Blue Mars Part 45

"I do not."

Sax tried to explain. "It seems to me that nomads in general tend to make use of the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and live off what they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course even more so, given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change it."

"Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt content. Have you heard about them?"

"Yes. But they're not going to have much luck with that, I would guess. The mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood."

"If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species."

"True. But the salt.w.a.ter species will be happy."

They walked across the middle of the towns.h.i.+p toward the plaza over the dock, pa.s.sing between long rows of grapevines pruned to the shape of waist-high T's, the intermingled horizontal vines heavy with grape cl.u.s.ters of dusty indigo, and bracken, and clear viridine. Beyond the vineyards the ground was covered with a mix of plants, like a kind of prairie, with narrow foot trails cutting through it.

At a restaurant fronting the plaza they were treated to a meal of pasta and shrimp. The conversation ranged everywhere. But then someone came rus.h.i.+ng out of the kitchen, pointing at his wrist: news had just come in of trouble on the s.p.a.ce elevator. The UN troops who had been sharing the customs duties on New Clarke had taken over the whole station, and sent all the Martian police down, charging them with corruption and declaring that the UN would administer the upper end of the elevator by itself from now on. The UN's Security Council was now saying that their local officers had overstepped their instructions, but this backpedaling did not include an invitation to the Martians to come back up the cable again, so it looked like a smoke screen to Sax. "Oh my," he said. "Maya will be very angry, I fear."

Ann rolled her eyes. "That isn't really the most important ramification, if you ask me." She looked shocked, and for the first time since Sax had found her in Olympus caldera, fully engaged in the current situation. Drawn out of her distance. It was fairly shocking, now that he thought of it. Even these seafarers were visibly shaken, though before they like Ann had seem distanced from whatever circ.u.mstances obtained on land. He could see the news tearing through the restaurant's conversations, and throwing them all into the same s.p.a.ce: upheaval, crisis, the threat of war. Voices were incredulous, faces were angry.

The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious as to their reaction. "You'll have to do something about this," one of their guides noted.

"Why us?" Ann replied tartly. "It's you who will have to do something about it, if you ask me. You're the ones responsible now. We're just a couple of old issei."

Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. "That's not true. But you're right, we will be watching, and talking with the other towns.h.i.+ps about how to respond. We'll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn't so true for us."

Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found he wanted to talk to Maya.

The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.

Sax and Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked back up at the towns.h.i.+p, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked like a good life. But something about... he chased the thought, and then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-outs these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?

He said, "Sometimes I regret- when I see those seafarers, and the lives they lead- it seems ironic that we- that we stand on the brink of a- of a kind of golden age-" There, he had said it; and felt foolish; "- which will only come to pa.s.s when our generation has died. We've worked for it all our lives, and then we have to die before it will come."

"Like Moses outside Israel."

"Yes? Did he not get to go in?" Sax shook his head. "These old stories-" Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood something. "Well, I can imagine how he felt. It's- it's frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious curious. About the history we'll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?"

Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, "Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you're going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children's chances with you. That you'd left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves."

"True."

And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.

They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the c.o.c.kpit, and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind wafting offsh.o.r.e cool and fragrant, Sax said, "I still wonder about the possibility of some kind of browns."

Ann glanced at him. "And where's the red in it?"

"Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land untouched. The areophany."

"That's always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis."

"Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds."

"I don't think there are any Indian reds." And she laughed darkly.

Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.

"Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?" Ann asked one night as they were retiring to their hulls.

"It's hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening gesture only, because if it's serious it would be so- unintelligent. They must know that Clarke is very vulnerable to- removal from the scene."

"Kasei and Dao didn't find it that easy to remove."

"No, but-" Sax did not want to say that their attempt had been botched, but he was afraid that she would read the comment out of his silence. "We in Da Vinci set up an X-ray laser complex in Arsia Mons caldera, buried behind a rock curtain in the north wall, and if we set it off the cable will be melted right at about the areosynchronous point. There isn't a defensive system that could stop it."

Ann stared at him; he shrugged. He wasn't personally responsible for Da Vinci actions, no matter what people thought.

"But bringing down the cable," she said, and shook her head. "It would kill a lot of people."

Sax remembered how Peter had survived the fall of the first cable, by jumping out into s.p.a.ce. Rescued by chance. Perhaps Ann was less likely to write off the lives that would inevitably be lost. "It's true," he said. "It isn't a good solution. But it could be done, and I would think the Terrans know that."

"So it may just be a threat."

"Yes. Unless they're prepared to go further."

North of the Oxia archipelago they pa.s.sed McLaughlin Bay, the eastern side of a drowned crater. North again was Mawrth Point, and behind it the inlet to Mawrth Fjord, one of the narrowest and longest fjords of all. It was a matter of constant tacking to sail up it, pushed this way and that by tricky winds, swirling between steep convolute walls; but Sax did it anyway, because it was a pretty fjord, at the bottom of a very deep and narrow outbreak channel, widening as one sailed farther into it; and beyond and above the end of the water, the rock-floored canyon continued inland for as far as one could see, and many kilometers beyond that. He hoped to show Ann that the existence of the fjords did not necessarily mean the drowning of all the outbreak channels; Ares and Kasei also retained very long canyons above sea level, and Al-Qahira and Ma'adim as well. But he said nothing of this, and Ann made no comment.

After the maneuvering in Mawrth, he sailed them almost directly west. To get out of the Chryse Gulf into the Acidalia region of the North Sea, it was necessary to work around a long arm of land called the Sinai Peninsula, sticking out into the ocean from the west side of Arabia Terra. The strait beyond it connecting Chryse Gulf with the North Sea was 500 kilometers wide; but it would have been 1,500 kilometers wide if it were not for the Sinai Peninsula.

So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not talking. Many times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. "Perhaps the combination should be called blue," Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the water. "Brown isn't very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new."

"Maybe we should."

At night after dinner, and some time looking at the stars swimming over the sloppy sea surface, they said good night, and Sax retired to the starboard hull cabin, Ann to the port; and the AI sailed them slowly through the night, dodging the occasional icebergs that began to appear at this lat.i.tude, pushed into the gulf from the North Sea. It was quite pleasant.

One morning Sax woke early, stirred by a strong swell under the hull, which pitched his narrow bed up and down in a way that his dreaming mind had interpreted as a giant pendulum, swinging them this way and that. He dressed with some difficulty and went abovedeck, and Ann, standing at the shrouds, called out, "It seems the groundswell and the windchop are in a positive interference pattern."

"Are they!" He tried to join her, and was slammed down into a c.o.c.kpit seat by a sudden rise of the boat. "Ah!"

She laughed. He grabbed the c.o.c.kpit handrail, pulled himself up to her side. He saw immediately what she meant; the wind was strong, perhaps sixty-five kilometers per hour, and the whine in the boat's minimal rigging was loud and sustained. There were whitecaps everywhere on the blue sea, and the sound of the wind coursing through all that broken water was very unlike what it would be pouring over rock- there it would be a high keening shriek- here, among the trillions of bursting bubbles, it was a deep solid roar. Every wave was whitecapped, and the great hills of the ground swells were obscured by foam flying off the crests and rolling in the troughs. The sky was a dirty opaque raw umber, very ominous looking, the sun a dim old coin, everything else dark, as if in shadow, though there were no clouds. Fines in the air: a dust storm. And now the waves were picking up, so that they spent many long seconds shooting up the side of one, then almost as many schussing down into the trough of the next one. Up and down in a long rhythm. The positive interference Ann had spoken of made some waves doubly big. The water not foaming was turning the color of the sky, brownish and dull, dark, though there was still not a cloud to be seen- only this ominous color of the sky; not the old pink, but more like the dust-choked air of the Great Storm. The whitecaps ceased in their area and the sound of water against the boat grew louder, a slushy rumble; the sea here was coated with frazil ice, or the thicker elastic layer of ice crystals called nilas. Then the whitecaps returned, twice as thick as before.

Sax climbed down into the c.o.c.kpit and checked the weather report on the AI. A katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf. A howler, as the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them. But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was still a fairly local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a roller-coaster ride, s.h.i.+mmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down on the huge groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being knocked over by the wind, but the boat's skittering flights up and down showed that they underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had contracted almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned over to check the AI more closely; the volume k.n.o.b on the beeper was turned all the way down. So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.

A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers away didn't help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in all the years of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through some invisible fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken pancake ice of a sea surface that had been about to freeze over in the night; difficult to spot in all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger chunk, bergy bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse Strait on a current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee sh.o.r.e of the southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for that matter.

They were forced to cover the c.o.c.kpit with its clear sh.e.l.l, rolling up out of the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof cover they were immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a true howler, Kasei Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast of air; the AI listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180 and 220 kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as they crossed the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160 kilometers an hour at the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating now, crests flattened by gusts, torn apart. The s.h.i.+p was shutting down in response to all that, mast retracting, c.o.c.kpit covered, hatches battening; then the sea anchor went out, a tube of material like a wind sock, dragging underwater upwind of them, slowing their drift to leeward, and mitigating the jarring impacts against small icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they all cl.u.s.tered against the lee sh.o.r.e. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was the brash ice and bergy bergs that were floating downwind faster than they were, and knocking against the windward hull, even as the leeward hull still slammed against a thickening ice ma.s.s. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in effect the boat was becoming a kind of submarine, lying at the surface and just under it. The strength of the materials of the boat could sustain any shock that even a howler and a lee sh.o.r.e of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could sustain forces several magnitudes stronger. But the weak point, as Sax reflected as he was thrown hard against his seat belt and shoulder harness, holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, was their bodies. The catamaran lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening swoop, crashed to a halt against a big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into the restraints. It seemed they might be in danger of being shaken to death, an unpleasant way to go, as he was beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged by seat belts; but if they freed themselves they would be flung around the c.o.c.kpit, into each other or into something sharp, until something broke or burst. No. It was not a tenable situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen on his bed's frame would be gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck the ice ma.s.s were so abrupt that he doubted being horizontal would help much.

"I'm going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay," he shouted in Ann's ear. She nodded that she had heard. He shouted the instruction right into the AI's pickup, and the computer heard and understood, which was good, as it would have been hard to type accurately with the boat soaring and plunging and shuddering as it slammed into the ice. In all that jarring it was not possible to feel the boat's engine, which had been running all along, but a slight change in their angle to the groundswell convinced him that it was pus.h.i.+ng harder as the AI tried to get them farther west.

Down near the point of the Sinai Peninsula, on the southern side, a large inundated crater called Arigato made a round bay. The entrance of the bay was about sixty degrees of the circle of the crater, facing southwest. The wind and waves were both also from the southwest; so the mouth of the bay, quite shallow, as it was a low part of the old crater rim, was bound to be broken water, a difficult crossing no doubt. But once inside the bay the groundswell would be cut off by that same rim, and both waves and wind much reduced, especially when they got behind the western cape of the bay. There they would wait out the howler, and be on their way again when it was done. In theory it was an excellent plan, although Sax worried about conditions in the mouth of the bay; the chart showed it was only ten meters deep, which was certain to cause the groundswells to break. On the other hand, in a boat that became a kind of submarine (and yet drawing less than two meters of water for all that) negotiating broken surf might not be much of a problem ; just go with it. The AI appeared to consider his instructions within the realm of the possible. And indeed the boat had pulled in the sea anchor, and with its powerful little engines was making its way across the wind and waves toward the bay, which was not visible; nothing of the lee sh.o.r.e could be seen through the dirty air.

So they held to the c.o.c.kpit railings and waited out the reach, speechless; there was little to say, and the booming howl of the howler made it difficult to communicate. Sax's hands and arms got very tired from holding on, but there was no help for that except to abandon the c.o.c.kpit and go below and strap himself into his bed, which he did not want to do. Despite the discomfort, and the nagging worry about the bay entrance, it was an extraordinary experience to watch the wind pulverize the surface of the water the way it was.

A short while later (though the AI indicated it had been seventy-two minutes), he caught sight of land, a dark ridge over the whitecaps to the lee side of them. Seeing it meant they were probably too close to it, but there ahead it disappeared, and reappeared farther west: the entrance to Arigato Bay. The tiller s.h.i.+fted against his knee, and he noted a change in the boat's direction. For the first time he could hear the hum of the little engines at the sterns of the two hulls. The jarring against the ice got rougher, and they had to hold on tight. Now the groundswells were getting taller, their crests torn off, but the bulk of every wave remaining, its face surging up as it encountered the sea bottom. And now he could see in the foam rolling over the water ice chunks, and larger bergy bits- clear, blue, jade, aquamarine- pitted, rough, gla.s.sy. A great deal of ice must have been driven against the lee sh.o.r.e ahead of them. If the bay mouth was choked with ice, and waves were breaking over the bar nevertheless, it would be a nasty pa.s.sage indeed. And yet that looked like what the situation would be. He shouted a question or two at the AI, but its replies were unsatisfactory. It seemed to be saying that the boat could sustain any shocks the situation could inflict, but that the engines could not drive it through pack ice. And in fact the ice was thickening rapidly; they seemed in the process of being enveloped by a loose ma.s.s of bergy bits, driven onsh.o.r.e by the wind from all over the gulf. Their grinding and knocking was now a big component of the overwhelming noise of the storm. Indeed it looked like it would now be difficult to motor out of the situation, straight offsh.o.r.e into the wind and waves and out to sea. Not that he really wanted to be out there, tossed up and down on waves that were growing ever larger and more unruly; capsizing would be a very real possibility; but because of the unexpected density of ice insh.o.r.e, it was beginning to look like getting offsh.o.r.e had been their better option. Now closed to them. They were in for a hard pummeling.

Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the c.o.c.kpit rail for dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax's mind satisfaction: she showed no inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so that she could shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.

"We can't stay here!" she shouted. "When we tire- the impacts are going to tear us up- ah!- like dolls!"

"We can strap ourselves to our beds," Sax shouted.

She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints might not be any better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem of getting secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind was- shrieking wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger and larger; when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve heart-stopping seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there they saw chunks of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the flying foam to crash down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the boat's hulls and decking, and even the clear thin c.o.c.kpit sh.e.l.l, with a force they could feel all through their bodies.

Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann's ear. "I believe this is one of those situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!"

"... lifeboat?" Ann said.

Sax nodded. "The boat is its own lifeboat!" he shouted. "It flies!"

"What do you mean?"

"It flies!"

"You're kidding!"

"No! It becomes a- a blimp!" He leaned over and put his mouth right to her ear. "The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the c.o.c.kpit empty their ballast. They fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They told me about it back in Da Vinci, but I've never seen it! I didn't think we'd be using it!" The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da Vinci, quite pleased with themselves at the new craft's versatility. But the ice packing against the lee sh.o.r.e made that option unavailable to them, something that Sax did not regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going down in the boat didn't appeal to him.

Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. "Do you know how to fly it!" she shouted.

"No!"

Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it into the air. Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the right toggles. He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then leaned forward to shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and mouth hard, and then he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of his nose like water from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked, tasting his blood. "I love you!" he shouted. She didn't hear him.

"How do we launch it?" Ann cried.

He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the emergency board under a protective bar.

If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind's speed, of course, there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee sh.o.r.e. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. Still- whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or the other.

Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a b.l.o.o.d.y mess. "Worth a try!" she shouted.

So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final look at Ann- their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not articulate, but which warmed him- he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully the alt.i.tude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent more time flying.

As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the fall down into the next icy trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar- then bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to back- oops then all the way over again, topsy-turvy- then righted, and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on- his shoulder harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann's, even though he had been pressed against her. The tiller was bas.h.i.+ng his knee. He held on to it. Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other's shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other's bones. They looked at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impa.s.sive. Up they shot into the sky.

His collarbone hurt, where Ann's forehead or elbow had struck it. But they were flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was accelerated to something nearer the wind's speed, the turbulence lessened greatly. The balloons seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast. Then just when Sax was beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike stability, even to expect it, the boat shot straight up and began its horrible tumbling again. Updraft no doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it was all too possible they were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail ball. On Mars there were thunderheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by howlers from far to the south, and b.a.l.l.s of hail flew up and down in these thunderheads for a long time. Sometimes hail the size of cannonb.a.l.l.s had come cras.h.i.+ng down, devastating crops and even killing people. And if they were pulled up too high they might die of alt.i.tude, like those early balloonists in France, was in the Montgolfiers themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn't remember. Up and up, tearing through wind and red haze, no chance to see very far- BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down hard. Thunder. Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130 decibels. Ann seemed limp against him, and he s.h.i.+fted sideways, reached up awkwardly and twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her face. "Hey!" she cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of the wind. "Sorry," he said, though he was sure she couldn't hear him. It was too loud to talk. They were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force. The boat was shrieking as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his eardrums hurt to bursting, he wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth. Then up again and they popped, painfully. He wondered how high they would go; very possible they would die of thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had thought to pressurize the c.o.c.kpit, who knew. It behooved him to try to understand the boat as blimp, or at least master the alt.i.tude adjustment system. Not that there was much to be done against the force of such updrafts and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against the c.o.c.kpit sh.e.l.l. There were small toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment of less violent tumbling he was able to put his face down near the bar and read the display terminal embedded in it. Alt.i.tude... not obvious. He tried to calculate how high the boat would go before its weight caused it to level off. Hard when he wasn't actually sure of the boat's weight, or the amount of helium deployed.

Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up, down, up; then down, for many seconds in a row. Sax's stomach was in his throat, or so it felt. His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding continuously. Then up. Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they were, and whether they were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen outside the sh.e.l.l of the c.o.c.kpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no danger of fainting. Ann was motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear again to see if she was conscious, but couldn't move his arm. He elbowed her side. She elbowed back; if he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to remember to go lighter next time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a less violent prod in return. Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had learned it as a boy for no reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could hear it all, every dit and dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this was no time for lessons.

The violent ride went on for so long he couldn't estimate it: an hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn't much to say.

"We're in a thunderhead!"

"Yes!"

Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes- the surface of the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first time.

Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud's bottom, in falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Alt.i.tude adjustors. He pushed them both gently down.

They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.

But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia. Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards- irrigation ca.n.a.ls and curving streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in ca.n.a.ls, in little craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses cl.u.s.tered in little villages, only outbuildings in the fields- barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann's hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.

He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. He pushed down the adjustors hard.

Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the adjustors full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O's in their faces.

Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the c.o.c.kpit sh.e.l.l. Brown water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the Arabian countryside. The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann's face was wet and her hair stood out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She smiled a crooked smile. "Nicely done," she said.

Part Fourteen

Phoenix Lake

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

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

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

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

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

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