Green Mars

PART 5 Homeless

Biogenesis is in the first place psychogenesis. This truth was never more manifest than on Mars, where noosphere preceded biosphere — the layer of thought first enwrapping the silent planet from afar, inhabiting it with stones and plans and dreams, until the moment when John stepped out and said Here we are — from which point of ignition the green force spread like wildfire, until the whole planet was pulsing with viriditas. It was as if the planet itself had felt something missing, and at the tap of mind against rock, noosphere against lithosphere, the absent biosphere had sprung into the gap with the startling suddenness of a magician’s paper flower.

Or so it seemed to Michel Duval, who was passionately devoted to every sign of life in the rust waste; who had seized Hiroko’s areophany with the fervor of a drowning man thrown a buoy. It had given him a new way of seeing. To practice this sight he had taken on Ann’s habit of walking outside in the hour before sunset, and in the long-shadowed landscapes he found every patch of grass a piercing delight. In each little tangle of sedge and lichen he saw a miniature Provence.

This was his task, as he now conceived it: the hard work of reconciling the centrifugal antinomy of Provence and Mars. He felt that in this project he was part of a long tradition, for recently in his studies he had noticed that the history of French thought was dominated by attempts to resolve extreme antinomies. For Descartes it had been mind and body, for Sartre, Freudianism and Marxism, for Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and evolution — the list could be extended, and it seemed to him that the particular quality of French philosophy, its heroic tension and its tendency to be a long march of magnificent failures, came from this repeated attempt to yoke together impossible opposites. Perhaps they were all, including his, attacks on the same problem, the struggle to knit together spirit and matter. And perhaps this was why French thought had so often welcomed complex rhetorical apparatuses such as the semantic rectangle, structures which might bind these centrifugal oppositions in nets strong enough to hold them.

So now it was Michel’s work patiently to knit green spirit and rust matter, to discover the Provence in Mars. Crustose lichen, for instance, made parts of the red plain look as if they were being plated with apple jade. And now, in the lucid indigo evenings (the old pink skies had made grass look brown), the sky’s color allowed every blade of grass to radiate such pure greens that the little meadow lawns seemed to vibrate. The intense pressure of color on the retina … such delight.

And it was awesome as well, to see how fast this primitive biosphere had taken root, and flowered, and spread. There was an inherent surge toward life, a green electric snap between the poles of rock and mind. An incredible power, which here had reached in and touched the genetic chains, inserted sequences, created new hybrids, helped them to spread, changed their environments to help them grow. The natural enthusiasm of life for life was everywhere clear, how it struggled and so often prevailed; but now there were guiding hands as well, a noosphere bathing all from the start. The green force, bolting into the landscape with every touch of their fingertips.

So that human beings were miraculous indeed — conscious creators, walking this new world like fresh young gods, wielding immense alchemical powers. So that anyone Michel met on Mars he regarded curiously, wondering as he looked at their often innocuous exteriors what kind of new Paracelsus or Isaac of Holland stood before him, and whether they would turn lead to gold, or cause rocks to blossom.

The American rescued by Coyote and Maya was no more or less remarkable on first acquaintance than any other person Michel had met on Mars; more inquisitive perhaps, more ingenuous it seemed; a bulky shambling man with a swarthy face and a quizzical expression. But Michel was used to looking past that kind of surface to the transformative spirit within, and quickly he concluded that they had a mysterious man on their hands.

His name was Art Randolph, he said, and he had been salvaging useful materials from the fallen elevator. “Carbon?” Maya had asked. But he had missed or ignored her sarcastic tone and replied, “Yes, but also—” and he had rattled off a whole list of exotic brec-ciated minerals. Maya had only glared at him, but he had not appeared to notice. He only had questions. Who were they? What were they doing out there? Where were they taking him? What kind of cars were these? Were they really invisible from space? How did they get rid of their thermal signals? Why did they need to be invisible from space? Could they be part of the legendary lost colony? Were they part of the Mars underground? Who were they, anyway?

No one was quick to answer these questions, and it was Michel

who finally said to him, “We are Martians. We live out here on our own.”

“The underground. Incredible. I would have said you guys were a myth, to tell you the truth. This is great.”

Maya only rolled her eyes, and when their guest asked to be dropped off at Echus Overlook, she laughed nastily and said, “Get serious.”

“What do you mean?”

Michel explained to him that as they could not release him without revealing their presence, they might not be able to release him at all.

“Oh, I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

Maya laughed again.

Michel said, “It’s a matter that is too important for us to trust a stranger. And you might not be able to keep it a secret. You would have to explain.how you had gotten so far from your vehicle.”

“You could take me back to it.”

“We don’t like to spend time around things like that. We wouldn’t have come close to it if we hadn’t noticed you were in trouble.”

“Well, I appreciate it, but I must say this isn’t much of a rescue.”

“Better than the alternative,” Maya told him sharply,

“Very true. And I do appreciate it, really. But I promise I won’t tell anyone. And you know it isn’t as if people don’t know you’re out here. TV back home has shows about you all the time.”

Even Maya was silenced by that. They drove on, Maya got on their intercom and had a brief rapid exchange with Coyote, who was traveling in the rover ahead of them, with Kasei and Nirgal. Coyote was adamant; as they had saved the man’s life, they could certainly rearrange it for a time to keep themselves out of danger. Michel reported the gist of the exchange to their prisoner.

Randolph frowned briefly, then shrugged. Michel had never seen a faster adjustment to the rerouting of a life; the man’s sangfroid was impressive. Michel regarded him attentively, while also keeping one eye on the front camera screen. Randolph was already asking questions again, about the rover’s controls. He only made one more reference to his situation, after looking at the radio and intercom controls. “I hope you’ll let me send some kind of message to my company, so they’ll know I’m safe. I worked for Dumpmines, a part of Praxis. You and Praxis have a lot in common, really. They can be very secretive too. You ought to contact them just for your own sake, I swear. You must have some coded bands that you use, right?”

No response from Maya or Michel. And later, when Randolph had gone into the rover’s little toilet chamber, Maya hissed, “He’s obviously a spy. He was out there deliberately so we would pick him up.”

That was Maya. Michel did not try to argue with her, but only shrugged. “We’re certainly treating him like one.”

And then he was back out among them, and asking more questions. Where did they live? What was it like hiding all the time? Michel began to be amused at what seemed more and more like a performance, or even a test; Randolph appeared perfectly open, ingenuous, friendly, his swarthy face almost that of a moon-calf simpleton — and yet his eyes watched them very carefully, and with every unanswered question he looked more interested and more pleased, as if their answers were coming to him by telepathy. Every human was a great power, every human on Mars an alchemist; and though Michel had given up psychiatry a long time ago, he could still recognize the touch of a master at work. He almost laughed at the growing urge he felt in himself, to confess everything to this hulking quizzical man, still clumsy in the Martian g.

Then their radio beeped, and a compresed message lasting no more than two seconds buzzed over the speakers. “See,” Randolph said helpfully, “you could get a message out to Praxis just like that.”

But when the AI finished running the message through the decryption sequence, there was no more joking. Sax had been arrested in Burroughs.

At dawn they drew up with Coyote’s car, and spent the day conferring about what to do. They sat in a cramped circle in the living compartment, their faces all lined and etched with worry — all except their prisoner, who sat between Nirgal and Maya. Nirgal had shaken hands with him and nodded as if they were old friends, although neither had said a word. But the language of friendship was not in words.

The news about Sax had come from Spencer, by way of Nadia. Spencer was working in Kasei Vallis, which was a kind of new Korolyov, a security town, very sophisticated and at the same time very low-profile. Sax had been taken to one of the compounds

there, and Spencer had found out about it and made the call out to Nadia.

“We have to get him out,” Maya said, “and fast. They’ve only had him a couple days.”

“The Sax Russell?” Randolph was saying. “Wow. I can’t believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?”

Maya cursed him in livid Russian. Coyote ignored them all; he hadn’t said anything since the message had arrived, and was busy at his AI screen, looking at what appeared to be weather satellite photos.

“You might as well let me go,” Randolph said into the silence. “I couldn’t tell them anything they won’t get out of Russell.”

“He won’t tell them anything!” Kasei said hotly.

Randolph waggled a hand. “Scare him, maybe hurt him a little, put him under, plug him in, dope him up and zap his brain in the right places — they’ll get answers to whatever they ask. They’ve got it down to a science, as I understand it.” He was staring at Kasei. “You look familiar too. Never mind! Anyway, if they can’t tweak it out, they can usually do it more crudely.”

“How do you know all this?” Maya demanded.

“Common knowledge,” Randolph said. “So maybe it’s all wrong, but…”

“I want to go get him,” Coyote said.

“But they’ll know we’re out here,” Kasei said.

“They know that anyway. What they don’t know is where we are.”

“Besides,” Michel said, “it’s our Sax.”

Coyote said, “Hiroko won’t object.”

“If she does, tell her to fuck off!” Maya exclaimed. “Tell her shikata ga nai!”

“It would be my pleasure,” Coyote said.

The western and northern slopes of the Tharsis bulge were unpopulated relative to the eastern drop to Noctis Labyrinthus; there were a few areothermal stations and aquifer wells, but much of the region was covered in a year-round blanket of snow and fim and young glaciers. Winds out of the south collided with the strong northwest winds coming around Olympus Mons, and the blizzards could be fierce. The protoglacial zone extended up from the six-or seven-kilometer contour nearly to the base of the great volcanoes; it was not a good place to build, nor was it a good place for stealth cars to hide. They drove hard over the sastrugi and along ropy lava mounds that served as roads, north past the bulk of Tharsis Tholus, a volcano that was about the size of Mauna Loa, though under the rise of Ascraeus it looked like a cinder cone. The next night they made it off the snow and northeast across Echus Chasma, and hid for the day under the stupendous eastern wall of Echus, just a few kilometers north of Sax’s old headquarters at the top of the cliff.

The east wall of Echus Chasma was the Great Escarpment at its absolute greatest — a cliff three kilometers tall, running in a straight line north and south for a thousand kilometers. The areologists were still arguing over its origin, as no ordinary force of landscape formation seemed adequate to have created it. It was simply a break in the fabric of things, separating the floor of Echus Chasma from the high plateau of Lunae Planum. Michel had visited Yosemite Valley in his youth, and he still recalled those towering granite cliffs; but this wall standing before them was as long as the whole state of California, and three kilometers high for most of that length: a vertical world, its massive planes of redrock staring out blankly to the west, glowing in each empty sunset like the side of a continent.

At its northern end this incredible cliff finally became less tall, and less steep, and just above 20° North it was cut by a deep broad channel, which ran east through Lunae plateau, down onto the Chryse basin. This big canyon was Kasei Vallis, one of the clearest manifestations of ancient flooding anywhere on Mars. A single glance at a satellite photo and it was obvious that a very large flood had run down Echus Chasma once upon a time, until it reached a break in its great eastern wall, perhaps a graben. The water had turned right down this valley and smashed through it with fantastic force, eroding the entrance until it was a smooth curve, slopping over the outside bank of the turn and ripping at joints in the rock until they were a complex gridwork of narrow canyons. A central ridge in the main valley had been shaped into a long lemniscate or tear-shaped island, the shape as hydrodynamic as a fishback. The inner bank of the fossil watercourse was incised by two canyons that had been mostly untouched by water, ordinary fossae that showed what the main channel had probably looked like before the flood. Two late meteor strikes on the highest part of the inner bank had completed the shaping of the terrain, leaving fresh steep craters.

From the ground, driving slowly onto the rise of the outer bank, it was a rounded elbow of a valley, with the lemniscate ridge, and the round ramparts of the craters on the rise of the inner bank, the most prominent features. It was an attractive landscape, reminiscent of the Burroughs region in its spatial majesty, the great sweep of the main channel just begging to be filled with running water, which no doubt would be a shallow braided stream, coursing over pebbles and cutting new beds and islands every week…

But now it was the site for the transnationals’ security compound. The two craters on the inner bank had been tented, as had big sections of the gridwork terrain on the outer bank, and part of the main channel on both sides of the lemniscate island; but none of this work was ever shown on the video, or mentioned in the news. It was not even on the maps.

Spencer had been there since the beginning of construction, however, and his infrequent reports out had told them what the new town was for. These days almost all the people found guilty of crimes on Mars were sent out to the asteroid belt, to work off their sentences in mining ships. But there were people in the Transitional Authority who wanted a jail on Mars itself, and Kasei Vallis was it.

Outside the valley entrance they hid their boulder cars in a knot of boulders, and Coyote studied weather reports. Maya fumed at the delay, but Coyote shrugged her off. “This isn’t going to be easy,” he told her sternly, “and it isn’t possible at all except in certain circumstances. We need to wait for some reinforcements to arrive, and we need to wait on the weather. This is something Spencer and Sax himself helped me to set up, and it is very clever, but the initial conditions have to be right.”

He returned to his screens, ignoring them all, talking to himself or to the screens, his dark thin face flickering in their light. Alchemist indeed, Michel thought, muttering as if over alembic or crucible, working his transmutations on the planet… a great power. And now focused on the weather. Apparently he had discovered some prevailing patterns in the jet stream, tied to certain anchoring points in the landscape. “It’s a question of the vertical scale,” he said brusquely to Maya, who with all her questions was beginning to sound like Art Randolph. “This planet has a thirty-k span top to bottom. Thirty thousand meters! So there are strong winds.”

“Like the mistral,” Michel offered.

“Yes. Katabatic winds. And one of the strongest of them drops off the Great Escarpment here.”

The prevailing winds in the region, however, were westerlies. When these hit the Echus cliff, towering updrafts resulted, and flyers living in Echus Overlook took advantage of them for sport, flying all day in gliders or birdsuits. But fairly frequently cyclonic systems came by, bringing winds from the east, and when that happened cold air ran over the snow-covered Lunae plateau, scouring snow and becoming denser and colder, until the entire drainage area was funneled out through notches in the great cliffs edge, and the winds then fell like an avalanche.

Coyote had studied these katabatic winds for some time, and his calculations had led him to believe that when conditions were right — sharp temperature contrasts, a developed storm track east to west across the plateau — then very slight interventions in certain places would cause the downdrafts to turn into vertical typhoons, smashing down into Echus Chasma and blasting north and south with immense power. When Spencer had identified for them the nature and purpose of the new settlement in Kasei Vallis, Coyote had immediately decided to try to create the means to effect these interventions.

“Those idiots built their prison in a wind tunnel,” he muttered at one point, in answer to Maya’s inquisition. “So we built a fan. Or rather a switch to turn the fan on. We dug in some silver nitrate dispensers at the top of the cliff. Big monster jet hoses. Then some lasers to burn the air just over the flow zone. That creates an unfavorable pressure gradient, damming up the normal outflow so that it’s stronger when it finally breaks through. And explosives installed all down the cliff face, to push dust into the wind and make it heavier. See, wind heats up as it falls, and that would slow it down some if it weren’t so full of snow and dust. I climbed down that cliff five times to set it all up, you should have seen it. Set some fans as well. Of course the power of the whole apparatus is negligible compared to the total wind force, but sensitive dependence is the whole key to weather, you see, and our computer modeling located the spots to push the initial conditions the way we want. Or so we hope.”

“You haven’t tried it?” Maya asked.

Coyote stared at her. “We tried it in the computer. It works fine. If we get initial conditions of hundred-and-fifty kilometer cyclonic winds over Lunae, you’ll see.”

“They must know about these katabatic winds in Kasei,” Randolph pointed out.

“They do. But what they calculated as once-a-millennium winds, we think we can create any time the initial conditions are there on top.”

“Guerrilla climatology,” Randolph said, eyes bugged out. “What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?”

Coyote pretended to ignore him, although Michel saw a brief grin through the dreadlocks.

But his system would only work with the proper initial conditions. There was nothing to do but sit and wait, and hope they developed.

During these long hours it seemed to Michel that Coyote was trying to project himself through his screen, out into the sky. “Come on,” the wiry little man urged under his breath, nose against glass. “Push, push, push. Come over that hill, you bastard wind. Tuck and turn, spiral tight. Come on!”

He wandered the darkened car when the rest of them were trying to sleep, muttering, “Look, yes, look,” and pointing at features of satellite photos that none of the rest of them could see. He sat brooding over scrolling meteorological data, chewing on bread and cursing, whistling like a wind. Michel lay on his narrow cot, head propped on his hand, watching in fascination as the wild man prowled through the dimness of the car, a small, shadowy, secretive, shamanesque figure. And the bearish lump of their prisoner, one eye agleam, was likewise awake to witness this nocturnal scene, rubbing his scruffy jaw with an audible rasping, glancing at Michel as the whispering continued. “Come on, damn you, come on. Shoooooooooo … Blow like an October hurricane …”

Finally, at sunset on their second day of waiting, Coyote stood and stretched like a cat. “The winds have come.”

During the long wait some Reds had driven from Mareotis to aid in the rescue, and Coyote had worked out a plan of attack with them, based on information Spencer had sent out. They were going to split up, and come on the town from several angles. Michel and Maya were to drive one car onto the cracked terrain of the outer bank, where they could hide at the foot of a small mesa within sight of the outer-bank tents. One of these tents contained a medical clinic where Sax was being taken some of the time, a fairly low-security place according to Spencer, at least compared to the holding compound on the inner bank, where Sax was being kept between sessions in the clinic. His schedule was staggered, and Spencer could not be sure which location he would be in at any given time. So when the wind hit, Michel and Maya were going to enter the outer-bank tent and meet Spencer, who would be there ready to guide them to the clinic. The bigger car, with Coyote, Kasei, Nirgal, and Art Randolph, was going to converge, with some of the Reds from Mareotis, on the inner bank. Other Red cars would be doing their best to make the raid look like a full-scale attack from all directions, particularly the east. “We will make the rescue,” Coyote said, frowning at his screens. “The wind will make the attack.”

So the next morning Maya and Michel sat in their car, waiting for the winds to arrive. They had a view down the slope of the outer bank to the big lemniscate ridge. Through the day they could see into the green bubble worlds under the tents on the outer bank and the ridge — little terrariums, overlooking the red sandy sweep of the valley, connected by clear transit tubes and one or two arching bridge tubes. It looked like Burroughs some forty years before, patches of a city growing to fill a big desert arroyo.

Michel and Maya slept; ate; sat; watched. Maya paced the car. She had been getting more nervous every day, and now she padded about like a caged tigress that has smelled the blood of a meal. Static electricity jumped off her fingertips as she caressed Michel’s neck, making her touch painful. It was impossible to calm her down; Michel stood behind her when she sat in the pilot’s chair, massaging her neck and shoulders as she had his, but it was like trying to knead blocks of wood, and he could feel his arms getting tense from the contact.

Their talk was disconnected and desultory, wandering in random jumps of free association. In the afternoon they found themselves talking for an hour about the days in Underhill — about Sax, and Hiroko, and even Frank and John.

“Do you remember when one of the vaulted chambers collapsed?”

“No,” she said irritably. “I don’t. Do you remember the time Ann and Sax had that big argument about the terraforming?”

“No,” Michel said with a sigh, “I can’t say I do.” They could go back and forth like that for a long time, until it seemed they had lived in completely different Underhills. When they both remembered an event, it was cause for cheer. All the First Hundred’s memories were growing spotty, Michel had noticed, and it seemed to him that most of them recalled their childhoods on Earth better than they did their first years on Mars. Oh, they remembered their own biggest events, and the general shape of the story; but the little incidents that somehow stuck in mind were different for everyone. Memory retention and recollection were getting to be big clinical and theoretical problems in psychology, exacerbated by the unprecedented longevities now being achieved. Michel had read some of the literature on it from time to time, and though he had long ago given up the clinical practice of therapy, he still asked questions of his old comrades in a kind of informal experiment, as he did now with Maya: Do you remember this, do you remember that? No, no, no. What do you remember?

The way Nadia bossed us around, Maya said, which made him smile. The way the bamboo floors felt underfoot. And do you remember the time she screamed at the alchemists? Why no! he said. On and on it went, until it seemed that the private Underhills they inhabited were separate universes, Riemannian spaces that intersected each other only at the plane at infinity, each of them meanwhile wandering in the long reach of his or her own idiocosmos. “I hardly remember any of it,” Maya said at last, darkly. “I can still barely stand to think of John. And Frank too. I try not to: And then something will trigger something, and I’ll be lost to everything else while I remember it. Those kinds of memories are as intense as if what you remember only happened an hour before! Or as if it were happening again.” She shuddered under his hands. “I hate them. Do you know what I mean?”

“Of course. Memoire involuntaire. But I remember also that the very same thing happened to me when we were living in Underhill. So it isn’t just getting old.”

“No. It’s life. What we can’t forget. Still, I can .hardly look at Kasei …”

“I know. Those children are strange. Hiroko is strange.” “She is. But were you happy, then? After you left with her?” “Yes.” Michel thought back on it, working hard to recall. Recollection was certainly the weak link in the chain… “I was, certainly. It was a matter of admitting things I had tried to suppress in Underbill. That we are animals. That we are sexual creatures.” He kneaded her shoulders harder than ever, and she rolled them under his hands.

“I didn’t need reminding of that,” she said with a short laugh. “And did Hiroko give that back to you?”

“Yes. But not just Hiroko. Evgenia, Rya — all of them, really. Not directly, you know. Well, sometimes directly. But just in admitting that we had bodies, that we were bodies. Working together, seeing and touching each other. I needed that. I was really having trouble. And they managed to connect it to Mars as well. You never seemed to have trouble with that part either, but I did, I really did. I was sick. Hiroko saved me. For her it was a sensuous matter to make our home and food out of Mars. A kind of making love to it, or impregnating it, or midwifing it — in any case, a sensuous act. It was this that saved me.”

“This and their bodies, Hiroko’s and Evgenia’s and Rya’s.” She looked over her shoulder at him with a wicked grin, and he laughed. “That you remember well enough, I bet.”

“Well enough.”

It was midday, but to the south, up the long throat of Echus Chasma, the sky was darkening. “Maybe the wind is coming at last,” Michel said.

Clouds topped the Great Escarpment, a tall mass of highly turbulent cumulonimbus clouds, their black bottoms flickering with lightning, striking the top of the cliff. The air in the chasm was hazy, and the tents of Kasei Vallis were defined sharply under this haze, little blisters of clear air standing over the buildings and curiously still trees, like glass paperweights dropped on the windy desert. It was only just past noon. They would have to wait until dark even if the winds did come. Maya stood and paced again, radiating energy, muttering to herself in Russian, ducking down to take looks out of their low windows. Gusts were picking up and striking the car, whistling and keening over the broken rock at the foot of the little mesa behind them.

Maya’s impatience made Michel nervous. It really was like being trapped with a wild beast. He slumped down in one of the drivers’ seats, looking up at the clouds rolling off the Escarpment. Martian gravity allowed thunderheads to tower tremendous heights into the sky, and these immense white anvil-topped masses, along with the stupendous cliff face under them, made the world seem surrealistically big. They were ants in such a landscape, they were the little red people themselves.

Certainly they would make the rescue attempt that night; they had had to wait too long as it was. On one of her restless turns Maya stopped behind him again, and took the muscles between his shoulders and neck and squeezed them. The squeezes sent great shocks of sensation down his back and flanks, and then along the insides of his thighs. He flexed in her clutches, and turned in the rotating seat so that he could put his arms around her waist, and his ear against her sternum. She continued to work his shoulders, and he felt his pulse pumping in him, and his breath grow short. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. They worked their way against each other until they were tightly wrapped together, Maya kneading his shoulders all the while. For a long time they stayed like that.

Then they moved back into the living compartment of the car, and made love. Tight with apprehension as they both were, they fell into it with intensity. No doubt the talk of Underhill had started this; Michel recalled vividly his illicit lusts for Maya in those years, and buried his face in her silvery hair, and tried his best to merge with her, to climb right into her. Such a big feline animal she was, pushing back in an equally wild attempt to take him in, which effort carried him completely away. It was good to be by themselves, to be free to disappear into surprised ravishment, nothing but a series of moans and yelps and electric rushes of sensation.

Afterward he lay on her, still inside her, and she held his face and stared at him. “In Underhill I loved you,” he said.

“In Underhill,” she said slowly, “I loved you too. Truly. I never did anything about it because I would have felt foolish, what with John and Frank. But I loved you. That was why I was so angry at you when you left. You were my only friend. You were the only one I could talk with honestly. You were the only one who really listened to me.”

Michel shook his head, remembering. “I didn’t do a very good job of that.”

“Maybe not. But you cared about me, didn’t you? It wasn’t just your job?”

“Oh no! I loved you, yes. It is never just a job with you, Maya. Not for anyone or anything.”

“Flatterer,” she said, pushing him. “You always did that. You tried to put the best interpretation on all the horrible things I did.” She laughed shortly.

“Yes. But they weren’t so horrible.”

“They were.” She pursed her mouth. “But then you disappeared!” She slapped his face lightly. “You left me!”

“I left, anyway. I had to.”

Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness — at least that particular happiness — for her. His “optimism by policy” was going to become more of an effort, and he would now have another antinomy to reconcile in his life, as centrifugal as Provence and Mars — which was simply Maya and Maya.

They lay side by side, each in his or her own thoughts, looking outside and feeling the rover bounce on its shock absorbers. The wind was still rising, the dust now pouring down Echus Chasma and then Kasei Vallis, in a ghostly mimicry of the great outflow that had first carved the channel. Michel pushed up to check the screens. “Up to two hundred kilometers per hour.” Maya grunted. Winds had been far faster in the old days, but with the atmosphere so much thicker, these slower speeds were deceptive; present-day gales were much more forceful than the old insubstantial screamers.

Clearly they would go in tonight, it was only a matter of getting Coyote’s bursted signal. So they lay back down together and waited, tense and relaxed at the same time, giving each other thorough massages to pass the time and relieve the tension, Michel marveling throughout at the catlike grace of Maya’s long muscular body, ancient by the dates, but in most respects the same as ever. As beautiful as ever.

Then finally sunset stained the hazy air, and the monumental clouds to the east, clouds which now covered the cliff face. They got up and sponged down, and ate a meal, and dressed and sat in the drivers’ seats, getting nervous again as the quartz sun disappeared and the stormy twilight fell away.

In file dark the wind was sheer noise, and an irregular trembling of the rover on its stiff shock absorbers. Gusts buffeted the car so hard.that it was sometimes held down against the full crush of the shocks for seconds at a time, the car struggling to rise on the springs and failing, like an animal fighting to free itself from the bottom of a stream. Then the gust would let off and the car would jerk up wildly. “Are we going to be able to walk in this?” Maya asked.

“Hmm.” Michel had been out in some hard blows before, but in the dark one couldn’t be sure if this was worse than those or not. It certainly seemed like it, and the rover anemometer was now registering gusts of 230 kilometers per hour, but in the lee of their little mesa it was unclear whether these represented true maxi-mums or not.

He checked the fines gauge, and was not surprised to find it was now a full-blown dust storm as well. “Let’s drive down closer,” Maya said. “It will get us there quicker, and make it easier to relocate the car as well.”

“Good idea.”

They sat in the drivers’ seats and took off. Out of the shelter of the mesa, the wind was ferocious. At one point the bouncing grew so severe it felt as if they might be flipped over, and if they had been side-on to the wind, they might have been; as it was, with the wind behind them, they rolled on at fifteen kilometers per hour when they should have been going ten, and the motor hummed unhappily as it braked the car from going even faster. “This is too much wind, isn’t it?” Maya asked.

“ I don’t think Coyote has much control over it.”

“Guerrilla climatology,” Maya said with a snort. “That man is a spy, I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t think so.”

The cameras showed nothing but a starless black rush. The car’s AI was guiding them by dead reckoning, and on the screen’s map they were shown within two kilometers from the outer bank’s southernmost tent. “We’d better walk from here,” Michel said.

“How will we find the car again?”

“We’ll have to get out the Ariadne thread.”

They suited up and got in the. lock. When the outer door slid open the air sucked out instantly, pulling them hard. The wind keened across the doorway.

They stepped out of the lock and were slammed by great blows to the back. One knocked Michel to his hands and knees, and he could just see through the dust to Maya, in the same position beside him. He reached back into the lock and took the thread reel in one hand, Maya’s hand in the other. He clipped the reel to his forearm.

By careful experiment they found they could stand if they stayed crouched forward, helmets at waist level and hands up and ready to catch themselves if they were knocked down. They stumbled ahead slowly, crashing down when strong gusts made it impossible to stand. The ground under them was just barely visible, and a knee striking a rock was all too possible. Coyote’s wind had indeed come down too strong. But there was nothing to be done about it. And clearly the inhabitants of the Kasei tents were not going to be out wandering around.

A gust knocked them down again, and Michel let the wind pour over him. It was hard to keep from being rolled. His wristpad was connected to Maya’s by a phone cord, and he said, “Maya, are you all right?”

“Yes. And you?”

“I’m okay.”

Though there seemed to be a small tear in his glove, over the ball of his thumb. He bunched his fist, felt the cold seeping up his wrist. Well, it wouldn’t be instant frostbite the way it used to be, nor pressure bruising. He took a suit patch from his wristpad compartment, stuck it on. “I think we’d better stay down like this.”

“We can’t crawl two kilometers!”

“We can if we have to.”

“But I don’t think we do. Just stay low, and be ready to go down.”

“Okay.”

They stood again, bent double, and shuffled cautiously forward. Black dust flew past them with amazing rapidity. Michel’s navigation display lit his faceplate, down in front of his mouth: the first bubble tent was still a kilometer away, and to his astonishment the green numbers of the clock showed 11:15:16 — they had been out an hour. The howl of the wind made it hard to hear Maya, even with his intercom right against his ear. Over on the inner bank Coyote and the others, and the Red groups as well, were presumably making their raid on the living quarters — but there was no way of telling. They had to take it on faith that the shocking wind had not halted that part of the action, or slowed it down too much.

It was hard work to shuffle forward doubled over, connected by the telephone cord. On and on it went, until Michel’s thighs burned and his lower back hurt. Finally his navigation display indicated they were very close to the southernmost tent. They could see nothing of it. The wind became stronger than ever, and they crawled the final few hundred meters, over painfully hard bedrock. The clock numerals froze at 12:00:00. Sometime soon thereafter they banged into the concrete coping of the tent’s foundation. “Swiss timing,” Michel whispered. Spencer was expecting them in the timeslip, and they had thought they would have to wait at the wall until it came. He reached up and put a hand gently on the tent’s outermost layer. It was very taut, pulsing in time with the onslaught of air. “Ready?”

“Yes,” Maya said, her voice tight.

Michel took a small air gun from his thigh pocket. He could feel Maya doing the same. The guns were used with a variety of attachments, for everything from driving nails to giving inoculations; now they hoped to use them to break the tough and elastic fabrics of the tent.

They disconnected the phone cord between them, and put their two guns against the taut vibrating invisible wall. With a tap of the elbows they shot together.

Nothing happened. Maya plugged the phone cord back into her wrist. “Maybe we’ll have to slash it.”

“Maybe. Let’s put the two guns together, and try again. This material is strong, but still, with the wind …”

They disconnected, got set, tried it again — their arms were jerked over the coping, and they slammed into the concrete wall. A loud boom was followed by a lesser one, then a cascading roar, and a series of explosions. All four layers of the tent were peeling away, between two of the buttresses and maybe all across the south side, which would surely explode the whole thing. Dust was flying among the dimly lit buildings ahead of them. Windows were going dark as buildings lost lights; some appeared to be losing their windows to the sudden depressurization, although this was nowhere near as severe as it once would have been.

“You okay?” Michel said over the intercom. He could heard Maya’s breath sucking through her teeth. “Hurt my arm,” she said. Over the roar of the wind they could hear the high ringing of alarms. “Let’s find Spencer,” she said harshly. She pushed up and was blown violently over the coping, and Michel quickly followed, falling hard inside and rolling into her. “Come on,” she said. They stumbled into the prison city of Mars.

Inside the tent it was chaos. Dust made the air into a kind of black gel, pouring through the street in a fantastically fast torrent, shrieking so that Michel and Maya could just barely hear each other, even when they reconnected their phone line. Decompression had blown out some windows and even a wall, so that the streets were littered with shards of glass and chunks of concrete. They moved side by side, kicking ahead cautiously with every step, hands often touching to confirm positions. “Try your 1R heads-up display,” Maya recommended. .

Michel turned his on. The infrared display was nightmarish, the blown buildings glowing like green fires.

They came to the large central building that Spencer had said would contain Sax, and found it too was bright green all along one wall. Hopefully there were bulkheads protecting the underground clinic where Spencer had said Sax was being taken; if not their rescue attempt might already have killed their friend. All too possible, Michel judged; the surface floors of the building were wrecked.

And getting down onto the lower floors was going to be a problem. There was presumably a stairwell that functioned as an emergency lock, but it wasn’t going to be easy to locate it. Michel switched to the common band, and eavesdropped on a frantic discussion of trouble across the valley; the tent over the smaller of the two craters on the inner bank had blown away, and there were calls for help. Over the phone Maya said, “Let’s hide and see if someone comes out.”

They lay down behind a wall and waited, protected somewhat from the wind. Then before them a door banged open, and suited figures rushed down the street and disappeared. When they were gone Maya and Michel went to the door, and entered.

It was a hallway, still depressurized; but its lights were on, and a panel in one wall was lit up with red lights. It was an emergency lock, and quickly they closed the outer door and got the little space repressurized. They stood before the inner door, looking at each other through dusty faceplates. Michel wiped his clear with a glove and shrugged. Back in the rover they had discussed this moment, the crux of the operation; but there hadn’t been all that much they could foresee or plan, and now the moment was here, and the blood was flying in Michel’s veins as if impelled by the wind outside.

They disconnected the phone cord between them, took laser pistols that Coyote had given them from their thigh pockets. Michel hit the door pad, and it opened with a hiss. They were met by three men in suits but without helmets, looking scared. MicheJ and Maya shot them and they went down, twitching. Thunderbolts from the fingertips indeed.

They dragged the three men into a side room, and shut them in. Michel wondered if they had shot them too many times; cardiac arrhythmias were common when that happened. His body seemed to have expanded until it was constricted by his walker, and he was very hot, and breathing hard, and ferociously jumpy. Maya apparently felt the same, and she led the way down a hall, almost running. The hallway suddenly went dark. Maya turned on her headlamp, and they followed its dusty cone of light to the third door on the right, where Spencer had said Sax would be. It was locked.

Maya took a small explosive charge from her thigh pocket and placed it over the handle and lock, and they went back down the hall several meters. When she blew the charge the door slammed outward, propelled by air bursting out from inside. They ran in and found two men struggling to latch helmets onto their suits; when they saw Michel and Maya one reached for a waist holster while the other went for a desk console, but hampered by the necessity of getting their helmets secured, they accomplished neither of these tasks before the two intruders shot them. The men went down.

Maya went back and closed the door they had come through. They walked down another hall, the final one. They came to the door of another room, and Michel pointed. Maya held out her pistol in both hands, nodded her readiness. Michel kicked the door in and Maya rushed through with Michel close after her. There was a figure in suit and helmet standing by what looked like a surgical gurney, working over the head of a recumbent body. Maya shot the standing figure several times and it crashed down as if struck by fists, then rolled over the floor, contorted by muscular spasms.

They rushed to the man on the gurney. It was Sax, although Michel recognized him by his body rather than his face, which was a deathmask apparition, with two blackened eyes, and a mashed nose between them. He appeared unconscious at best. They worked to detach him from body restraints. There were electrodes stuck to several places on his shaved head, and Michel winced as Maya simply tore them all away. Michel pulled a thin emergency suit from his thigh pocket, and set about pulling it up over Sax’s inert legs and torso, manhandling him in his haste; but Sax didn’t even groan. Maya came back and took an emergency fabric headpiece and small tank out of Michel’s backpack, and they hooked them to Sax’s suit, and turned the suit on.

Maya’s hand was clutching Michel’s wrist so hard that he feared the bones would crack. She plugged her phone line back into his wrist. “Is he alive?”

“I think so. Let’s get him out of here, we can find out later.”

“Look what they’ve done to his face, those fascist murderers.”

The person on the floor, a woman, was stirring, and Maya stalked over and kicked her hard in the gut. She leaned over and looked in the faceplate, cursed in a surprised voice. “It’s Phyllis.”

Michel pulled Sax out of the room and down the hall. Maya caught up with them. Someone appeared before them and Maya aimed her gun, but Michel knocked her hand aside — it was Spencer Jackson, he recognized him by the eyes. Spencer spoke, but with their helmets’ on they couldn’t hear him. He saw that, and shouted: “Thank God you came! They were done with him — they were going to kill him!”

Maya said something in Russian and ran back to the room and threw something inside, then ran back toward them. An explosion shot smoke and debris out of the room, peppering the wall opposite the door.

“No!” Spencer cried. “That was Phyllis!”

“I know,” Maya shouted viciously; but Spencer couldn’t hear her.

“Come on,” Michel insisted, picking up Sax in his arms. He gestured at Spencer to get helmeted. “Let’s go while we can.” No one seemed to hear him, but Spencer got on a helmet, and then helped Michel carry Sax along the hall and up the stairs to the ground floor.

Outside it was louder than ever, and just as black. Objects were rolling along the ground, even flying through the air. Michel took a shot to the faceplate that knocked him down.

After that he was two steps behind everything that happened. Maya plugged a phone jack into Spencer’s wristpad and hissed orders at both of them, her voice hard and precise. They hauled Sax bodily to the tent wall and over it, and crawled back and forth until they found the iron spool anchoring their Ariadne thread.

It was immediately clear that they could not walk into the wind. They had to crawl on hands and knees, the middle person with Sax draped over his or her back, the other two supporting on each side. They crawled on, following the thread; without it they wouldn’t have had a hope of relocating the rover. With it they could crawl on, straight toward their goal, their hands and knees going numb with the cold. Michel stared down at a black flow of dust and sand under his faceplate. At some point he realized that the faceplate was badly scarred.

They stopped to rest when shifting Sax to the next carrier. When his turn was done Michel knelt, panting and resting his faceplate right on the ground, so that the dust flew over him. He could taste red grit on his tongue, bitter and salty and sulphuric — the taste of Martian fear, of Martian death — or just of his own blood; he couldn’t say. It was too loud to think, his neck hurt, there was a ringing in his ears, and red worms in his eyes, the little red people finally coming out of his peripheral vision to dance right in front of him. He felt he was on the verge of blacking out. Once he thought he was going to vomit, which was dangerous in a helmet, and his whole body clenched in the effort to hold it down, a sweaty gross pain in every muscle, every cell of him. After a long struggle the urge passed.

They crawled on. An hour of violent and wordless exertion passed, and then another. Michel’s knees were losing their numbness to sharp stabbing pains, going raw. Sometimes they just lay on the ground, waiting for a particularly maniacal gust to pass. It was striking how even at hurricane speeds the wind came in individual buffets; the wind was not a steady pressure, but a series of shocking blows. They had to lie prone for so long waiting out these hammerstrokes that there was time to get bored, to have one’s mind wander, to doze. It seemed they might be caught out by dawn. But then he saw the shattered numerals of his faceplate clock — it was actually only 3:30 A.M. They crawled on.

And then the thread lifted, and they nosed right into the lock door of the rover, where the Ariadne thread was tied. They cut it free and blindly hauled Sax into the lock, then climbed in wearily after him. They got the outer door closed, and pumped the chamber. The floor of the lock was deep in sand, and fines swirled away from the pump ventilator, staining the overbright air. Blinking, Michel stared into the small faceplate of Sax’s emergency headpiece; it was like looking into a diving mask, and he saw no sign of life.

When the inner door opened, they stripped off helmets and boots and suits, and limped into the rover and closed the door quickly on the dust. Michel’s face was wet, and when he wiped it he discovered it was blood, bright red in the overlit compartment. He had had a bloody nose. Though the lights were bright it was dim in his peripheral vision, and the room was strangely still and silent. Maya had a bad cut across one thigh, and the skin around it was white with frostnip. Spencer seemed exhausted, unhurt but obviously very shaken. He pulled off Sax’s headpiece, gabbling at them as he did. “You can’t just yank people out of those probes, you’re very likely to damage them! You should have waited until I got there, you didn’t know what you were doing!”

“We didn’t know whether you would come,” Maya said. “You were late.”

“Not by much! You didn’t have to panic like that!”

“We didn’t panic!”

“Then why did you just tear him out of there? And why did you kill Phyllis?”

“She was a torturer, a murderer!”

Spencer shook his head violently. “She was just as much a prisoner as Sax.”

“She was not!”

“You don’t know. You killed her just because of how it looked! You’re no better than they are.”

“Fuck that! They’re the ones torturing us! You didn’t stop them and so we had to!”

Cursing in Russian, Maya stalked to one of the drivers’ seats and started the rover. “Send the message to Coyote,” she snapped at Michel.

Michel struggled to recall how to operate the radio. His hand tapped out the release for the bursted message that they had Sax. Then he went back to Sax, who was lying on the couch breathing shallowly. In shock. Patches of his scalp had been shaved. He too had had a bloody nose. Spencer gently wiped it, shaking his head. “They use MRI, and focused ultrasound,” he said dully. “Taking him out like that could have …” He shook his head.

Sax’s pulse was weak and irregular. Michel went to work getting the suit off him, watching his own hands move like floating starfish; they were disconnected from his own volition, it was as if he were trying to work a damaged teleoperator. I’ve been stunned, he thought. I’m concussed. He felt nauseated. Spencer and Maya were shouting at each other angrily, really getting furious, and he couldn’t follow why.

“She was a bitch!”

“If people were killed for being bitches you never would have made it off the Ares!”

“Stop it,” he said to them weakly “Both of you.” He did not quite understand what they were saying, but it was clearly a fight, and he knew had to mediate. Maya was incandescent with rage and pain, crying and shouting. Spencer was shouting back, his whole body trembling. Sax was still comatose. I’m going to have to start doing psychotherapy again, Michel thought, and giggled. He navigated his way to a driver’s seat and tried to comprehend the driver’s controls, which pulsed blurrily under the flying black dust outside the windshield. “Drive,” he said desperately to Maya. She was in the seat next to him weeping furiously, both handsclenching the steering wheel. Michel put a hand to her shoulder and she knocked it aside; it flew away as if on a string rather than the end of his arm, and he almost fell out of his chair. “Talk later,” he said. “What’s done is done. Now we have to get home.” “We have no home,” Maya snarled.