, spattering brown film across the windows.“Christ,” the pilot complained,“where’s the windshield wipers?”The other pilot laughed, but Reese had misplaced his sense of humor. He glanced over at Takahashi, who was staring ahead out the windows, impassive.

Eight minutes after launch, the external tank fell away, and the orbiter climbed the last few miles on the nitrogen and hydrazine in its own tanks. Night was falling across the Mediterranean below them, and bright, unwinking stars rose over the crescent Earth.

“Holy Christ,” the first pilot said. Reese stripped the thick webbing away and floated out of his seat.The orbiter still flew on its back, the Earth directly overhead as Reese drifted up between the pilots’ seats for a look.

Morgan’s presence seemed to have stayed behind on the planet, dropped away with the pull of gravity.Though he knew it was a simpleminded and even dangerous illusion, Reese felt as if his perspective was intact for the first time since he left Mexico.

Lena and Kane rose through the hatch, Lena pale and unsteady.“Oh my God,” she said, at the sight of the blue slice of planet over her head.

Kane strapped her in Reese’s seat and gave her a pill to swallow.“Stay put,” he said,“keep your eyes closed, and just concentrate on holding that down.”

Space Adaptation Syndrome, nasa’s fancy term for space sickness. Reese could already feel his own facial tissues swelling and his inner ear sending garbled signals to the brain. If Lena was the only one incapacitated, they would be ahead of the percentages. But he couldn’t do anything more for her than Kane already had, and at the moment he was more interested in the tracking signal from the Mars Mission Module, less than an hour downrange of their current position.

They spent a second long, frustrating hour as the novice pilot tried to dock with the mm. His instincts were useless; increased thrust moved them into a higher, slower orbit, and by dropping low enough to catch up they overshot, time and again. Reese finally went below decks and suited up to begin denitrogenating.

And then they were docked, and Reese was finally through the airlock and out the open bay doors, strapped to an ms09 maneuvering unit, rising into the shadow of the Mission Module.The fifth booster stage lay in the orbiter’s payload bay; when it was in place the spacecraft would be nearly two hundred feet long, a tall, thin cylinder pointed into space. He squirted nitrogen from his jets and lifted to the top of the ship.

“Reese?” Kane said.“How does it look?”

“Fine,” he said.“Listen, can you leave me alone for a minute?”

“Uh, sure.”

Reese cut the radio off and watched the planet slowly turning beneath his feet. Looking down the ship gave him an eerie sense of perspective, as if it were a tower running all the way to the surface, flexing in the wind as the planet moved.

There it is, he thought.A fragile accident of a world, the one place in the solar system, maybe in the universe, that is truly hospitable to the human race. Could you turn your back on it forever?

He touched his gloved index fingers to his thumbs, closed his eyes, and waited until he could feel the stillness all the way through his lungs and stomach and heart. Here he could feel a deeper, slower rhythm, a music inaudible on Earth.

One single world, no matter how rich or familiar, was not enough. He’d been stranded down there, rescued by circumstances he didn’t fully understand. Before he would let himself be trapped there again, he would risk anything.

Anything.

He opened his eyes and turned the radio on.“Let’s go to work,” he said.

The pilots fitted the final stage into position with the orbiter’s manipulator arm. Lena, nearly recovered from her sas, hovered outside with Takahashi and gave directions.

Meanwhile Kane and Reese opened the Mission Module to hard vacuum.Then they blasted the inside surface clean with nitrogen jets and pumped in a fresh atmosphere.The module still smelled faintly of rotting food. In time, Reese thought, the Sabatier units would clean it up, or they would just get used to it.

During the second day the abandoned Antaeus facility passed slowly overhead. Reese had spent three redundant weeks there after the first Mars landing, quarantined even though they’d been isolated for nearly ten months on the return trip. Later the station had been turned over to genetic engineers, then evacuated when the government fell.

There had been rumors, doubtlessly exaggerated, of some strange experiments in the station, and it gave Reese a momentary chill to see, through the orbiter’s telescope, a light still burning in the lab.

That afternoon Takahashi pronounced the ship’s computers functional, and the four of them said their goodbyes to Morgan’s pilots and watched the shuttle move slowly away.And then they stood in awkward silence in the Command Center of the Mission Module as the first stage ignited, building slowly to the one-G thrust that would ease them out of Earth orbit and into the long fall away from the sun.

For nearly a month Reese kept them on a tight nasa schedule of exercise, eva, and simulations. He watched with twinges of misplaced desire as Lena and Kane dabbled in zero-G sex, then settled into quiet antipathy.And when the schedules began to break down, he found himself unable to argue. He spent more time alone in his cabin or struggling with his personal demons in the midnight, hallucinatory silence of the command center, leaving Takahashi to his fanatical exercise and quiet arrogance.

For Reese, familiarity reduced the trip to a few milestones: the passage of lunar orbit, shutdown of the last engine, the midpoint of the Hohmann ellipse; nothing else seemed real or significant. He had internalized the voice on the tape, and he lost any desire to talk about it, even though he was no longer afraid of Morgan.

Only as they strapped themselves in for aerobraking did he realize that the time was coming when he would have to act, to try for the astrometry diskette on Deimos if he wanted it.There could be no second chance, no other way of giving the person named Verb “enough information about the terminus” for her to give him what he wanted.

And then he realized that his mind was already made up.

As the mem sank toward the giant, striated flanks of Arsia Mons, he was a bullet that had been fired, mindless, unable to change his course. He watched the slow-falling dust as the lander bumped to a stop, his helmet seeming to find its own way into its socket, his legs taking him down the ladder after Takahashi. One of the colonists held out an arm to support him, and he took it, watching the figure by the airlock door that held her hand to her throat in an achingly familiar gesture.

“Reese?” she said, and he nodded, let her help him inside and into a cot in sickbay.“Sleep,” she said, and he felt the needle go into his arm, the warmth of Butorphenol spreading through his jaw and the underside of his tongue, taking the gravity away again.

Kane looked into the greasy water and saw himself reflected, from his worn boots and woolen trousers to the crude leather helmet on his head.A cold wind blew off the ocean, its breath whistling past him with a faint, chilling melody. He shivered and stepped carefully around the tidal pool, the rocks painful to his feet. Through the fog a ship landed, its motion unaffected by the sea, drifting exactly to the shore and then pausing.Words were carved into the prow, and he could barely make them out: Thou man which shalt entir into thys shippe, beware that thou be in stedefaste beleve, for I am Faythe.And therefore beware how thou entirst but if thou be stedefaste, for and thou fayle therof I shall nat helpe the. Caxton’s Mallory, a distant part of his brain told him, but the words had no relevance to what he was seeing. The ship rode low in the water, low enough that a dozen steps across the rotted pier took him onto its deck. He breathed the salt, stinking air and then climbed down creaking steps into the hold. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he made out a crude bed in one corner. On it lay a silver serving tray that held a silver goblet, a half-drawn broadsword etched with runes, and a long-bladed pike. The sight of the objects filled him with terror. He woke with a scream gurgling in his throat and his hands clutching at his face for a beard that wasn’t there. Even when his conscious brain recognized the glazed walls of the Martian sickbay, his body, down to the cellular level, felt displaced, disoriented.

He had never dreamed so intensely before, felt so clearly that he had been transported through time, or into some parallel universe.

A sharp spasm of hunger brought him to a sitting position. Gravity clung to him like mud and the effort of fighting it made him dizzy, nauseated.The pain in his ribs awoke with a dull throbbing, and he touched his chest, finding a tight lattice of surgical tape.

He didn’t hurt as badly as he thought he would, but then again, when he’d felt that second rib crack he’d thought he was going to die. He sat with his feet off the edge of the cot and drank a little water. Compared with the brownish, alkaline water of the ship it tasted impossibly sweet and pure.

As long as he kept still, both his stomach and ribs were all right. Turning his head slightly, he could count twenty beds in the sickbay, all of them in use.Takahashi slept peacefully across the room; next to him Lena kicked and moaned softly. Reese was off to Kane’s left, pale but breathing.

A row of windows above Lena and Takahashi’s cots showed a twilit garden and squat, distant houses.The dazzling reddish light from overhead faded as Kane watched, giving way to the sudden Martian night and the colorless glow of fluorescents.

Almost immediately he felt a slow, distant rumbling in the walls. He gripped the sides of the cot, afraid of a tremor, and then saw a silvery line rising slowly across the open section of the dome.

“They’re just raising the mirror,” a voice said, and Kane recognized it as the one that had come over his headphones. He turned slowly and saw a very tall, intense-looking woman standing behind him. She had tangled, dark blonde hair to her shoulders and the beginnings of intriguing lines around her eyes and mouth. Her scent, compounded of strong soap and mild exertion, alerted Kane on a primitive level. He felt a surge of almost impersonal longing, an upwelling of his imbalanced hormones.

“They close both sides at night. During the day one side is always open to the sun.Are you all right?”

“Okay, I guess,” Kane said.As she moved, her breasts turned under her T-shirt in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in Earth’s gravity.

“Do you want to try and stand up?”

“Sure,” he said.“Why not?” She helped him to his feet, carefully avoiding his ribs. She was an inch or so taller than Kane, and she had to bend her knees in order to slide one of his arms around her shoulders. The pleasure of touching her was muddled for him by vertigo and a sensation that his intestines were going to spill out of his body.

“My name is Molly,” the woman said.

“Kane,” he said.

“I know.”

“The others...are they okay? How’s Reese?”

“He’s the worst off, but he’ll get over it. He’s been through this before.”

They made it twice around the room. Only once, when he stumbled,did Kane have a serious vestibular problem.The worst part was seeing the faces of the other patients, most of them in their fifties and sixties, their sunken eyes, gray skin, hollow necks ringed with bowstring muscles.

He lay back down on his cot, exhausted, his shrunken heart hammering and his ribs aching dully.“These others,” he said, with a limp gesture,“what’s wrong with them?”

Molly’s mouth stretched out into a hard line.“Cancer, most of them,” she said.“We’re what you call a high risk up here.The dome cuts out most of the hard radiation, but enough still gets through...” She trailed off, started again.“Get some rest. I’ll come back with some broth or something in a little bit.”

“Molly?”

“Yes?”

“You knew we were coming.We signaled you all the way here.There must have been broadcasts from Earth at least every couple of months for the last nine years.Why didn’t you ever answer?”

She sat on the edge of the cot, one hip a distracting pressure against his leg.“Do you really need an answer to that? We didn’t want you to come.You people, you and the Russians both, you pulled out and left us here and that was the end of it.You’ve been through your problems, apparently, or you wouldn’t be here.Well, we’ve been through our problems too, only they’re not the same.We don’t want your help, and we don’t want to belong to anybody anymore.”

“Well,” Kane said.“At least I know where we stand.”

“Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against you personally, and I don’t even care if you stay here for a week or two or whatever. But there are people here who are going to care. Curtis, for one, and he’s the governor.Then there’s about thirty people who survived the Marsgrad disaster.They wouldn’t want to see anybody waving an American flag around here.”

“Nobody’s going to wave any flags, if that matters.There isn’t even a US anymore.”

“We kind of figured that out.We got your broadcasts, saying you were a Pulsystems expedition. I’ve got nothing against corporatocracy myself, but nationalism doesn’t die out overnight.We’ve seen that here, and we don’t want it starting again.”

Kane raised his hands,palm out.“Truce,”he said.“As far as I knew,we were only coming here to sift through the ruins. Nobody’s told Morgan that there’s anybody alive up here yet.” He gave in to a yawn.“Besides, we’re not really in any condition to overthrow your way of life.”

“Granted,” she said, and stood up.“I’ll get you some soup.”

After she left, he sat propped up in bed, reluctant to let himself sleep again.What, he asked himself, could have been so frightening about the dream? As far as he could tell it was no more than a scene from Mallory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, left over from his college mythology courses. Nothing particularly sinister in that.Yet he knew it wasn’t the events, but the consciousness in the dream that had frozen him, a medieval terror of the gods and their instruments.

Takahashi woke, sat up, and took a few clumsy steps away from his bed. Kane watched him with a cold, grudging respect as he forced himself to walk, his face as immobile as during his interminable hours of exercise on the ship. Lena had opened her eyes, but lay quietly, making no effort to join him.

By the time Molly came back with a tray of food,Takahashi was already sitting at the long Formica table in the next room. Kane joined him under his own power, but both Lena and Reese needed help. Molly passed around bowls of steaming chicken broth and glasses of ice water. Kane took a long drink and then let go of the glass. He watched in embarrassment as it fell to the floor, spattering his trousers.

“Gravity,” Reese said, with a weak, gray smile.“You’ll get used to it.”

Kane realized that his instincts were no longer trustworthy, had altered in free fall to the point that he was unsuited for the simplest behavior. He lifted a spoonful of soup, the muscles of his hand and arm unconsciously accelerating it as it rose, to keep it from wobbling off into space. No, he thought. He stopped his arm, watched a drop stretch downward from the spoon and fall gently into his lap.

The stock was rich with globules of yellow fat, and Kane’s hunger won out over his feelings of clumsiness and shame. He bent over the bowl and slurped it up, amazed how the reduced swelling in his face was allowing him to taste things for the first time in months.

When he looked up again someone else had come into the room.

“Don’t stand up,” the man said, walking quickly to the table.

Kane stared at him, a slow, psychic tremor moving through his brain.

“I’m Curtis, and I’m the governor here. Reese, of course, I already know,but I look forward to meeting the rest of you.Welcome to Frontera.”

Kane, paralyzed, heard something that was not quite a voice speak to him. It spoke inside his head, with the voice of authority. It said,“This man is your enemy.”

The paralysis broke, and Kane let out a trembling sigh. He continued to stare at Curtis, as if fixing his image on a photographic plate in his memory: bald, shining head, short-sleeved dress shirt with threadbare collar and seams, forearms matted with black hair, the lower half of his face darkened by a half-day’s growth of stubble.

Anybody, Kane thought, who shaves his head and doesn’t think it’s weird is kidding himself.

“I see you’ve all met my wife, Molly,” Curtis said.“I hope she’s taken care of your immediate needs.” Kane did not miss the brief glance of resentment that Molly turned on her husband.

“Now,” Curtis said.“I know you’re all tired, but I’m sure you can see our position.We haven’t had any coherent information from Earth in eight years.We don’t know what’s going on there, or what you people’s intentions are.” He knitted his hands together in front of him and waited, but none of them showed any inclination to answer. Kane looked down the table and saw his own hostility reflected in Reese’s eyes.

Curtis was sitting next to Lena, and Kane watched his right hand move within a fraction of an inch of hers.“We monitored some of your broadcasts as you came in. Kane and Reese we knew about, but I don’t know your name.”

“Lena,” she said.

Incredibly, to Kane, Curtis seemed to be taking up some sort of flirtation with Lena, within moments of having clearly branded Molly as his possession. Even more incredible was Lena’s obvious interest. She must have gone off suppressants too.

“How about it?” he said to her.“What’s the story?”

“Things on Earth,” she said, a little awkwardly.“I guess they’re okay. The big governments collapsed, and the corporations just sort of took up the slack...”

“At the same time? Russia and America both?”

“No,” she said,“not quite. Russia was worse off, with crop failures and revolts in the provinces.They must have gone down first, but nobody knew about it. Everybody was so used to not hearing about them, we just didn’t know. I guess the first time we really knew they were gone was during the North Africa thing.They would have sent troops, but obviously they didn’t have any to send.”

“North Africa thing?” Curtis said.

“Ask Kane about it,” Lena said.“He was there.”

“Kane?”

Kane shrugged.“Supposedly this un group at Biotek Afrika—that was a big lab in Luxor—had made some kind of breakthrough in implant wetware. Biological circuitry, that kind of thing, tied right into the nervous system.The Red Chinese were almost as bad off as the Russians, all their ‘modernizations’ didn’t have enough public money behind them. So they made one last grab for world power and tried to take over the lab.”

“And the US sent troops?”

“The US didn’t have any troops,” Kane said.“The corporations sent their own armies.That was when everybody figured out that the governments were gone.There was a lot of rioting and all that, and finally the big companies just stepped in. Started policing the cities, paying welfare, reopening the hospitals and all.”

“What happened in Africa?”

“Nothing happened,” Kane said.“Everybody came home.”

He didn’t want to talk about what had really happened, what it had really been like. It was still too soon, would always be too soon...

Kane had thirty men and women under his command, part of a total Pulsystems force of nearly five thousand, veterans of mercenary fire-fights from Taiwan to Ecuador, from the rescue of company personnel to the quelling of riots on company property. But this time it was different, this time they were moving into a combat theater already occupied by armed forces of the largest corporations on Earth.And none of them was really sure what they were doing there.

The decisions were all being made at computer consoles in air-conditioned offices halfway around the world, while Kane and five thousand others waited in tenuous pharmaceutical calm near the drowned city of Wadi Halfa, exposed again now since the Chinese sabotage of the Aswan High Dam.Their Mylar tents glittered between the melted mud bricks of the city like globs of mercury in a shattered sand castle.The air stank of rotting catfish and every day the enemy changed, from Hitachi on Friday to a Russian steel combine on Sunday, and still the only shots they had fired had been at cancerous Nile crocodiles where they lay stupefied in the sun.

When the order came to move it took them all the way to Luxor, five thousand of them moving downstream in anything they could commandeer, from inflatable Zodiacs to crumbling feluccas, even a World War II landing craft that had been working as a ferry between the East and West Banks.

Just before dawn Kane spotted the helicopters moving in from the west. He remembered wondering who they belonged to just before they opened fire, catching a glimpse in the sudden, harsh light of an exploding gasoline tank of the pemex logo, the Mexican oil cartel, wondering if they even knew who they were attacking, wondering if the raid had been launched by operator error five thousand miles away.

Less than seven hundred of them survived, washed up at the Temple of Amen-Mut-Khonsu just outside Luxor. Kane, in agony from a laser burn across his left thigh, clutching his M37 so tightly he thought the plastic stock might shatter in his hand, lay and stared at the high-water lines on the columns of the temple, at the stylized beard of Ramses II, shattered by a high-caliber bullet, at the compelling and unintelligible hieroglyphics stained muddy red by the rising sun.

Beyond the temple lay the fragrant, smoking ruins of the village where Biotek Afrika’s cooks and day laborers had lived, their cauterized bodies now scattered over a square mile of dmz. Beyond that lay the walls of the Biotek compound, breached by mortar fire and melted by beam weapons, manned by frightened Europeans in lab coats or street clothes, their M16s and Ingrams chattering harmlessly into the dirt.

Kane waited for orders to come through the receiver clamped to the mastoid bone behind his ear, the sunlight burning into his leg, the tension building in him, desperate with the need to turn his fear and pain and confusion into the clean lines of laser fire and the purifying glow of thermite.

The sound of helicopters came to him there, freezing his blood. He could see the sickly green of their fuselages and knew they were the same pemex machines, knew that this time there was no escape, not inside this giant, roofless pachinko machine of ancient sandstone. He set his back against the swollen base of a column and raised his gun.

What had happened to their communications? What sense was he to make of his own death when it came to him like this, anonymously out of the sky? He waited for a shot but the chance never came.

Instead the copters veered wide around the Temple and began to rake the Biotek complex with withering fire. Kane rolled onto his elbows, blinking. He hadn’t been mistaken, he could see the pemex logo as the pilots swooped low over the burning buildings.A new deal, then, another turn of the wheel.

In seconds the way was open. Kane’s last memory was of standing sentry duty inside a white tiled lab while one of Morgan’s techs dumped the Biotek computers in a continuous high-speed transmission, aimed at a relay satellite that would bounce it on to Houston, while the air around him steamed with co2 from the chunks of dry ice that littered the floor, thrown out as the fragile living circuits were looted from the cryogenic vaults and stuffed into anything that would hold the cold.

He never saw the explosion that split his skull, remembered only a flash of light and nausea that existed outside of time, a memory still in reach as he sat there in the Martian sickbay, staring at Curtis.

“I don’t understand,” Curtis said.“If nothing happened there, why was it so important?”

“It wasn’t what happened in North Africa that was important,” Takahashi said.“It was what happened afterward. In point of fact, a lot did come out of it—Pulsystems moved into a whole new field of technology, but that’s not the main thing.The main thing is that North Africa showed the world where the real power lay.”

“I didn’t get your name,” Curtis said.

“Takahashi.Vice president at Pulsystems. I’m in charge of this mission.”

“Not Reese?”

“No,” Reese said.“I’m just here for the ride. It’s Morgan’s mission, and Takahashi is Morgan’s man.”

“Then I guess I should be talking to you,” Curtis said.“You’re obviously the one to tell me what this is all about.”

Takahashi shrugged.“It’s like Lena said.Things have stabilized with about fifty percent employment and a guaranteed income.The standard of living certainly isn’t what it was fifteen or twenty years ago, but it’s on the way up again.The worst is over, and a company the size of Pulsystems has to look for new opportunities for growth.The nasa hardware was on hand and it was the decision of the Chairman that we would take the first steps toward reopening space.”

“More than that,” Lena said.“We had to see what had happened to you, to rescue any survivors—”

“You’ve come to save us,” Curtis said.

“Sure,” Reese said.“Why not? Don’t you need saving?”

“As a matter of fact, no. But I would have thought a rescue mission would have at least two or three ships to bring back the rescuees.You didn’t even bring any supplies or special medical equipment.”

“We didn’t know you were alive!” Lena said.

Kane put his spoon on the table.“You’ve already been through the ship, then.”

Curtis ignored both of them.“In fact, you didn’t even have enough propellant to slow yourselves down.We tracked you all the way through that aerobraking stunt. My guess is you didn’t have enough stages for the ship.Which tells me that your man Morgan isn’t building any new hardware, just using up the leftovers. Now tell me, does that sound like an ongoing space program to you?”

The worst part of this, Kane thought, is that he’s right. Just what the hell are we doing here?

“As far as Chairman Morgan is concerned,”Takahashi said,“he undertook the entire expense of this mission himself. If it’s successful, he should be able to get funding from some of the other majors.When that happens, there will be time for fabricating new hardware.”

“And what,” asked Curtis,“constitutes a successful mission?”

“We found a surviving colony up here,” Reese said.“I’d call that a pretty big success in itself.Wouldn’t you?”

Curtis stood up.“I’m sure you all need some rest.” He looked at Lena. “We’ll talk more later. If there’s anything you need, just let me know.” Kane wasn’t sure if the offer was for Lena alone or extended to all of them.“Molly?” Curtis said.“Are you coming?”

“I’ll be along,” she said, and Curtis left.

She stood behind Reese and put one hand on his shoulder.“I’m sorry. He’s gotten worse, hasn’t he?”

“I never knew him all that well,” Reese said,“but yeah, he seems to be losing whatever he had. Is he okay?”

“I don’t know. He’s changed. I don’t think he ever meant to put himself in a position of power. But once he got there—it’s like he can’t do without it now.”

“Of course he’s got a point,” Lena said.“This whole thing is suspicious. I mean, if Morgan somehow knew they were alive, it would explain why he was so desperate to get here.But why us?What does he expect us to do without ships to evacuate them or supplies or anything else?”

“Ask Morgan,” Reese said.“I don’t know.” He took Molly’s hand and held on to it.

Kane wondered if the warmth between Reese and Molly was the remnant of something sexual. It seemed unlikely; she would have been barely twenty the last time Reese saw her, less than half his age. Kane found himself resenting the intimacy, partially from sexual attraction to Molly, partially because of the distance he still felt between himself and Reese.And then there was the overwhelming sense of alienation that Curtis had given him. He not only didn’t belong here, but his connection with Morgan made him an object of suspicion and anger.

“You’d better get some rest,” Molly said to Reese, squeezing his hand and letting it go.Then she turned and smiled at Kane.“Take care,” she said. Kane nodded and watched her walk away.

“We have to get back to the ship,”Kane said.“We need to tell Morgan what’s happening.”

Reese shrugged.

“I’ll go,”Takahashi said.“I’m in the best shape for it, and it’s my job.” Kane didn’t argue with him, and neither did Lena or Reese.“The question is, what are we going to tell him?”

“Tell him they don’t want us,” Kane said.“Tell him we might as well pull out.”

“We don’t know that,” Reese said.“The only one we’ve really heard from is Curtis. He doesn’t speak for the whole colony, regardless of what he thinks.” He stood up, steadied himself for a moment on the edge of the table, then walked cautiously back to his cot.

“Lena?” Kane asked.

“I don’t know.All I know is I don’t want to go back on that ship again. Right now it feels like I never want to go, and I expect I’m going to feel that way for a while.”

“I’ll tell him we’re okay,”Takahashi said.“I’ll say the colony’s functional, I’ll say we’ll get back to him. If he wants any more than that, I’ll tell him he’ll have to wait.”

“Sounds good to me,” Kane said. He finished Reese’s soup and drank most of his water. Nine months of zero-G had cost him a tenth of his blood plasma, and it had left him enormously thirsty.

On his way back to the cot he dialed the lights down to a pale glow. He was exhausted; whether he wanted to or not, he was going to have to sleep again. He closed his eyes, felt the soft texture of the darkness.

He couldn’t remember having dreamed, wasn’t sure if he’d actually been asleep or not.The hand shook him gently by the arm again and the voice whispered,“Kane?”

“Mmmm?”

“Quiet, now. Don’t wake the others.”

He blinked, focused on a tall, tanned woman with dust-colored hair. “Who are you?”

“Dian,” she said, staring at him intently, as if the name should mean something to him.“You are Kane, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, we need to get on with this thing. I’m starting to get really paranoid.”

“Paranoid?”

“Curtis is suspicious.We’ve got to move soon.And I for one want to get the hell out of here.”

Kane was fully awake now.“Maybe there’s some kind of misunderstanding here.Am I supposed to know you?”

The woman rocked back on her heels. Her eyebrows were so light that Kane had trouble reading her expression.“Okay,” she said, tilting her head and raising one hand apologetically.“If that’s the way you want to play it. It’s your show. But for God’s sake don’t wait around too long, okay? Before this whole thing falls apart on us.” She stood up smoothly, blending in with the shadows, and Kane was left with nothing but a faint afterimage on his retinas.

He got shakily to his feet and moved to the pile of belongings that they’d brought from the ship. His bag was in the middle, and as he lifted it he could feel the weight of the pistol inside. He carried it back to the cot and spread it open on the floor beneath his feet.

He was not hallucinating. Something was going on that no one had told him about; the gun, and Morgan’s subliminals, and the woman named Dian were part of it. He took the pistol out, repelled by its dark gleam and oily scent, wrapped it in a dirty T-shirt, and stuffed it under the mattress of his cot. Curtis had searched the ship; apparently they hadn’t gone through the bags yet but it would only be a matter of time before they did.

Kane lay back, conscious of the bulk of the gun against his left hip. The princess, he thought bitterly, and the pea.

Dian obviously had at least some of the story. In the morning he would get what he could from her. For the moment he was too tired even to put his duffel away. He closed his eyes, drifted.

A cool breeze swept down out of the pines. He stood for a moment on the narrow path and savored the paradox of the sun’s warmth and the air’s chill.The Shinto temple stood only a few yards away, its long, low walls no more than a palisade of bamboo, the thatch of its roof brown and in need of replacement.

The name of the temple was Atsuta. He was here on the instructions of his dying father, stopping on his way east before confronting the Ainu aborigines who were said to be as fierce as the bears they raised from cubs and then strangled, smearing themselves with the blood, even drinking it.The impurity of it nauseated him.

With manicured, tattooed hands, he removed his sandals and entered the temple.The air inside, musty and chill, made him draw his robe closed over the tattooed serpent that wound its way around his chest. He could feel the spirits of the kami moving through the ancient, gnarled trees around the temple, whispering to him in an indecipherable language.

He squatted in front of the shrine itself, a wooden box the size of a child’s coffin, its shelves containing the heads of snakes, bottles of pink and scarlet dyes, and a crude painting of a waterfall.The shrine was dedicated to Susa-no-wo, god of the plains of the seas, born from the snot of Izanagi, the last of the first gods. He began to pray, as his father had instructed him.

The screeching of a hawk shattered his concentration. He looked, saw the hawk flying straight at him through the open door of the temple, wings back, talons extended.At the last possible moment, the bird veered up and burst through the rotten thatch of the roof, releasing a cascade of ill-smelling straw.

A single shaft of light fell into the shrine.

He put out one hand and touched the dried yellow monkey skull that lay in the circle of light. He felt a latch click.The shrine trembled for an instant, and then a side panel fell away, and a long, narrow object fell into his lap.

A sword.

He saw the eight-headed snake, as big around as a grown man, its fangs dripping venom, saw Susa-no-wo slashing the monster to pieces, saw him taking the sword, Kusa-nagi, from the tail of the snake.

He saw again the hold of the ship, the tray, the goblet, the pike.

He screamed.

By the time Molly got to the sickbay, they had Kane sedated and strapped to a gurney.The room stank of fatigue and worn tempers. Reese sat on the edge of his cot, head down, arms on his thighs; Lena and Takahashi were at the table, not looking at each other.

“What happened?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” Reese said. He looked bad, she thought, necrotic, hypoxic. He needed sleep, not another crisis. But then the same was true of them all.“He woke up screaming and couldn’t seem to stop.”

She picked up a used hypo from the table.“Valium?”

“I gave it to him,” Lena said defensively.“It’s out of my medical kit.”

Molly nodded and stood next to Kane. Even with his eyes closed, he had an intense, haunted look that attracted her.After ten years of the same faces, she thought, it’s such a pleasure to see a new one.

She raised one eyelid.The pupil was dilated from the drug, but otherwise seemed to be responding normally to the light.

“Did he say anything?” she asked.“Anything articulate?”

“He said ‘no’ a lot,” Lena offered.“And something like ‘leave me alone’ or ‘get away’ or something like that.”

Takahashi helped her roll Kane into the next room and shift him over to the holo scanner platform. She sensed that he was indifferent to Kane’s condition and was only demonstrating how well he’d recovered from the flight.

She noticed Lena watching her as she connected the intake and outtake lines of the blood processor to an artery and vein on the inside of Kane’s thigh. Like a musician, Molly thought, watching somebody else on stage.“You want to start that for me?” she asked, nodding to the processor terminal.

“Sure,” Lena said.

Molly brought up the scanner and typed in a series of commands.

“He’s anemic,” Lena said, watching the readings scroll up on the crt.“The volume is low. Leucocytes up a little because of the ribs.As expected. But there’s nothing else wrong here. No alkaloids, no other apparent hallucinogens.”

Molly watched a diagram of Kane’s body form on the scanner’s crt, white lines on black background.The image of the body began to rotate on the long axis, the major organs appearing in green as the scanner worked in, the cracked ribs surrounded by the bright blue of damaged tissue.

“What’s that?” Reese asked from behind.

“Where?”

“There.At the back of the skull.That yellow patch.”

Molly called up an enlargement of the head and froze the posterior view.A small, flat rectangle of yellow was attached to the back of the right temporal lobe.“Jesus Christ,” Molly said.

Lena came over to look.“What is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“A tumor?” Reese suggested.

Molly shook her head.“Cancer cells are undifferentiated.This system shows them in red.”

“What else could it be?” he asked.

“Um,” Lena said.“You want a guess?”

“Go,” Molly said.“We’re listening.”

“What Kane said tonight about North Africa. He said nothing happened, that they all just came back. I don’t think that’s the way it was.”

“What do you mean?” Molly said.

Lena looked over at Takahashi. He was staring back at her coldly, impassively.“I heard rumors.They said before Biotek Afrika burned, Morgan’s people got what they were after. Implant wetware. Biological

circuitry. Supposedly Pulsystems now has working organic roms.”

“roms?” Molly said.“You mean there’s programming in that thing?”

“I told you it was just a guess. But look where it is. Kane’s right-handed, so that’s the mirror image of Wernicke’s area in his left brain, his prime language center.The two lobes are connected, here, through the anterior commissures. So programming inserted where that thing is, in a basically unused part of the brain, would go straight over to the language center.”

“And then?” Reese asked.

“Well...stimulating that area of the right brain is supposed to cause hallucinations.Voices. People hear their dead parents talking to them.”

“Morgan,” Reese said.

“You—” Lena broke off, then started again.“Wait a minute.You think Morgan did this to him? To his own nephew?”

“We went into Houston one afternoon.We brought back some kind of cylinder containing cryogenic material. Right after that he was gone for two days.That’s when they must have put it in him. Christ. He nearly killed a guy to keep it from being stolen. Do you believe that?”

“You can treat it,” Lena said.“Stelazine or Thorazine or any of the anti-psychotics. It’s clinically similar to schizophrenia.”

“What I want to know,” Molly said,“is what it’s doing to him.What’s it telling him? What’s it trying to make him do?” She glanced to her left, saw Takahashi leaning against one wall, his eyes narrowed as he watched the crt display.

He knows, she thought.Takahashi had said he was a vice president, and she suspected he was more than that. Pulsystems had always had major Japanese funding, and she had a suspicion that it had been a large infusion of New Yen that had held the company together through the collapse of the US government.Was Takahashi the watchdog for the Japanese faction? Just how important was he?

Reese must have been thinking the same thing.“Okay,Takahashi. It’s too late to make any difference to anybody.What did Morgan do to him?”

“Why are you asking me?” Takahashi said.

“He wouldn’t risk sending Kane up here with an implant unless one of us knew about it. It’s not me and it’s not Lena.You might as well tell us.”

Takahashi sighed.“All right.It’s pretty much the way Lena guessed it. But it was necessary. Morgan tried the new techniques on Kane to save his life. His skull was fractured in Luxor, not just cracked, but sliced wide open.Without the operation he would have been dead,at best a vegetable.”

“What is that...thing?” Molly asked.“That yellow box?”

“That’s the processor,”Takahashi said.“The programs are interchangeable.The first software they came up with was crude, barely let him function.When they get a more sophisticated implant, they can change it out, almost like changing a diskette.That’s what you saw Kane bringing from Houston. Just the latest update.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Lena said.“What do they need to put software in there for? That area has nothing to do with his motor control, or his language, or his memory, or anything.”

“You’re asking the wrong person,”Takahashi said.“If you want to know that you’d better ask Morgan.”

“Speaking of which,” Reese said.“Did you get through to him?”

“I told him about the colony. He said to rest up and just play it as it comes.”

“That’s it?” Lena asked.“Wasn’t he even surprised?”

“Didn’t seem to be.”

“ ‘Play it as it comes?’” Reese said.“That doesn’t sound like Morgan.”

“Now what?”Takahashi said, flushing.“Do you think I’m lying about it?”

“Why not?” Lena said.“You didn’t say anything about Kane all this time.That doesn’t really inspire a lot of trust.”

“If you’d known Kane had a brain implant there would have been even more tension on the flight out than there already was.Weren’t things bad enough?”

Lena walked out and Molly turned back to the scanner. She cut the power to both it and the blood processor and waited for the tubes to turn white before she pulled them from Kane’s leg.A single drop of dark red swelled up at the arterial puncture and she pressed a piece of gauze against it, feeling the tension in his sartoris muscle as his body resisted the Valium, aware of the heat of his half-erect penis, only a few centimeters away.

“Takahashi?” she said, and he helped her move Kane back onto the gurney and from there back onto his cot. Most of the other patients in the sickbay had fallen back into sedated oblivion, but two of them were still awake, awake and staring with confusion and fear at the aliens from Earth.

“Go to sleep,” she said to them, and the eyes closed. She turned back to Lena and said,“I’ll get you some Stelazine. In case he wakes up again.”

Reese followed her back to the pharmaceutical closet and blocked the doorway. In his black clothes he looked like an overgrown teenage thug, threatening but anachronistic, out of place.

“We need to talk,” he said.

“I know.”

“What about Sarah? Is she...?”

“Still alive?Yeah,she’s alive.”Molly took a vial of Stelazine off the shelf and turned around.“It’s strange,Reese.It’s stranger than you can imagine.”

“It’s not my fault,” Reese said.“I was coming back.You know I was. It just took me this long to get here.That’s all.”

“I know,” she said.“It’s not like there’s anything you could have done.” Her throat ached with an inappropriate desire to cry.“I didn’t mean it to sound like I was blaming you for anything.”

“I want to see her.”

“I know you do.” She’d expected this to happen, still had no easy answer for him.“I’m just not sure if it’s a good idea, that’s all. It’s like there’s nothing in her universe but physics. She won’t even let us call her Sarah anymore, did you know that? Of course you didn’t, how could...but...I mean, it’s all of them.All the...different ones, it’s like a badge or something. If you’ve got an extra finger or there’s a hole in your liver then you get to have a new name and then you’re in the club, and you get to live—” She broke off before she gave too much away.

“Easy,” Reese said, putting a hand behind her neck and squeezing gently.The familiar gesture, taking her back to her childhood, made her feel instantly calm.

“I’m okay,” she said.“Really. I need to talk to you, too.There’s just been so much...” She was suddenly aware of the open door, of the others waiting outside it.“Tomorrow,” she said.“When you’re rested.We’ll talk some more.”

“And Sarah?”

“I’ll see. I’ll talk to her.”

She pushed past him, handed the Stelazine to Lena, locked the closet and put the key away.“Tomorrow,” she said to Reese again, and then she walked back out into the fluorescent night of the dome.A sudden, powerful urge to see the stars sent her past the animal pens and into an observation bubble in the side wall. Here, in the shadows, she could see the lifeless plains outside and the deeper, colder darkness above them. This was normal.This was the way things were. How could she put that into words that Reese would understand? Because until he understood that much, he had no hope of understanding Verb, or Zeet, or Pen-ofmy-Uncle, or any of the others. Having been the first man to set foot here wasn’t enough, the few months he’d spent in the dome weren’t enough, not even sympathy and love and gallows humor were enough.

The lights were off in their surreal, high-tensile styrofoam cottage. She undressed and got into bed, hoping that Curtis was already asleep. He let her get settled and comfortable and then he said,“Well?”

She jumped a little, in spite of herself.“We sedated him,” she said.

“That’s all? I mean, you were gone a long time to just administer a sedative.”

“For God’s sake, Curtis, I’m fully grown. I don’t have to account to you for everything I do.”

“I guess that depends on what you were doing. I mean, if you found out something that was important to the future of the colony, that would be my business, wouldn’t it?”

“You were listening, weren’t you?”

“Not me personally. But I suppose it comes down to the same thing.”

“So what do you want? A tribunal? Shoot me at dawn?”

He came up on one elbow and dug his fingers into her arm.“Do you have the slightest fucking idea of what’s going on around here or not? Are you actually pretending you don’t know why those people are here?”

“I know what they told me. But I suppose that’s not germane.”

He let her go and rolled onto his back.“There’s a leak, Molly.We have to assume they know everything. Everything.And you know what pisses me off ? What pisses me off is that I don’t think I know everything. I don’t even think I know as much as Morgan’s stooges about what those kids of yours and Dian’s are up to. Now isn’t that a kick in the ass?”

“Theoretical physics,” Molly said.“I could write some of the equations out for you.Would that make you feel better? Because you wouldn’t get anything out of them.”

“Quantum mechanics was a physical theory and it wiped out Hiroshima and Nagasaki.What are they doing out there? What are they building?”When she didn’t answer he sighed dramatically.“You really see me as some petty little Hitler, don’t you? Power crazy.You can’t even trust me with the discoveries those kids are making right under my nose.”

Yes, she thought, that’s true.That just about sums it up. But she didn’t let the words out, afraid they might take on a life of their own, that they might betray her too, just as Curtis had.

“You’re wrong,” he said.“You’re more wrong than you know. I still love you.Did you know that?You’ve made it where it’s almost impossible to get those words out without choking on them.But they’re true.And I care about this colony.The lives of everyone here are my responsibility.”

Was it possible? she wondered. Could it be that he did still love her, that this was all her fault somehow?

Then she remembered Curtis in the sickbay, his hand just millimeters from Lena’s, the sick knowledge that the new woman had aroused his curiosity, that he would pursue her and have her if he could, the way he’d pursued and had the others.

Not for the first time she wondered what the word love meant to him, if it had a one-to-one semantic correspondence to a repeatable phenomenon, mental or physical, or if the word itself was everything, a self-defining verbal gesture. In physics, she thought, the first test is falsifiability. If you can’t prove it wrong, you can’t prove it right, either.

If he could write out the math for her, she thought, then she’d know.

“I believe,” she said slowly,“that you mean what you’re saying. But it’s going to take more than words to convince me.”

“You don’t understand me at all, do you? You’ve got all your feelings so pushed back and under control that you think everybody else is the same way.Well, we’re not.What do you think it’s like for me? Eight years ago we pulled ourselves back from the edge of something that would have killed us all, and the only way we did it was by believing we could be more than some dying ghost town on the edge of space.The next two years were the best years of my life, and yours too, if you had the heart to admit it. Everybody’s.We were all working hard, and we could see the results right in front of us, hold them in our hands.To see those first crops coming in, the kid being born...”

“Yeah, okay. I was there.”

“Yeah.Well, I was there too. Do you think I haven’t noticed how different it is now? Alcohol consumption up about 50 percent every year, every year more Thorazine cases out in the fields, people late to work, people not coming to work at all, almost half the female kids showing some symptoms of anorexia—”

“Right,” Molly said, wanting to hurt him,“and then there’s the people that spend all their time in the isolation tanks, tripping out, running away from the things that scare them.”

“Okay,” Curtis said,“I’m not going to argue that right now. Maybe all this is just inevitable. Maybe it’s the human condition. But that doesn’t make it hurt me any less, make me feel any less responsible for it.”

“Look,” Molly said,“we may be close to something, okay? But we don’t have it yet. It’s going to take a few more months.”

“We haven’t got a few more months.They’re here, it’s happening now.”

“We can handle them,” Molly said.“It’s going to work out.” Come on, she told herself. Can’t you be any more convincing than that? Even if you don’t believe it yourself ?

“It had better,” Curtis said. He turned away from her and was asleep in seconds.

She wished she could escape into sleep that easily, the way she had all through adolescence. But more and more she was turning into her mother, who had roamed the house late at night and then been up again before dawn, always, in Molly’s memory, dressed in a faded blue cotton kimono and clumsy house shoes. Heredity, Molly thought. It’s not even the anger and frustration keeping me up, it’s simple heredity.

She slept fitfully until dawn and then came finally, violently awake as the east mirror rumbled open. Her heart pounded, the noise of the hydraulics sounding this morning like the crack of literal doom, like the shattering of the plastic sky overhead, the end of the world.

She hunched fetally under the sheet, her back to Curtis, telling herself it wasn’t really that bad. But her arguments lacked force.The order of her existence was collapsing—Kane hallucinating and under Morgan’s control, Reese evasive and cold, Curtis convinced of betrayal.

Not to mention the second ship from Earth, a further, unknown disaster, still waiting in the wings.

It’s bad, she thought. Genuinely bad.

She put on a tattered nasa Constant Wear Garment and went into the kitchen,shutting Curtis behind the bedroom door.The light over the counter was on,silhouettingVerb and one of her friends as they ate breakfast.

Empathy again? Molly wondered. Or one of those synchronistic events that her physics is supposed to predict?

“Good morning,” Molly said.The boy was about eleven, apparently normal, just sociopathic enough to prefer living in the cave with the more visibly strange. He was obsessed with electronics, and Molly and Dian used him in the construction of Verb’s devices. E17, she remembered, was what he was calling himself this week.

“Is he all right?”Verb asked.

“Reese, you mean?” Molly said, and the girl nodded.“He’s okay.They used aerobraking instead of rockets, and it was hard on him, but he’ll get over it.”

“I want to see him.”

“He wants to see you, too,” Molly said.Was something up? The boy stared down into a bowl of cereal and goat’s milk, pretending to ignore them. She had Verb’s promise not to talk about her work, and she had to trust her.There simply wasn’t anything else she could do.“Why is it so important to you? You weren’t but two years old when he left. I don’t see how you can even remember him.”

She had wanted to tell Verb that she was related to Reese, but Curtis had opposed it.There was enough gossip, he said, without dragging his own family through it. Molly hadn’t understood why it was so important to him, but she’d given in. She’d spent so much of her life keeping the secret that it had become second nature to her anyway.

“But I do remember him,”Verb was saying.“I remember stuff you wouldn’t even believe. Sometimes I even think I remember being born, just the colors. Is that too weird? But that’s not the important thing. It’s the connections.The connections, don’t you see? That’s what the physics is all about.”

Molly mixed a cup of instant coffee from the hot water dispenser. “And physics,” she said,“is everything. Right?”

When she turned around the boy was staring at her, spoon poised halfway to his mouth.“Well?”Verb said.“Isn’t it?”

They were scaring her, but only, she told herself, because she was letting them.The coffee seemed raw and bloody, as if she could taste her own nerve endings in it.“Forget it,” she said, pouring the coffee down the recycler.“Forget I said anything. Let’s get out of here.”

In the fields outside, the first of the farm teams was already at work, six women, four men, two older children.Two of the women and one of the men were chemical lobotomies, apt to forget what they were doing and stand staring into the dazzling reflections in the mirror over-head.All of them wore goggles as well as the usual oxygen masks to cut the sting of the ammonia fertilizer they sprayed.

They were being recorded by a video camera on a light pole overhead, one of thirty or more that Curtis had salvaged from various early probes or converted from the home units of his subordinates.They fed a control room in the Center, the heart of Curtis’s “electronic democracy.”

As they passed the farmers, one of their children looked up and muttered,“Hey, freak.”

“Hush!” one of the women scolded, but there were no apologies, no other reprimands, and Molly let it pass.Verb went on talking about some new mathematical model as if she’d never heard.

It was all so fragile, the human chemistry as well as the inorganic.The ammonia, for example, came from Haber-Bosch catalysis of nitrogen and hydrogen that had been compressed, condensed, and filtered out of the Martian atmosphere.The same process gave them their oxygen and the nitrogen/argon buffer they breathed with it, and squeezed almost a pound of water out of 30 cubic meters of Martian air. Each piece fit snugly into place, endlessly recycled, without waste or inefficiency.

Their society had worked that way too, at least for a while.The first hard years had provided the heat to fuse them all together, Russians, Americans, Japanese, in a proton-proton reaction that kept them all alive. It was only now that the energy of that fusion was burning out, leaving collapsing factions behind that could flare into violence at any moment.

Through it all Curtis had kept his iron control, obsessed with his vision of a terraformed Mars, even after it became obvious that they didn’t have the resources to do it on their own.They needed help from Earth, the ships, the material to make huge solar mirrors, the mass drivers to bring them ice and asteroids.

Curtis had been right the night before, of course. He didn’t know what Verb’s physics was capable of, or he would have moved in and taken it for himself long before.

Because the new physics meant energy virtually without a price tag, energy for the taking, enough to make Curtis’s dreams into reality and solidify his vision of Mars forever.And no matter how much she wanted to see Mars bloom, she couldn’t let Curtis twist that garden into his own rigid image.

She stopped outside the Center.“Stay here,” she said to the children. “If he’s up to it, I’ll send him out in a little bit.”

All four of the astronauts were sleeping, and for an instant, barely long enough for the thought to register at all, it occurred to her how easy it would be to get rid of them now, to inject air bubbles into their veins or move them into the surgery and quietly gas them.

Then Kane turned over, making a soft noise in his sleep, and she was back to normal.

She knelt beside Reese’s cot, touching his forehead and testing the pulse in his carotid artery. He woke under her hand and said,“Hello,” his voice still thick with sleep.

“How do you feel?”

“Hungry,” he said, sitting up cautiously.“Hungry and...sort of stupid.”

“Sarah’s outside,” she said.“Verb is what they call her now.”

“What?”

“I told you, they have their own names for each other.Verb is what they call her now.”

“Verb. No kidding.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Go on.”

“She’s outside now. She’ll take you to breakfast, if you want.”

“Yeah.”

“She’s not beautiful, Reese. I just want you to be prepared for that. There’s not anything beautiful about her. I don’t even know if there’s anything there to love. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He stood up and she helped him as far as the sick bay door, and then she handed him an oxygen mask from the rack on the wall. He put it on and walked out of the Center on his own, Molly just behind him.

He stood there for a long moment, and Molly watched him take it all in, knowing that as sick as she was of this fishbowl city, as much as she missed the luxuries of Earth, as much as she wanted even more to be further, deeper, faster, that she would be homesick for this place if she’d been stranded the way Reese had, not knowing if he would ever get this far again.

Then Verb came up to them, leaving E17 sitting a dozen meters away with his back to them. She took Reese’s left arm in both her hands and quietly said,“Grandpa?”

The night before, after Molly left, Reese had lain in the darkness, trying to second-guess Morgan’s plan.

He tried to leave his emotions out of it.That he’d been swindled was no surprise, set up for some kind of complicated snatch-and-run by Morgan’s promises of new frontiers; what hurt was the knowledge that it might all end here, not just for himself but for the entire human race, as if the only fish ever to crawl onto land had lasted ten years and then died with no offspring.

And surely he was not exaggerating.Whatever Morgan had programmed Kane to do would be devastating, might bring the entire colony down in the process.

Don’t kid yourself, he thought.You know what Morgan wants.The transporter, the one that’s good for ten or twenty light-years.

The very thing you want for yourself.

Someone at the far end of the sickbay groaned in her sleep, the whimper of the fly being sucked dry by the spider, a tiny, apologetic cry for help when there was no help to be given.

He knew his odds: his father had died of cancer, he himself had made two round trips to Mars and then this last run, had poisoned his body with alcohol and drugs. Given enough time, cancer was a virtual certainty.

Not me, Reese thought. Not that way.

He thought about Sarah.

She was alive, Molly had said, alive but strange, stranger than he would be able to imagine. Strange enough, he wondered, to build a matter transporter? The voice on the tape had said it was a kid, female, and then Molly had told him they had new names now. He remembered the last time he’d seen her, only two years old, already pacing herself through the elementary math and logic tutorials on Molly’s computer, sketching from memory a diagram of a hypercube.

If it was Sarah, and it almost had to be, the irony was compelling, the grandchild become mother to the man...

The sight of her the next morning was more than he could have prepared himself for: her pale flabbiness, her stringy hair and lopsided eyes. And then she called him grandfather.

“Molly?” he said.“You told her?”

“No. I had no idea she even knew. Not until now.”

“It’s no big deal,” the girl said, turning her oversized head at an angle to look at Molly, as if it weighed too much even for her thick, wrinkled neck.“I can use a computer, you know. I’ve looked up your genetics and they’re a lot closer to Reese’s than to the guy that was supposed to be your father.”

“Jesus,” Molly said.“She was talking about connections this morning. I should have seen this coming.”

“I don’t suppose it matters,” Reese said.“Not anymore.”

“It shouldn’t,” Molly said.“Not to any rational person. But it’s liable to put Curtis over the edge. It’s not like you guys are Damon and Pythias to start with.”

“I never told anybody,” the girl said.“I don’t have to tell anybody now.”

Reese looked at her again, tried to see past the distorted body to something more spiritual, and failed.“Molly said you might take me to breakfast,” he said at last.

Sarah—Verb—nodded, and Molly said,“I’ll catch up to you later. Be careful, will you? And keep a low profile. Curtis isn’t going to want you walking around.”

“Okay,”he said.“What about Kane and the others?What happens to them?”

“I don’t know,” she said, and walked away.

It was morning under the dome.To his left, high up on the open expanse of plastic, Reese could see a suited figure, hanging on the outside of the cylinder, polishing away the minute scratches left by windblown dust, scratches that could eventually turn the dome opaque. Beyond, the pale pink of the sky shaded upward to a blue flecked with stars and lit by the bright point of Deimos.

In front of him the fields and houses alternated in a checkerboard that covered more than three acres of land between the Center and the south wall. Reese remembered the work that had gone into making that soil arable, filtering out the salt and sulphur and lime, enriching it with treated sewage and nitrogen wrung out of the thin Martian air, remembered the first crops, the endless radishes.

Then everything had been new, bright, and hard-edged, a planned subdivision just poured out of the developer’s truck. In twelve years it had already passed into middle age, a Martian equivalent of rocking chairs on the porches and weeds in the yards, only here the faces sat behind pressurized windows, without even a highway to focus their attention on.

“Are you hungry?”Verb asked,and Reese nodded.“We can go to his place,” she said, and pointed to the boy sitting on a concrete bench a few yards away.“His mother’s working.” In the sudden awkwardness of her hands he saw unspoken messages, a need to communicate something whose words were denied her. He knew then intuitively what his rational brain had already determined. She was the one with the answers.

She called the boy over and introduced him. Reese shook his hand, wondering where the boy had unearthed the cliché of eyeglasses with electrician’s tape wound over the bridge, an obvious affectation when surgery or contact lenses were so easily available.

The three of them followed the red gravel walkway around the Center. Reese stopped at the east animal pen and stared through the pressurized plastic bubble at the goats, their brown eyes shifting past him with animal indifference. Beyond them were the crowded chicken cages, and Reese could almost smell their sour odor through the double insulation of the plastic and his own oxygen mask.