Green Mars Part 23

The three old ones thought it over.

Slowly Zeyk said, "He was an angry man. He listened to Arabs, though, and respected us. He lived with us for a time and learned our language, and truthfully there are few Americans who have ever done that. And so we loved him. But he was no very easy man to know. And he was angry. I don't know why. Something in his years on Earth, I suppose. He never spoke of them. In fact he never spoke about himself at all. But there was a gyroscope in him, spinning like a pulsar. And he had black moods. Very black. We sent him out in scouting rovers, to see if he could help himself. It didn't always work. He would rip us from time to time, even though he was our guest." Zeyk smiled, remembering. "Once he called us all slaveowners, right to our faces over coffee."

"Slaveowners?"

Zeyk waved a hand. "He was angry."

"He saved us, there at the end," Nadia told Zeyk, stirring from deep in her own thoughts. "In sixty-one." She told them of a long drive down Valles Marineris, accomplished at the very same time that the Compton Aquifer outbreak was flooding the great canyon; and how when they were almost clear of it, the flood had caught Frank and swept him away. "He was out getting the car off a rock, and if he hadn't acted so quickly, the whole car would have gone."

"Ah," said Zeyk. "A happy death."

"I don't think he thought so."

The issei all laughed, briefly, then reached together for their empty cups, and made a small toast to their late friend. "I miss him," Nadia said as she put her cup down. "I never thought I would say that."

She went silent, and watching her Nirgal felt the night cosseting them, hiding them. He had never heard her speak of Frank Chalmers. A lot of her friends had died in the revolt. And her partner too, Bogdanov, whom so many people still followed.

"Angry to the last," Zeyk said. "For Frank, a happy death."

From Lyell they continued counterclockwise around the South Pole, stopping at sanctuaries or tent towns, and exchanging news and goods. Christianopolis was the largest tent town in the region, center of trade for all the smaller settlements south of Argyre. The sanctuaries in the area were mostly occupied by Reds. Nadia asked all the Reds they met to convey news of the congress to Ann Clayborne. "We're supposed to have a phone link, but she's not answering me." A lot of the Reds clearly thought a meeting was a bad idea, or at least a waste of time. South of Schmidt Crater they stopped at a settlement of Bologna communists who lived in a hollowed-out hill, lost in one of the wildest zones of the southern highlands, a region very hard to travel in because of the many wandering scarps and dikes, which rovers could not negotiate. The Bolognese gave them a map marking some tunnels and elevators they had installed in the area, to allow pa.s.sage through dikes, and up or down scarps. "If we didn't have them our trips would be nothing but detours."

Located next to one of their hidden dike tunnels was a small colony of Polynesians, living in a short lava tunnel, which they had floored with water and three islands. The dike was piled high with ice and snow on its southern flank, but the Polynesians, most of whom were from the island of Vanuatu, kept the interior of their refuge at homey temperatures, and Nirgal found the air so hot and humid that it was hard to breathe, even when just sitting on a sand beach, between a black lake and a line of tilting palm trees. Clearly, he thought as he looked around, the Polynesians could be counted among those trying to build a culture incorporating some aspects of their archaic ancestors. They also proved to be scholars of primitive government everywhere in Earth's history, and they were excited at the idea of sharing what they had learned in these studies at the congress, so it was no problem getting them to agree to come.

To celebrate the idea of the congress they had gathered for a feast on the beach. Art, seated between Jackie and a Polynesian beauty named Tanna, beamed blissfully as he sipped from a half coconut sh.e.l.l filled with kava. Nirgal lay stretched out on the sand before them, listening as Jackie and Tanna talked animatedly about the indigenous movement, as Tanna called it. This was not any simple back-to-the-past nostalgia, she said, but rather an attempt to invent new cultures, which incorporated aspects of early civilizations into high-tech Martian forms. "The underground itself is a kind of Polynesia," Tanna said. "Little islands in a great stone ocean, some on the maps, some not. And someday it will be a real ocean, and we'll be out on the islands, flouris.h.i.+ng under the sky."

"I'll drink to that," Art said, and did. Clearly one part of the archaic Polynesian culture that Art hoped they were incorporating was their renowned s.e.xual friendliness. But Jackie was mischievously complicating things by leaning on Art's arm, either to tease him or to compete with Tanna. Art was looking happy but concerned; he had drunk his cup of the noxious kava fairly quickly, and between that and the women, appeared lost in a blissful confusion. Nirgal nearly laughed out loud. It seemed possible that some of the other young women at the feast might also be interested in sharing the archaic wisdom, judging by their glances his way. On the other hand Jackie might leave off teasing Art. It did not matter; it was going to be a long night, and New Vanuatu's little tunnel ocean was kept as warm as the old Zygote baths. Nadia was already out there, swimming in the shallows with some men a quarter her age. Nirgal stood and pulled off his clothes, walked out into the water.

It was getting to be late enough in the winter that even at 80 lat.i.tude the sun rose for an hour or two around noon, and during these brief intervals the s.h.i.+fting fogs glowed in tones pastel or metallic- on some days violet and rose and pink, on others copper and bronze and gold. And in all cases the delicate shades of color were captured and reflected by the frost on the ground, so that it looked sometimes as if they traversed a world made entirely of jewels, of amethysts, rubies, sapphires.

On other days the wind would roar, throwing a weight of frost that coated the rover, and gave the world a flowing, underwater look. In the brief hours of sunlight they worked at clearing the rover's wheels, the sun in the fog like a patch of yellow lichen. Once, after one of these windstorms had cleared, the fog hood was gone as well, and the land to every horizon was a spectacular complexity of ice flowers. And over the northern horizon of this rumpled diamond field stood a tall dark cloud, pouring up into the sky from some source that appeared to be not far over the horizon.

They stopped and dug out one of Nadia's little shelters. Nirgal stared out at the dark cloud and looked at the map. "I think it might be the Rayleigh mohole," he said. "Coyote started up the robot excavators in that one, during that first trip I took with him. I wonder if something's come of it."

"I've got a little scout rover stashed in the garage here," Nadia said. "You can take that over and have a look if you want. I'd go too but I need to get back to Gamete. I'm supposed to meet Ann there day after tomorrow. Apparently she's heard about the congress, and wants to ask me some questions."

Art expressed an interest in meeting Ann Clayborne; he had been impressed by a video about her he had seen on the flight to Mars. "It would be like meeting Jeremiah."

Jackie said to Nirgal, "I'll come with you."

So they agreed to meet in Gamete, and Art and Nadia headed there directly in the big rover, while Nirgal took off with Jackie in Nadia's scout car. The tall cloud still stood over the icescape ahead of them, a dense pillar of dark gray lobes, torn flat in the stratosphere, in different directions at different times. As they got closer, it seemed more and more certain that the cloud was pouring up out of the silent planet. And then as they rolled to the edge of one low scarp, they saw that the land in the distance was clear of ice, the ground as rocky as it would be in high summer, but blacker, a nearly pure black rock that was smoking from long orange fissures in its bulbous, pillowy surface. And just beyond the horizon, which here was six or seven kilometers off, the dark cloud was roiling up, like a mohole thermal cloud gone nova, the hot gaseous smoke exploding outward and then tumbling up hastily.

Jackie drove their car to the top of the highest hill in the region. From there they could see all the way to the source of the cloud, and it was just as Nirgal had guessed the moment he had seen it: the Rayleigh mohole was now a low hill, black except for its pattern of angry orange cracks. The cloud poured out of a hole in this hill, the smoke dark and dense and roiling. A tongue of rough black rock stretched downhill to the south, in their direction and then off to their right.

As they sat in the car, silently watching, a big part of the low black hill covering the mohole tipped over and broke apart, and liquid orange rock ran quickly between the black chunks, sparking and splas.h.i.+ng yellow. The intense yellow quickly turned orange, and then darkened further.

After that nothing moved but the column of smoke. Over the ventilator and engine hums they could hear a rumbling ba.s.so continuo, punctuated by booms that were timed to sudden explosions of smoke from the vent. The car trembled slightly on its shock absorbers.

They stayed on the hill watching, Nirgal rapt, Jackie excited and talkative, commenting at length, then going silent as chunks of lava broke away from the hill, releasing more spills of melted rock. When they looked through the car's IR viewer the hill was a brilliant emerald with blazing white cracks in it, and the tongue of lava licking the plain was bright green. It took about an hour for orange rock to turn black in visible light, but through the IR the emerald went dark green in about ten minutes. Green pouring up into the world, with the white bursting through it.

They ate a meal, and as they cleaned their plates Jackie moved Nirgal around the cramped kitchen with her hands, friendly in the way she had been in New Vanuatu, her eyes bright, a small smile on her lips. Nirgal knew these signs, and he caressed her as she pa.s.sed in the small s.p.a.ce behind the drivers' seats, happy at the renewed intimacy, so rare and so precious: "I'll bet it's warm outside," he said.

And her head snapped around as she looked at him, her eyes wide.

Without another word they dressed and got into the lock, and held gloved hands as they waited for it to suck and open. When it did they stepped out of the car, and walked across the dry rust rubble, holding hands and squeezing hard, winding around b.u.mps and hollows and chest-high boulders toward the new lava. They carried thinsulate pads in their outside hands. They could have talked but they didn't. The air pushed at them from time to time, and even through the layers of his walker Nirgal could feel that it was warm. The ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the rumble was distinct, vibrating in his stomach; it was punctuated every few seconds by a dull boom, or a sharper cracking noise. No doubt it was dangerous to be out here. There was a small rounded hill, very like the one their car was parked on, overlooking the tongue of hot lava from a somewhat closer distance, and without consultation they headed for it, climbing its final slope with big steps, always holding hands, gripping hard.

From the top of the little hill they could see far over the new black flow and its s.h.i.+fting network of fiery orange cracks. The noise was considerable. It seemed clear that any new lava would run off the other side of the black ma.s.s, the downhill side. They were on a high point in the bank of a stream, with an obvious watercourse running left to right as they looked down on it. Of course a sudden great flood might overwhelm them, but it seemed unlikely, and in any case they were in no more danger here than they had been in the car.

All such calculations disappeared as Jackie pulled her hand free of his and began to take off her glove. Nirgal did the same, rolling the stretching fabric up until the wrist was exposed and his thumb free. The glove popped off his fingertips. It was about 278 degrees, he reckoned, brisk but not particularly cold. And then a wave of warm air buffeted him, followed by a wave of hot air, perhaps 315adeg;K, which quickly pa.s.sed and was followed by the jostling cool air his hand had been exposed to first. As he peeled off his other glove it became clear that the temperature was all over the place, each knock of the wind distinctly different. Jackie had already unzipped her jacket from her helmet, and down the front, and now as Nirgal watched she pulled it off, baring her upper body. The air struck her and goose-pimples ran over her skin like cat's paws over water. She leaned over to get off her boots, and her air tank lay in the hollow of her spine, her ribs standing out under her skin. Nirgal stepped over and pulled her pants down over her bottom. She reached back and pulled him to her and wrestled him to the ground, and they went down together in a tangle, twisting fast to get onto the thinsulate pads; the ground was very chill. They got their clothes off, and she lay back with her air tank above her right shoulder. He lay on her; in the chill air her body was amazingly warm, radiating heat like the lava, buffets of heat pus.h.i.+ng him from below and from the side, the wind airy and cooked, her body pink and muscular, wrapping him hard with arms and legs, startlingly tangible in the sunlight. They bonked faceplates. Their helmets were pumping out air hard, to compensate for the leaks around shoulders, backs, chests, collarbones. For a time they looked each other in the eye, separated by the double layer of gla.s.s, which seemed the only thing keeping them from fusing into one being. The sensation was so powerful it felt dangerous- they bonked and bonked, expressing the desire to fuse, but knowing they were safe. Jackie's eyes had a strange vibrant border between iris and pupil. The little black round windows were deeper than any mohole, a drop to the center of the universe. He had to look away, he had to! He lifted off her to look at her long body, which, stunning as it was, was still less stunning than the depths of her eyes. Wide rangy shoulders, oval navel, the so-feminine length of her thighs- he closed his eyes, he had to. The ground trembled under them, moving with Jackie so that it felt as if he were plunging into the planet itself, a wild muscular female body- he could lie perfectly still, they both lay perfectly still, and still the world vibrated them, in a gentle but intense seismic ravishment. This living rock. As his nerves and skin began to thrum and sing he turned his head to look out at the flowing magma and then everything was coming together.

They left the Rayleigh volcano, and rolled back down into the fog hood's darkness. On the second night after leaving Rayleigh they approached Gamete. In the dark gray of an especially thick noon twilight they came up and under the great overhang of ice, and suddenly Jackie leaned forward with a cry and slapped off the autopilot, then kicked down the brake.

Nirgal had been dozing, and he caught himself on his steering wheel, staring out to see what the trouble was.

The cliff where the garage had been was shattered- a great ice fall spilled away from the cliff, covering where the garage had been. The ice at the top of the break was heavily starred, as by explosion. "Oh," Jackie cried, "they've blown it up! They've killed them all!"

Nirgal felt as if he had been punched in the stomach; he was amazed to find what a physical blow fear could wield. In his mind he was numb, and seemed to feel nothing- no anguish, no despair, nothing. He reached out and squeezed Jackie's shoulder- she was shaking- and peered anxiously through the thick blowing mist.

"There's the bolt-hole," he said. "They wouldn't have been caught unawares." The tunnel led through an arm of the polar cap to Chasma Australe, where there was a shelter in the ice wall.

"But-" Jackie said, and swallowed. "But if they didn't get any warning!"

"Let's get around to the shelter in Australe," Nirgal said, taking over the controls.

He bounced them over the ice flowers at the car's top speed, concentrating on the terrain and trying not to think. He did not want to get to the other shelter- get there and find it empty, taking away his last hope, the only way he had of staving off this disaster. He wanted never to arrive, to keep driving clockwise around the polar cap forever, no matter the torque of apprehension that was causing Jackie to hiss as she breathed, and to moan from time to time. In Nirgal it was only a numbness, an inability to think. I don't feel a thing, he thought wonderingly. But unbidden images of Hiroko kept flas.h.i.+ng before him as if projected on the winds.h.i.+eld, or standing ghostlike out in the driving mists. There was a chance that the a.s.sault had come from s.p.a.ce, or by missile from the north, in which case there might not have been any warning. Wiping the green world out of the universe, and leaving only the white world of death. The colors drained from everything, as in this gray-fog winter world.

He pursed his lips and concentrated on the icescape, driving with a ruthless touch he had not known he had. The hours pa.s.sed and he did his best not to think of Hiroko or Nadia or Art or Sax or Maya or Dao or any of the rest: his family, neighborhood, town, and nation, all under that one small dome. He bent over his twisted stomach and focused on the world of driving, on each little b.u.mp and hollow to be dodged in the vain attempt to make it a less rattled ride.

They had to go clockwise for three hundred kilometers, and then most of the way up the length of Chasma Australe, which in late winter narrowed and became so choked with ice blocks that there was only a single route through, marked by weak little directional transponders. There he was forced to slow down, but under the dark mist they could drive at all hours, and they did so until they reached the low wall that marked the refuge. It was just fourteen hours after their departure from the gate of Gamete- an accomplishment, over such jagged frosty terrain- but Nirgal didn't even note it. If the refuge was empty- If it was empty... The numbness in him was eroding fast as they approached the low wall at the head of the chasm; there was no sign of anyone or anything there, and his fear was breaking through the numbness like orange magma out of the cracks in black lava, it gushed out and billowed through him, became an unbearable ripping tension in every cell of him....

Then a light flickered from low on the wall, and Jackie cried "Ah!" as if stuck with a pin. Nirgal accelerated and the car bounded toward the ice wall, he almost crashed the car right into it; he slammed on the brakes and the big wire wheels of the car skidded very briefly, then ground to a halt. Jackie popped on her helmet and dashed into the lock, and Nirgal followed, and after an agonizing suck and pump they dropped out of the lock onto the ground, and hurried to the lock door in a shallow recess in the ice. The door opened and four suited figures leaped out holding guns; Jackie cried out over the common band, and in a second the four were hugging them; so far so good, although it was conceivable that they were just comforting them, and Nirgal was still in an agony of suspense, when he saw Nadia's face behind one of the faceplates. She gave him the thumbs-up sign, and he realized that he had been holding his breath for what seemed like the last fifteen hours entire, thought no doubt it was only since he had jumped out of the car. Jackie was crying with relief and Nirgal felt that he wanted to cry too, but the sudden disintegration of the numbness and then the fear had left him merely shattered, exhausted, beyond tears. Nadia led him into the refuge lock by hand, as if she understood this, and when the lock was closed and pumping up Nirgal began to understand the voices on the common band: "I was so scared, I thought you were dead." "We got out the escape tunnel, we saw them coming-"

Inside the shelter they took off their helmets and went through a hundred rounds of embracing. Art slapped him on the back, his eyes popping out like eggs: "So glad to see see you two!" He pulled Jackie into a rough hug, then held her out at arm's length and looked at her wet snotty red-eyed girlish face with approval and admiration, as if just this moment accepting that she was human too, and not some feline G.o.ddess. you two!" He pulled Jackie into a rough hug, then held her out at arm's length and looked at her wet snotty red-eyed girlish face with approval and admiration, as if just this moment accepting that she was human too, and not some feline G.o.ddess.

As they staggered down the narrow tunnel to the refuge's rooms, Nadia told them the story, scowling as she recalled it. "We saw them coming and got way up the back tunnel, and then brought down both domes, and all the tunnels. So we may have killed a good number of them, but I don't know- I don't know how many they sent in, or how far they got. Coyote's out shadowing them to see if he can tell. Anyway, it's done."

At the end of the tunnel was a crowded refuge of several little chambers, roughly walled, floored and ceilinged by insulation panels, set right against cavities in the ice. Every room radiated from a larger central chamber that served as kitchen and dining hall. Jackie hugged everyone in there but Maya, ending with Nirgal. They held each other hard, and Nirgal felt her trembling, and realized he was trembling as well, in a kind of synchronic vibration. The silent, desperate, fearful drive would strengthen the bond as much as their lovemaking by the volcano, or more- it was hard to tell- he was too tired to be able to read the powerful vague emotions slos.h.i.+ng through him. He disengaged from Jackie and sat, feeling suddenly exhausted to tears. Hiroko sat beside him, and he listened to her as she told him what had happened in more detail. The attack had started with the sudden appearance of several s.p.a.ce planes, dropping onto the flat outside the hangar in a group. So they had had very little warning inside, and the people at the hangar had reacted in confusion, telephoning in to warn the others, but failing to activate Coyote's defense system, which apparently they had simply forgotten. Coyote was disgusted about this, Hiroko said, and Nirgal could well believe it. "You have to stop paratrooper attacks at the very moment of landing," he said. Instead the people at the hangar had retreated into the dome. After some confusion they had gotten everyone up into the escape tunnel, and once they were past the blast point Hiroko had ordered them to use the Swiss defense and bring down the dome, and Kasei and Dao had obeyed her, and so the whole dome had been blown down, killing whatever part of the attack force was inside, burying them in million of tons of dry ice. Radiation readings seemed to indicate that the Rick-over had not suffered a meltdown, although it certainly had been crushed along with everything else. Coyote had disappeared down a side tunnel with Peter, out a bolt-hole of his own, and Hiroko didn't know exactly where they had gone. "But I think those s.p.a.ce planes may be in trouble."

So Gamete was gone, and the sh.e.l.l of Zygote too. In some future age the polar cap would sublime away and reveal their flattened remnants, Nirgal thought absently; but for now it was buried, utterly unreachable.

And here they were. They had gotten out with only some AIs, and the walkers on their backs. And now they were at war with the Transitional Authority (presumably), with some part of the force that had a.s.saulted them still out there.

"Who were they?" Nirgal asked.

Hiroko shook her head. "We don't know. Transitional Authority, Coyote said. But there are a lot of different units in UNTA security, and we need to find out if this is the full Transitional Authority's new policy, or if some unit has gone on a rampage."

"What will we do?" Art asked.

At first no one answered.

Finally Hiroko said, "We'll have to ask for shelter. I think Dorsa Brevia has the most room."

"What about the congress?" Art asked, reminded of it by the mention of Dorsa Brevia.

"I think we need it now more than ever," Hiroko said.

Maya was frowning. "It could be dangerous to congregate," she pointed out. "You've told a lot of people about this."

"We had to," Hiroko said. "That's the point of it." She looked around at them all, and even Maya did not dare contradict her. "Now we have to take the risk."

Part Seven

What Is to Be Done?

The few big buildings in Sabis.h.i.+ were faced with polished stone, picked for colors that were unusual on Mars: alabaster, jade, malachite, yellow jasper, turquoise, onyx, lapis lazuli. The smaller buildings were wooden. After traveling by night and hiding by day, the visitors found it a pleasure to walk in the sunlight between low wooden buildings, under plane trees and fire maples, through stone gardens and across wide boulevards of streetgra.s.s, past ca.n.a.ls lined by cypress, which occasionally widened into lily-covered ponds, crossed by high arching bridges. They were almost on the equator here, and winter meant nothing; even at aphelion hibiscus and rhododendron were flowering, and pine trees and many varieties of bamboo shot high into the warm breezy air.

The ancient j.a.panese greeted their visitors as old and valued friends. The Sabis.h.i.+ issei dressed in copper jumpsuits, went barefoot, and wore long ponytails, and many earrings and necklaces. One of them, bald, with a wispy white beard and a deeply wrinkled face, took the visitors on a walk, to stretch their legs after their long drives. His name was Kenji, and he had been the first j.a.panese to step on Mars, though no one remembered that anymore.

At the city wall they looked out at enormous boulders balancing on nearby hilltops, carved into one fantastic shape after another.

"Have you ever been to the Medusae Fossae?"

Kenji only smiled and shook his head. The kami stones on the hills were honeycombed with rooms and storage s.p.a.ces, he told them, and along with the mohole mound maze they now could house a very great number of people, as many as twenty thousand, for as long as a year. The visitors nodded. It seemed possible it might become necessary.

Kenji took them back to the oldest part of town, where the visitors had been given rooms in the original compound. The rooms were smaller and more spare than most of the town's student apartments, and had a patina of age and use that made them more like nests than rooms. The issei still slept in some of them.

As the visitors walked through these rooms, they did not look at each other. The contrast between their history and those of the Sabis.h.i.+ans was too stark. They stared at the furniture, disturbed, distracted, withdrawn. And after that evening's meal, after a lot of sake had gone down the hatches, one said, "If only we had done something like this."

Nanao began to play a bamboo flute.

"It was easier for us," Kenji said. "We were all j.a.panese together. We had a model."

"It doesn't seem much like the j.a.pan I remember."

"No. But that isn't the true j.a.pan."

They took their cups and a few bottles, and climbed up stairs to a pavilion on top of a wooden tower next to their compound. Up there they could see the trees and rooftops of the city, and the jagged array of boulders standing on the black skysill. It was the last hour of twilight, and except for a wedge of lavender in the west the sky was a rich midnight blue, liberally flecked with stars. A string of paper lanterns hung in a grove of fire maples below.

"We are the true j.a.panese. What you see in Tokyo today is transnational. There is another j.a.pan. We can never go back to that, of course. It was a feudal culture in any case, and had features we cannot accept. But what we do here has its roots in that culture. We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place."

"Kasei Nippon."

"Yes, but not just for Mars! For j.a.pan also. As a model for them, you see? An example of what they can become."

And so they drank rice wine under the stars. Nanao played his flute, and down in the park under the paper lanterns someone laughed. The visitors sat leaning against each other, thinking. They talked for a while about all the sanctuaries, how different they were and yet how much they had in common.

"This congress is a good idea."

The visitors nodded, in various degrees of a.s.sent.

"It's just what we need. I mean, we have been getting together to celebrate John's festival for how many years now? And it's been good. Very pleasant. Very important. We have needed it, for our own sakes. But now things are changing fast. We can't pretend to be a cabal. We have to deal with the rest of them."

They talked specifics for a while: attendants at the congress, security measures, problem issues.

"Who attacked the egg- the egg?"

"A security team from Burroughs. Subaras.h.i.+ and Armscor have organized what they call a sabotage investigation unit, and they've gotten the Transitional Authority to bless the operation. They'll be coming south again, no doubt of that. We have almost waited too long."

"They got the inst.i.tution- the information- from me?"

A snort. "You should resist thinking you are so important."

"It doesn't matter anyway. It's the return of the elevator driving all this."

"And they are building one for Earth as well. And so..."

"We had better act."

Then as the stone sake bottles kept going around, and emptying, they gave up on such seriousness, and talked about the past year, things they had seen in the outback, gossip about mutual acquaintances, new jokes heard. Nanao got out a packet of balloons, and they filled them and tossed them out into the city's night breeze, and watched them float down onto the trees and the old habitats. They pa.s.sed around a canister of nitrous oxide, took breaths and laughed. The stars made a thick net overhead. One told stories of s.p.a.ce, of the asteroid belt. They tried to nick exposed bits of wood with their pocket knives and failed. "This congress will be what we call nema-was.h.i.+. Preparing the ground."

Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.

"Next year on Olympus."

"Next year on Olympus," the others repeated, and drank.

It was 180, M-year 40, when they began to arrive at Dorsa Brevia, in small cars and planes from all over the south. A group of Reds and caravan Arabs checked people's credentials in the wasteland approaches, and more Reds and Bogdanovists were stationed in bunkers located all around the dorsa, armed, in case there was any trouble. The Sabis.h.i.+an intelligence experts, however, thought that the conference was unknown in Burroughs or h.e.l.las or Sheffield, and when they explained why they thought so, people tended to relax, for clearly they had penetrated far into the halls of UNTA, and indeed throughout the whole structure of transnational power on Mars. That was another advantage to the demimonde; they could work in both directions.