Green Mars Part 33

Maya stared down at the scene, which looked so much like something from her youth, some river... the upper Rioni, in Georgia? The Colorado, seen once on a visit to America? She couldn't recall. So fuzzy, all that life. "It's beautiful. And so..." She shook her head; the sight had a quality she could not recall ever seeing before, as if it were out of time, a prophetic glimpse into a distant future.

"Here, let's go up the road a bit farther and see Hadriaca."

Maya nodded, and they returned to the car. Once or twice as they continued uphill, the road rose far enough above the foundation to give them another view down onto the canyon floor, and Maya saw that the little river continued to cut through rocks and vegetation. But Diana did not pause, and Maya saw no sign of settlements.

At the upper end of the tented canyon there was a big concrete block of a physical plant, housing the gas exchange mechanisms, and the pumping station. A forest of windmills stood on the rising slope to the north of this station, the big props all facing west and slowly spinning. Above that array rose the broad low cone of Hadriaca Patera, a volcano whose sides were unusually furrowed by a dense crisscrossing network of lava channels, the later ones cutting over the earlier ones. Now the winter's snowpack had filled the channels, but not the exposed black rock between them, which had been blown clear by the strong winds accompanying the snowstorms. The result was an enormous black cone sticking into the bruised sky, festooned with hundreds of tangled white ribbons.

"Very handsome," Maya said. "Can they see it from the canyon floor?"

"No. But a lot of them at this end work up on the rim anyway, at the well or the power station. So they see it every day."

"These settlers- who are they?"

"Let's go meet them and see," Diana said. Maya nodded, enjoying Diana's style, which still reminded her a bit of Ann. The sansei and yonsei were all strange to Maya, but Diana much less than most- a bit private perhaps, but compared to her more exotic contemporaries, and the Zygote kids, welcomely ordinary.

While Maya observed Diana, thinking this, Diana drove their rover into the canyon, down a steep road laid over a giant ancient talus slope near the head of Dao. This was where the original aquifer outburst had occurred, but there was very little chaotic terrain- just t.i.tanic talus slopes, permanently settled at the angle of repose.

The canyon floor itself was basically flat and unbroken. Soon they were driving down it, on a regolith track sprayed with a fixative. The track ran by the stream where it could. After about an hour's driving they pa.s.sed a green meadow, tucked into the lazy curve of a fat oxbow. In the center of this meadow, in a knot of piplusmn;on pine and aspen, huddled a gathering of low s.h.i.+ngled roofs, with faint smoke rising from a solitary chimney.

Maya stared at the settlement (corral and pasture, truck garden, barn, bee boxes), marveling at its beauty, and its archaic wholeness, its seeming detachment from the great redrock desert plateau above the canyon- detachment from everything really, from history, from Time itself. A mesocosm. What did they think in those little buildings of Mars and Earth, and all their troubles? Why should they care?

Diana stopped the car, and a few people came out and crossed the meadow to see who they were. Pressure under the tent was 500 millibars, which helped to support the weight of the tenting, as the atmosphere at large was averaging about 250 millibars now. So Maya popped the lock of the car, and got out without her helmet on, feeling undressed and uncomfortable.

These settlers were all young natives. Most of them had come down in the last few years from Burroughs and Elysium. Some Terrans lived in the valley too, they said- not many, but there was a Praxis program that brought up groups from smaller countries, and here in the valley they had recently welcomed some Swiss, and Greeks, and Navajo. And there was a Russian settlement down near h.e.l.l's Gate. So they heard some different languages in the valley, but English was the lingua franca, and the first tongue of almost all of the natives. They had accents to their English that Maya had not heard before, and made odd mistakes in grammar, at least to her ear; almost every verb after the first one was in present tense, for instance. "We went downstream and see some Swiss are working on the river. Stabilizing the banks in some places, with plants or rocks. They say in a few years the streambed is flushed enough for the water to clear."

Maya said, "It will still be the color of the cliffs, and the sky."

"Yeah, of course. But clear water looks better than silty water, somehow."

"How do you know?" Maya enquired.

They squinted and frowned, thinking about it. "Just from the way it looks in your hand, eh?"

Maya smiled. "It's wonderful you have so much room. Unbelievable what big s.p.a.ces they can roof these days, isn't it?"

They shrugged, as if they hadn't thought of it that way. One said, "We look forward to the day when we take the tenting off, actually. We miss the rain, and the wind."

"How do you know?"

But they knew.

She and Diana drove on, pa.s.sing very small villages. Isolated farms. A pasture of sheep. Vineyards. Orchards. Cultivated fields. Big packed greenhouses, gleaming like labs. Once a coyote ran across the track ahead of their car. Then on a high little lawn under a talus slope Diana spotted a brown bear, and later some Dall sheep. In the little villages people were trading food and tools in open marketplaces, and talking over the day's events. They did not monitor the news from Earth, and seemed to Maya astonis.h.i.+ngly ignorant of it. All but a little community of Russians, who spoke a mongrel Russian which nevertheless brought tears to Maya's eyes, and who told her that things on Earth were falling apart. As usual. They were happy to be in the canyon.

In one of the small villages there was an outdoor market in full swing, and there in the middle of the crowd was Nirgal, chomping an apple and nodding vigorously as someone spoke to him. He saw Maya and Diana get out of the car and rushed over and hugged her, lifting her off the ground. "Maya, what are you doing here?"

"On a tour from Odessa. This is Diana, Paul's daughter. What are you doing here?"

"Oh, visiting the valley. They've got some soil problems I'm trying to help with."

"Tell me about it."

Nirgal was an ecological engineer, and seemed to have inherited some of Hiroko's talent. The valley mesocosm was relatively new, they were still planting seedlings all up and down it, and though the soil had been prepped, nitrogen and pota.s.sium deficiencies were causing many plants not to thrive. As they walked around the marketplace Nirgal discussed this, and pointed out local crops and imported goods, describing the economics of the valley. "So they're not self-sufficient?" Maya asked.

"No no. Not even close. But they do grow a lot of their own food, and then trade other crops, or give them away."

He was working on eco-economics as well, it seemed. And he already had a lot of friends here; people kept coming up to hug him, and as he had his arm over Maya's shoulders, she got pulled into these embraces and then introduced to one young native after another, all of them looking delighted to see Nirgal again. He remembered all their names, asked how they were doing, kept up the questions as they continued to circulate through the market, past tables of bread and vegetables, and bags of barley and fertilizer, and baskets of berries and plums, until there was a whole little crowd of them like a mobile party, which finally settled around long pine tables outside a tavern. Nirgal kept Maya at his side throughout the rest of the afternoon, and she watched all the young faces, relaxed and happy, observing how much Nirgal was like John- how people warmed to him, and then were warm to each other- every occasion like a festival, touched by his grace. They poured each other's drinks, they fed Maya a big meal "all local, all local," they talked with each other in their quick Martian English, detailing gossip and explaining their dreams. Oh, he was a special boy all right, as fey as Hiroko and yet utterly normal, at one and the same time. Diana for instance was simply latched to his other side, and a lot of the other young women there looked like they wished they were in her place, or Maya's. Perhaps had been in the past. Well, there were some advantages to being an ancient babushka. She could mother him shamelessly and he only grinned, and nothing they could do. Yes, there was something charismatic about him: lean jaw, mobile humorous mouth, wide-set, brown, slightly Asiatic eyes, thick eyebrows, unruly black hair, long graceful body, though he was not as tall as most of them. Nothing exceptional. It was mostly his manner, friendly and curious and p.r.o.ne to hilarity.

"What about politics?" she asked him late that night, as they walked together from the village down to the stream. "What do you say to them?"

"I use the Dorsa Brevia doc.u.ment. My notion is that we should enact it immediately, in our daily lives. Most of the people in this valley have left the official network, you see, and are living in the alternative economy."

"I noticed. That's one of the things that got me up here."

"Yeah, well, you see what's happening. The sansei and yonsei like it. They think of it as a homegrown system."

"The question is, what does UNTA think of it."

"But what can they do? I don't think they care, from what I can see." He was constantly traveling, and had been now for years, and had seen a lot of Mars- much more than Maya had, she realized. "We're hard to see, and we don't appear to be challenging them. So they don't bother with us. They're not even aware how widespread we are."

Maya shook her head dubiously. They stood on the bank of the stream, which in this spot was noisily gurgling over shallows, the night-purple surface scarcely reflecting the starlight. "It's so silty," Nirgal said.

"What do you call yourselves?" she asked.

"What do you mean?"

"It's a kind of political party, Nirgal, or a social movement. You must call it something."

"Oh. Well, some say we're Booneans, or a kind of Marsfirst wing. I don't think that's right. I don't name it, myself. Maybe Ka. Or Free Mars. We say that, as a kind of greeting. Verb, noun, whatever. Free Mars."

"Hmm," Maya said, feeling the chill humid wind on her cheek, Nirgal's arm around her waist. An alternative economy, functioning without the rule of law, was intriguing but dangerous; it could turn into a black economy run by gangsters, and there was very little that any idealistic village could do about it. So that as a solution to the Transitional Authority it was somewhat illusory, she judged.

But when she expressed these reservations to Nirgal, he agreed. "I don't think of this as the final step. But I think it helps. It's what we can do now. And then, when the time comes..."

Maya nodded in the darkness. It was another Creche Crescent, she thought suddenly. They walked back up to the village together, where the party was still going on. There five young women at least began jockeying to be the last one at Nirgal's side when the party ended, and with a laugh only slightly edged (if she were young they would not have had a chance chance) Maya left them to it and went to bed.

After two days' driving downstream from the market village, still forty kilometers from h.e.l.l's Gate, they came around a bend in the canyon and could see down the length of it, to the towers of the piste's suspension bridge. Like something out of a different world, Maya thought, with a different technology entirely. The towers were six hundred meters high, and ten kilometers apart- a truly immense bridge, dwarfing the town of h.e.l.l's Gate itself, which did not roll over the horizon for another hour, and then came visible from the rim downward, its buildings spilling down the steep canyon walls like some dramatic seafront village in Spain or Portugal- but all in the shadow of the enormous bridge. Enormous, yes- and yet there were bridges twice as big as it in Chryse, and with the continual improvements in materials, there was no end in sight. The new elevator cable's carbon nanotube filament had a tensile strength that was overkill even for the elevator's needs, and using it you could build just about any surface bridge you could possibly imagine; people spoke of bridging Marineris, and there were jokes about running cable car lines between the prince volcanoes on Tharsis, to save people the fifteen-kilometer vertical drops between the three peaks.

Back in h.e.l.l's Gate Maya and Diana returned the car to the garage, and had a big dinner in a restaurant about halfway up the wall of the valley, under the bridge. After that Diana had friends she wanted to see, so Maya excused herself and went to the Deep Waters offices, and her room. But outside the gla.s.s doors of her room, above its little balcony, the great span of the bridge arched through the stars, and remembering Dao Canyon and its people, and black Hadriaca ribboned white with its snow-filled channels, she had great difficulty getting to sleep. She went out and sat curled in a blanket, on a chair on her balcony, for a good part of the night, watching the underside of the giant bridge and thinking about Nirgal and the young natives, and what they meant.

The next morning they were supposed to take the next circ.u.mh.e.l.las train, but Maya asked Diana to drive her out onto the basin floor instead, to see in person what happened to the water running down the Dao River. Diana was happy to oblige.

At the lower end of the town, the stream poured into a narrow reservoir, dammed by a thick concrete dam and pump, located right at the tent wall. Outside the tent, water was carried off across the basin in a fat insulated pipeline, set on three-meter pylons. The pipeline ran down the broad gentle eastern slope of the basin, and they followed it in another company rover, until the crumbled cliffs of h.e.l.l's Gate disappeared over the low dunes of the horizon behind them. An hour later the towers of the bridge were still visible, poking up over the skyline.

A few kilometers farther on, the pipeline ran out over a reddish plain of cracked ice- a kind of glacier, except that it fanned out right to left over the plain for as far as they could see. It was the current sh.o.r.e of their new sea, in fact, or at least one lobe of it, frozen in its place. The pipeline ran out over the ice, then descended into it, disappearing a couple of kilometers from sh.o.r.e.

A small, nearly submerged crater ring stuck out into the ice like a curving double peninsula, and Diana followed tracks onto one peninsula and drove until they were as far out in the ice as they could get. The visible world before them was completely covered with ice; behind them lay the rising slope of sand. "This lobe extends out a long way now," Diana said. "Look there-" She pointed at a silver twinkling on the western horizon.

Maya took a pair of binoculars from the dash. On the horizon she could make out what appeared to be the northern edge of the lobe of ice, where it gave way again to rising sand dunes. As she watched, a ma.s.s of ice at this border toppled, looking like a Greenland glacier caving into the sea, except that when it hit the sand it shattered into hundreds of white pieces. Then there was a spill of water, running as dark as the Ruby River out over the sand. Dust dashed up and away from this stream, and blew south on the wind. The edges of the new flow began to whiten, but Maya saw that it was nothing like the frightening speed with which the flood in Marineris had frozen in '61. It stayed liquid, with hardly any frost steam, for minute after minute, right out there in the open air! Oh the world was warmer, all right, and the atmosphere thicker; up to 260 millibars sometimes down here in the basin, and the temperature outside at the moment was 271K. A very pleasant day! She surveyed the surface of the ice lobe through the binoculars, and saw that it was liberally dotted by the bright white sheens of melt.w.a.ter ponds that had refrozen clean and flat.

"Things are changing," Maya said, although not to Diana; and Diana did not reply.

Eventually the flood of new dark water whitened all over its surface, and stopped moving. "It's coming out somewhere else now," Diana said. "It works like sedimentation in a river delta. The main channel for this lobe is actually well to the south of here."

"I'm glad I saw this. Let's get back."

They drove back to h.e.l.l's Gate, and that night had supper together again, on the same restaurant terrace under the great bridge. Maya asked Diana a great number of questions about Paul and Esther and Kasei and Nirgal and Rachel and Emily and Reull and the rest of Hiroko's brood, and their children and their children's children. What were they doing now? What were they going to do? Did Nirgal have lots of followers?

"Oh yes, of course. You saw how it is. He travels all the time, and there's a whole network of natives in the northern cities who take care of him. Friends, and friends of friends, and so on."

"And you think these people will support a..."

"Another revolution?"

"I was going to say independence movement."

"Whatever you call it, they'll support it. They'll support Nirgal. Earth looks like a nightmare to them, a nightmare trying to drag us down into it. They don't want that."

"They?" Maya said, smiling.

"Oh me too." Diana smiled back. "Us."

As they continued clockwise around h.e.l.las, Maya had cause to remember that conversation. A consortium from Elysium, without any metanat or UNTA connections that Maya could discover, had just finished roofing over the Harmakhis-Reull valleys, using the same method that had been used to roof Dao. Now there were hundreds of people in those two linked canyons, outfitting the aerators and working up soils, and seeding and planting the nascent biosphere of the canyons' mesocosm. Their on-site greenhouses and manufacturing plants were producing much of what they needed for this work, and metals and gases were being mined out of the badlands of Hesperia to the east, and brought into the town at the mouth of Harmakhis Vallis called Sukhumi. These people had the starter programs and the seeds, and they did not appear to put much stock in the Transitional Authority; they had not asked permission from it to engage in their project, and they actively disliked the official crews from the Black Sea Group, who were usually Terran metanat representatives.

They were hungry for manpower, however, and were happy to get more technicians or generalists from Deep Waters, and any equipment they could cadge from its headquarters. Practically every group Maya met in the Harmakhis-Reull region made a pitch for aid, and most of them were young natives, who seemed to think they had just as much chance at the equipment as anyone else, even though they were not affiliated with Deep Waters or any other company.

And everywhere south of Harmakhis-Reull, in the ragged ejecta hills behind the rim of the basin, there were dowsing crews, out looking for aquifers. As in the roofed canyons, most of these crews had been born on Mars, and a lot of them had been born on Mars since '61. And they were different, profoundly different, sharing interests and enthusiasms perfectly incommunicable to any other generation, as if genetic drift or disruptive selection had produced a bimodal distribution, so that members of the old h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens were now coinhabiting the planet with a new were now coinhabiting the planet with a new h.o.m.o ares h.o.m.o ares, creatures tall and slender and graceful and utterly at home, chattering to each other in a profound self-absorption as they did the work that would make h.e.l.las Basin into a sea.

And this gigantic project was perfectly natural work to them. At one stop on the piste Maya and Diana got out and drove with some friends of Diana's out onto one of the ridges of the Zea Dorsa, which ran out onto the southeast quarter of the basin floor. Now most of these dorsa were peninsulas running out under another ice lobe, and Maya looked down at the creva.s.se-riven glaciers to each side and tried to imagine a time when the surface of the sea would in fact lie hundreds of meters overhead, so that these craggy old basalt ridges would be nothing but blips on some s.h.i.+p's sonar, home to starfish and shrimp and krill and extensive varieties of engineered bacteria. That time was not far off, amazing though it was to realize it. But Diana and her friends, these in particular of Greek ancestry, or was it Turkish- these young Martian dowsers were not awed by this imminent future, nor by their project's vastness. It was their work, their life- to them it was was human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren't even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer- they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing. human scale, there was nothing unnatural about it. On Mars, simply enough, human work consisted of pharaonic projects like this one. Creating oceans. Building bridges that made the Golden Gate look like a toy. They weren't even watching this ridge, which would only be visible for a while longer- they were talking about other things, mutual friends in Sukhumi, that sort of thing.

"This is a stupendous act!" Maya told them sharply. "This is magnitudes bigger than anything people have been able to do before! This sea is going to be the size of the Caribbean! There's never been any project anything like this on Earth-no project! Not even close!" project! Not even close!"

A pleasant oval-faced woman with beautiful skin laughed. "I don't give a d.a.m.n about Earth," she said.

The new piste curved around the southern rim, crossing transversely some steep ridges and ravines which were called the Axius Valles. These corrugations ran from the rim's rough hills down into the basin, forcing the piste viaduct to alternate between great arching bridges and deep cuts, or tunnels. The train they had boarded after the Zea Dorsa was a short private one belonging to the Odessa office, so Maya got it to stop at most of the small stations along this stretch, and she got out to meet and talk with the dowsing and construction crews. At one stop they were all Earthborn emigrants, and to Maya much more comprehensible than the blithe natives- normal-sized people, staggering around amazed and enthusiastic, or dismayed and complaining, in any case aware of how strange their enterprise was. They took Maya down a tunnel in a ridge, and it turned out that the ridge was a lava tunnel running down from Amphitrites Patera, its cylindrical cavity much the same size as Dorsa Brevia's, but tilted at a sharp angle. The engineers were pumping the Amphitrites aquifer's water into it, and using it as their pipeline to the basin floor. So now, as the grinning Earthborn hydrologists showed her as she stepped into an observation gallery cut into the side of the lava tube, black water was racing down the bottom of the huge tunnel, barely covering its bottom even at 200 cubic meters a second, the roar of its splas.h.i.+ng echoing in the empty cylinder of basalt. "Isn't it great?" the emigrants demanded, and Maya nodded, happy to be with people whose reactions she could understand. "Just like a d.a.m.n big storm drain, isn't it?"

But back at the train, the young natives nodded at Maya's exclamations- lava tube pipeline, of course- very big, yes, it would be wouldn't it- saved her some pipe for the less fortunate operations, yes? And then they went back to discussing some people they knew that Maya had never heard of.

As the train continued they rounded the southwest arc of the basin, and the piste led them north. They rode over four or five more big pipelines, snaking out of high canyons in the h.e.l.lespontus Montes to their left, canyons between bare serrated ridges of rock, like something out of Nevada or Afghanistan, the peaks whitened with snow. Out the windows to the right, down on the basin floor, there were more spreading patches of dirty broken ice, often marked by the flat white patches of newer spills. They were building on the hilltops by the piste, little tent towns like places out of the Tuscan Renaissance. "These foothills will be a popular place to live," Maya said to Diana. "They'll be between the mountains and the sea, and some of these canyon mouths should end up as little harbors."

Diana nodded. "Nice sailing."

As they came around the last curve of their circ.u.mnavigation, the piste had to cross the Niesten Glacier, the frozen remainder of the ma.s.sive outburst that had drowned Low Point in '61. There was no easy way to make this crossing, as the glacier was thirty-five kilometers wide at its narrowest point, and no one had yet marshaled the time and equipment to build a suspension bridge over it. Instead several support pylons had been rammed through the ice and secured in the rock below. These pylons had prows like icebreakers on their upstream side, and on their downstream side there was attached a kind of pontoon bridge, which rode over the pa.s.sing ice of the glacier using cus.h.i.+oned smart pads that expanded or contracted to compensate for drops and rises in the ice.

The train slowed for the crossing of this pontoon, and as they glided over it Maya looked upstream. She could see where the glacier fell out of the gap between two fanglike peaks, very near Niesten Crater. Never-identified rebels had broken open the Niesten aquifer with a thermonuclear explosion, and released one of the five or six largest outbursts of '61, almost as big as the one that had harrowed the Marineris canyons. The ice under them was still a bit radioactive. But now it lay under the bridge frozen and still, the aftermath of that terrible flood nothing more than an astonis.h.i.+ngly broken field of ice blocks. Beside her Diana said something about climbers who liked to ascend the icefalls on the glacier for the fun of it. Maya shuddered with disgust. People were so crazy. She thought of Frank, carried away by the Marineris flood, and cursed out loud.

"You don't approve?" Diana asked.

She cursed again.

An insulated pipeline ran down the midline of the ice, under the pontoon and down toward Low Point. They were still draining the bottom of the broken aquifer. Maya had overseen the building of Low Point, she had lived there for years and years, with an engineer whose name she could not now recall- and now they were pumping up what was left at the bottom of Niesten aquifer, to add to the water over that drowned city. The great outburst of '61 was now reduced to a slender pipeline's worth of water, channelized and regulated.

Maya felt the turbulent maelstrom of emotions inside her, stirred by all she had seen on her circ.u.mnavigation, by all that had happened and all that was going to happen... ah, the floods within her, the flash floods in her mind! If only she could accomplish the same yoking of her spirit that they had with this aquifer- drain it, control it, make it sane. But the hydrostatic pressures were so intense, the outbreaks when they came so fierce. No pipeline could hold it.

"Things are changing," she told Michel and Spencer. "I don't think we understand things anymore."

She settled back into her life in Odessa, happy to be back but also disturbed, inquisitive, seeing everything anew. On the wall above her desk at the office she kept a drawing by Spencer, of an alchemist flinging a big volume into a turbulent sea. At the bottom he had written, "I'll drown my book."

She left the apartment every morning early, and walked down the corniche to the Deep Waters offices near the dry waterfront, next to another Praxis firm called Separation de L'Atmosphere. There she worked through the days directing the synthesis team, coordinating the field units, and concentrating now on the small mobile operations that were moving around the basin floor, doing last-minute mineral mining and rearrangement of the ice. Occasionally she worked on the design of these little roving hamlets, enjoying the return to ergonomics, her oldest skill aside from cosmonautics itself. Working one day on changing room cabinets, she looked down at her sketches and felt a wash of deja vu, and wondered if she had done exactly this bit of work before, sometime in the lost past. She wondered also why it was that skills were so robust in the memory, while knowledge was so fragile. She could not for the life of her recall the education that had given her this ergonomic expertise, but she had it nevertheless, despite the many decades that had pa.s.sed since she had last put it to use.

But the mind was strange. Some days the sense of deja vu returned as palpably as an itch, such that every single event of that day felt like something that had happened before. It was a sensation that became more and more uncomfortable the longer it persisted, she found, until the world became an acute frightful prison, and she nothing more than a creature of fate, a clockwork mechanism unable to do anything that she had not done before in some forgotten past. Once, when it lasted almost a week, she was almost paralyzed by it; she had never had the meaning of life a.s.saulted so viciously, never. Michel was quite concerned about it, and a.s.sured her it was probably the mental manifestation of a physical problem; this Maya believed, sort of, but as nothing he prescribed helped to ease the feeling, it was of little practical help. She could only endure, and hope for the sensation to pa.s.s.

When it did pa.s.s, she did her best to forget the experience. And then when it recurred, she would say to Michel "Oh my G.o.d, I'm feeling it again," and he would say "Hasn't this happened before?" and they would laugh, and she would do her best to make do. She would dive into the particulars of her current work, planning for the dowsing teams, giving them their a.s.signments based on the areographers' reports from the rim, and the results of other dowsing teams coming back in. It was interesting, even exciting work, a sort of gigantic treasure hunt, which necessitated a continuing education in areography, in the secret habits of submartian water. This absorption helped with the deja vu quite a bit, and after a while it became just another of the odd sensations with which her mind afflicted her, worse than the exhilarations but better than the depressions, or the occasional moments when rather than feeling that something had happened before, she was struck by the sense that nothing like this had ever happened ever, even though she might be doing something like stepping onto a tram. Jamais vu Jamais vu, Michel called it, looking concerned. Quite dangerous, apparently. But nothing to be done about it. Sometimes it was less than helpful, living with someone trained in psychological problems. One could easily become nothing more than a spectacular case study. They would need several pseudonyms to describe her.

In any case, on the days she was lucky and feeling well she worked completely abstracted, and quit somewhere between four and seven, tired and satisfied. She walked home in the characteristic light of the late day in Odessa: the whole town in the shadow of the h.e.l.lespontus, the sky therefore intense with light and color, the clouds brilliantly lit as they sailed east over the ice, and everything below burnished with reflected light, in that infinite array of colors between blue and red, different every day, every hour. She strolled lazily under the leaves of the trees in the park, and through the locked gate into the Praxis building, then up to the apartment to eat supper with Michel, who usually had finished a long day of doing therapy with homesick newcomers from Earth, or old-timers with a variety of complaints like Maya's deja vu or Spencer's dissociation- memory loss, anomie, phantom smells and the like- odd gerontological problems, which had seldom cropped up in shorter-lived people, giving ominous warnings that the treatments might not be penetrating the brain quite as fully as they needed them to.

Very few nisei or sansei or yonsei ever came to visit him, however, which surprised him. "No doubt it is a good sign for the long-term prospects of Martian habitation," he said one evening as he came up from a quiet day in his office on the bottom floor.

Maya shrugged. "They could be crazy and not know it. It looked like it might be that way to me, when I went around the basin."

Michel eyed her. "Do you mean crazy or just different?"

"I don't know. They just seem unaware of what they're doing."

"Every generation is its own secret society. And these are what you might call areurges. It is their nature to operate the planet. You have to give them that."

Usually by the time Maya got home the apartment would already be fragrant with the smells of Michel's attempts at Provencal cooking, and there would be an open bottle of red wine on the table. Through most of the year they ate out on the balcony, and when he was in town and feeling up to it Spencer joined them, as would their frequent visitors. As they ate they talked over the day's work, and the events around the world, and back on Earth.

And so she lived the ordinary days of an ordinary life, la vie quotidienne la vie quotidienne, and Michel would share it with his sly smile, a bald man with an elegant Gallic face, ironic and good-humored, and ever so objective. The evening light would concentrate itself into the band of sky over the black jagged peaks of the h.e.l.lespontus, brilliant pinks and silvers and violets shading up into dark indigos and bruised blacks, and their voices would soften in that last part of the twilight Michel called entre chien et loup entre chien et loup. And then they would pick up the plates, and go back inside, and clean up the kitchen- everything habitual, everything known, deep in that deja vu that one determines oneself, that makes one happy.

And then, on some evenings, Spencer would have arranged for her to attend a meeting, usually in one of the communes in the upper town. These were loosely affiliated with Marsfirst, but the people who came to the meetings did not seem much like the radical Marsfirsters whom Kasei had led at the Dorsa Brevia congress- they were more like Nirgal's friends in Dao, younger, less dogmatic, more self-absorbed, happier. It disturbed Maya to meet them even though she wanted to, and she spent the day before a meeting in a state of restless antic.i.p.ation. Then after dinner a small band of Spencer's friends would join them at the Praxis building, and accompany her as they made their way through town, taking trams and then walking, usually up into the upper reaches of Odessa, where the more crowded apartments were located.

Here entire buildings were becoming alternative strongholds, in which the occupants paid their rent and held some downtown jobs, but otherwise disconnected themselves from the official economy; they farmed in greenhouses and on terraces and roofs, and did programming and construction and small instrument and agritool manufacture, for selling and trading and giving among themselves. Their meetings took place in communal living rooms, or out in the little parks and gardens of the upper town, under the trees. Sometimes groups of Reds from out of town joined them.