Blue Mars Part 36

Maya was surprised: "How to stop her?"

"Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested."

And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.

There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that cla.s.sic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. "Tell me more about it," Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.

Michel had always wanted to take a trip on the Grand Ca.n.a.l, and recently he had talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya's various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underhill, which she refused even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel's desire to travel there by way of the Grand Ca.n.a.l seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. She wasn't sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; that was the trouble.

Now Vendana was saying that Jackie's campaign was to proceed along the Grand Ca.n.a.l, north to south, in a big ca.n.a.l cruiser that doubled as campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the ca.n.a.l's north end, getting ready in the Narrows.

So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she said, "So let's go to Odessa by the Grand Ca.n.a.l, like you said."

Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand Ca.n.a.l- a kind of giant joke, in Maya's opinion- it made him laugh. And that she liked to see. Michel thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she knew full well that it was Michel who was struggling.

So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit of dull white material, shaped like a bird's wing. This ship was a kind of pa.s.senger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circ.u.mnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray's little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship's mast sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird's wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful winds.

On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the Elysium ma.s.sif came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink against the hyacinth sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well, as if to stretch up and see the great ma.s.sif across the bay: bluffs alternated with marshes, and then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea cliff. The horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of black and ivory, and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and gra.s.ses, and streaked with white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the bottom of these cliffs and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the oncoming swells in quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing: long glides down the swells, the wind an offsh.o.r.e powerhouse, especially in the afternoons- the spray, the salt tang in the air- for the North Sea was becoming salty- the wind in her hair, the white V tapestry of the ship's wake, luminous over the indigo sea: beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to sail around the world and then around again, to never land and never change... there were people doing that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships utterly self-sufficient, sailing the great ocean in their own thala.s.sacracy....

But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from DuMartheray was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day- each so full, and oh so lovely- and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live live them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind.... Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue water, all untouched by human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor cafe next to the water in the long twilight, and that day's glorious sail would never come again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: "Ah, I'm alive again," she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel and his tricks- one would think that by now she would have become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to bear. But- well- better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation- and she could endure it- she could even enjoy it, somehow, in s.n.a.t.c.hes- a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous- the big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and star-board. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing light, across black water through a crowd of exotic ships at anchor, no two the same as ship design was going through a period of rapid innovation, new materials making almost anything possible, and all the old designs being reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to again; there a clipper ship, there a schooner, there something that looked to be entirely outrig-ger... finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the dusk. them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind.... Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue water, all untouched by human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor cafe next to the water in the long twilight, and that day's glorious sail would never come again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: "Ah, I'm alive again," she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel and his tricks- one would think that by now she would have become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to bear. But- well- better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation- and she could endure it- she could even enjoy it, somehow, in s.n.a.t.c.hes- a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous- the big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and star-board. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing light, across black water through a crowd of exotic ships at anchor, no two the same as ship design was going through a period of rapid innovation, new materials making almost anything possible, and all the old designs being reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to again; there a clipper ship, there a schooner, there something that looked to be entirely outrig-ger... finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the dusk.

Harbor towns at dusk were all alike. A corniche, a curving narrow park, lines of trees, an arc of ramshackle hotels and restaurants backing the wharves... they checked into one of these hotels, and then strolled the dock, ate under an awning just as Maya had supposed they would. She relaxed in the grounded stability of her chair, watching liquid light oxbow over the viscous black water of the harbor, listening to Michel talk to the people sitting at the next table, tasting the olive oil and bread, the cheeses and ouzo. It was strange how much beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness. And yet she wished the lazy postprandial sprawl in their hard chairs could go on forever.

Of course it didn't. They went up to bed, hand in hand, and she held on to Michel as hard as ever she could. And the next day they hauled their bags across town to the inner harbor, just north of the first ca.n.a.l lock, and up into a big ca.n.a.l boat, long and luxurious, like a barge become cruise ship. They were two of about a hundred pa.s.sengers coming on board; and among the others was Vendana and some of her friends. And further on, on a private ca.n.a.l boat a few locks ahead, were Jackie and her consort of followers, about to travel south as well. On some nights they would be docked in the same ca.n.a.lside towns. "Interesting," Maya drawled, and at the word Michel looked both pleased and worried.

The Grand Ca.n.a.l's bed had been cut by an aerial lens, concentrating sunlight beamed down from the soletta. The lens had flown very high in the atmosphere, surfing on the thermal cloud of gases thrown up by the melted and vaporized rock; it had flown in straight lines, and burned its way across the land without the slightest regard for details of topography. Maya vaguely remembered seeing vids of the process at the time, but the photos had necessarily been taken from a distance, and they had not prepared her at all for the sheer size of the ca.n.a.l. Their long low ca.n.a.l boat motored into the first lock; was lifted up a short distance on infilling water; motored out of an opening gate- and there they were, in a wind-rippled lake two kilometers wide, extending in a straight line directly southwest toward the h.e.l.las Sea, two thousand kilometers away. A great number of boats large and small were proceeding in both directions, keeping to the right with the slower ones closer to the banks, in the standard rules of the road. Almost all the craft were motorized, although many also sported lines of masts in schooner rig, and some of the smallest boats had big triangular sails and no engines-"dhows," Michel said, pointing. An Arab design, apparently.

Somewhere up ahead was Jackie's campaign ship. Maya ignored that and concentrated on the ca.n.a.l, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its const.i.tuent atoms and shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the ca.n.a.l had been left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The ca.n.a.l water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of the ca.n.a.l, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.

The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize s.p.a.ce in the locks; then every few hours a ca.n.a.lside town, hacked into the bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the many ca.n.a.ls on the cla.s.sic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been taken by the ca.n.a.l-besotted astronomers from the ca.n.a.ls and rivers of cla.s.sical antiquity. The first towns they pa.s.sed were quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a ca.n.a.l bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the ca.n.a.l was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.

For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the pa.s.sage of the Israelites, fish darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. "Bizarre," Maya said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and nod.

The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small ca.n.a.lside town called Naarsares. Across the ca.n.a.l was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a view far up and down the ca.n.a.l, and behind the ca.n.a.l to the arid highlands flanking it. Ahead they could see where the ca.n.a.l cut through the wall of Gale Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the ca.n.a.l, a holding area for ships and goods.

After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: "How do you like the ca.n.a.l?" they asked.

"Very interesting," Maya said curtly. She didn't like being asked questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a museum. They weren't going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps- such dark skin, such white regular teeth- strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants- human scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. s.e.xy.

She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more relaxed c.o.c.ktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at the ca.n.a.l and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did not react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It would be lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she didn't even really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought gave her ideas. Faces were so powerful.

His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of Rhodos. Sansei, from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had helped to found this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its surge was the only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial tail-wagging-the-dog approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now he was running for representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to coordinate the Green campaigns more generally.

"We'll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?" Maya asked Vendana later.

"Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale."

Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the young ones turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to continue partying; Maya was forgotten, she wasn't part of that. She stared after them, then joined Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething. She couldn't help it, even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes she hated the young. "I hate hate them," she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their youth- not just their physical perfection, but simply their age- sheer chronology- the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in antic.i.p.ation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she had been looking down on Mars from the them," she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their youth- not just their physical perfection, but simply their age- sheer chronology- the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in antic.i.p.ation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she had been looking down on Mars from the Ares Ares, after they had aerobraked, and were stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent; and shocked at the abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her that had been the best moment of all, that rush of antic.i.p.ation as it all lay there below them, anything possible. That was youth.

"Think of them as fellow travelers," Michel advised now, as he had several times before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. "They're only going to be young for as long as we were- a snap of the fingers, right? And then they're old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century's difference doesn't matter a d.a.m.n. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you."

"Yes yes," Maya said. It was true. "But I still hate them."

The aerial lens's burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so when it had blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim on the northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the ca.n.a.l bed elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the ca.n.a.l's endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a little divided town called Birch's Trenches, while the southwestern locks' larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn, and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the unmelted rim of Gale, overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and pa.s.sengers of pa.s.sing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars campaign. A big gra.s.sy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches of the town.

Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the stage, which gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest of the Free Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they waited for their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others Maya half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could be so revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that Frank used to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and, in a different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on the global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party. MarsFirst was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest terms of the renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she seemed to recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat resembling European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small parties bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds, and the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps, or running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in temporary alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst had become something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the outback, a nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of deal going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie, the way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet on it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.

Their speeches were all about beautiful wonderful Mars and how it was going to be ruined by overpopulation, unless they closed it to further Terran immigration. There was a strong case to be made for that point of view, actually, as could be told by the cheers and applause from the crowd. Their att.i.tude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants; but they cheered anyway. It was a good election issue. Especially if you ignored the risk of war, if you ignored the sheer immensity of Earth, and its primacy in human civilization. Defying it in this way.... Well, it didn't matter; these people didn't give a d.a.m.n about Earth, and they didn't understand it either. So defiance only made Jackie look more brave and beautiful, standing up for a free Mars. The ovation for her was loud and sustained; she had learned a lot since her maladroit speeches during the second revolution, she had gotten quite good. Very good.

When the Green speakers got up to take their turn, and argue for an open Mars, they tried to talk about the danger of a closed-Mars policy, but the response was of course much less enthusiastic than it had been for Jackie- their position sounded like cowardice, to tell the truth, and the desirability of an open Mars, naive. Before arriving in Banks Vendana had offered Maya a chance to speak, but she had declined, and now she was confirmed in her judgment; she did not envy these speakers their unpopular stance before a dwindling crowd.

Afterward the Greens held a small party/postmortem, and Maya critiqued their performance with some severity. "I've never seen such incompetence. You're trying to scare them, but you only sound fearful. The stick is necessary, but you need a carrot as well. The possibility of war is the stick, but you have to tell them why it would be good to keep Terrans coming up, without sounding like idiots. You have to remind them that we all have Terran origins, we are always immigrants here. For you can never leave Earth."

They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After that Maya got Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie's recent liaisons. Mikka was indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst was if anything more anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she had begun to see the outlines of a plan.

When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana and Athos and the rest, until they pa.s.sed a large band playing what they called Sheffield sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum rhythms at once, on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical use. But it suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able to guide the young Greens un.o.btrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted across the dance floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, "Oh, there's Antar- h.e.l.lo, An-tar! These are the people I'm sailing with. We're right behind you, apparently, headed to h.e.l.l's Gate and then Odessa. How's the campaign going?"

And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to object to even when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in the pocket of Earth's Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies, another dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way the Free Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same time to try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system. Hubris. Or perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the young natives' party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then Free Mars's status would be endangered, not only its supermajority but its simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their old fanaticisms intact- churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open feuds- there was definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for during the intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had clearly begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John would have gone crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told you so, and suggested yet another revolution.

But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it could not be banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being gracious, extra gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something. And as he always followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when suddenly Jackie and some others were at his side, and everyone saying h.e.l.lo. Maya nodded to Jackie, who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new companions, carefully introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she saw Jackie watching him, and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly glance to her. Swiftly but very casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk and n.a.z.ik, who were living on the coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two groups were moving slowly toward the music, and soon, if they kept going, they would be thoroughly mingled, and it would be too loud to hear any conversation but one's own. "I like this Sheffield sound," Maya said to Antar. "Help me get through to the dance floor?"

An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But Antar took her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos- or pretended not to. It was an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful up close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.

So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years. Indeed if you concentrated on the ba.s.s drums only, and held to their rhythms, then it was somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that fundamental ground ba.s.s the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen implements and round stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling or rapid thought. It made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood it, but rhythmic sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle gracefully about. He must be a fool but it didn't show. Jackie and Athos had disappeared. And so had Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all. Maya grinned and spun in the dance.

Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He liked sweaty hugs, and looked pleased but curious: "I thought you didn't like this kind of music?"

"Sometimes I do."

Southwest of Gale the ca.n.a.l rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena ma.s.sif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at a time they motored along the ca.n.a.l, or sailed under the power of the ship's line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, pa.s.sing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus- they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of the other h.e.l.las-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sulfuric yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear gla.s.s banks, clear on both sides of the ca.n.a.l, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Gla.s.s Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between the ca.n.a.lside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with gra.s.s lawns and hedges. The Gla.s.s Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a ca.n.a.l cliche from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their pa.s.sage through this region were warm and windless, the ca.n.a.l surface as smooth as the banks, and as clear: a gla.s.s world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the gla.s.s banks and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the pa.s.sing scene it occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.

As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the sh.o.r.es. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding h.e.l.las Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.

The ca.n.a.l cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The ca.n.a.lside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko... on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compa.s.s bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such ca.n.a.ls were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big ca.n.a.l, at Boone's Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a ca.n.a.l, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the ca.n.a.ls had been enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over the water, one's view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.

Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a ca.n.a.lside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the ca.n.a.lside promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the ca.n.a.l, there was an open-air cafe, from which came the plaintive singing of a gypsy violin; she turned into the cafe instinctively, and only at the last minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a ca.n.a.lside table alone, leaning over until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie's eye, so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was getting up to come over.

Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.

"It's beautiful this ca.n.a.l, don't you think?" Jackie was saying.

"A tourist trap," Maya said. "But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched."

"Oh come now," Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos's arm. "Where's your sense of romance?"

"What sense of romance," Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her- every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same- an impossibility- this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young G.o.ddess of Dorsa Brevia!

"Everyone has a sense of romance," Jackie said. The years were not making her any wiser. Another chronological discontinuity. Perhaps taking the longevity treatment so often had clogged her brain. Curious that after such a.s.siduous use of the treatments there should be any signs of aging left at all; in the absence of cell-division error, where exactly was it coming from? There were no wrinkles on Jackie's face, in some ways she could be mistaken for twenty-five; and the look of happy Boonean confidence was as entrenched as ever, the only way really she resembled John- glowing like the neon scrim of the cafe overhead. But despite all that she looked her years, somehow- in her eyes, or in some gestalt at work despite all the medical manipulation.

And then one of Jackie's many a.s.sistants was there among them, panting, gasping, pulling Jackie's arm away from Athos, crying "Jackie, I'm so sorry, so sorry, she's killed, she's killed-"- shivering- "Who?" Jackie said sharply, like a slap.

The young woman (but she was aging) said miserably, "Zo."

"Zo?"

"A flying accident. She fell into the sea."

This ought to slow her down, Maya thought.

"Of course," Jackie said.

"But the birdsuits," Athos protested. He was aging too. "Didn't they...."

"I don't know about that."

"It doesn't matter," Jackie said, shutting them up. Later Maya heard an eyewitness account of the accident, and the image stayed etched in her mind forever- the two fliers struggling in the waves like wet dragonflies, staying afloat so that they would have been okay, until one of the North Sea's big swells picked them up and slammed them into the base of a seastack. After which they had drifted in the foam.

Now Jackie was withdrawn, remote, thinking things over. She and Zo had not been close, Maya had heard; some said they hated each other. But one's child. You were not supposed to survive your children, that was something even childless Maya felt instinctively. But they had abrogated all the laws, biology meant nothing to them anymore; and here they were. If Ann had lost Peter on the falling cable; if Nadia and Art ever lost Nikki... even Jackie, as foolish as she was, had to feel it.

And she did. She was thinking hard, trying to find the way out. But she wasn't going to; and then she would be a different person. Aging- it had nothing to do with time, nothing. "Oh Jackie," Maya said, and put a hand forward. Jackie flinched, and Maya pulled the hand back. "I'm sorry."

But just when people most need help is when their isolation is the most extreme. Maya had learned that on the night of Hiroko's disappearance, when she had tried to comfort Michel. Nothing could be done.

Maya almost cuffed the sniffling young aide, restrained herself: "Why don't you escort Ms. Boone back to your ship. And then keep people away for a while."

Jackie was still lost in her thoughts. Her flinch away from Maya had been instinct only, she was stunned- disbelieving- and the disbelief absorbed all her effort. All just as one would expect, from any human being. Maybe it was even worse if you hadn't gotten along with the child- worse than if you loved them, ah, G.o.d-"Go," Maya said to the aide, and with a look commanded Athos to help. He would certainly make an impression on her, one way or the other. They led her off. She still had the most beautiful back in the world, and held herself like a queen. That would change when the news sank in.

Later Maya found herself down at the southern edge of town, where the lights left off and the starry sheen of the ca.n.a.l was banked by black berms of slag. It looked like the scroll of a life, someone's world line: bright neon squiggles, moving across a landscape to the black horizon. Stars over-head and underfoot. A black piste over which they glided soundlessly.

She walked back to their boat. Stumped down the gang-plank. It was distressing to feel this way for an enemy, to lose an enemy to this kind of disaster. "Who am I going to hate now?" she cried to Michel.

"Well," Michel said, shocked. Then, in a comforting tone: "I'm sure you'll think of someone."

Maya laughed shortly, and Michel cracked a brief smile. Then he shrugged, looking grave. He less than any of them had been lulled by the treatment. Immortal stories in mortal flesh, he had always insisted. He was downright morbid about it. And here another ill.u.s.tration of his point.

"So the all-too-human got hers at last," he said.

"She was an idiot with all those risks, she was asking for it."

"She didn't believe in it."

Maya nodded. No doubt true. Few believed in death anymore, especially the young, who never had, even before the days of the treatment. And now less than ever. But believe in it or not, it was touching down more and more, mostly of course among the superelderly. New diseases, or old diseases returned, or else a rapid holistic collapse with no apparent cause- this last had killed Helmut Bronski and Derek Hastings in recent years, people Maya had met, if not known well. Now an accident had struck someone so much younger than they were that it made no sense, fit no pattern but youthful recklessness. An accident. Random chance.

"Do you still want to get Peter to come?" Michel asked, from out of a whole different realm of thought. What was this, realpolitik from Michel? Ah- he was trying to distract her. She almost laughed again.

"Let's still get in touch with him," she said. "See if he might come." But this was only to rea.s.sure Michel; her heart was not in it.

That was the beginning of the string of deaths.

But she didn't know that then. Then, it was only the end of their ca.n.a.l journey.

The burn of the aerial lens had stopped just short of the eastern edge of the h.e.l.las Basin watershed, between Dao and Harmakhis valleys. The final segment of the ca.n.a.l had been dug by conventional means, and it dropped so precipitously down the steep eastern slope of the basin that frequent locks were necessary, here functioning as dams, so that the ca.n.a.l no longer had the cla.s.sic look it had had in the highlands, but was rather a series of reservoir lakes connected by short broad reddish rivers, extending out from under each clear dam. So they boated across lake after lake, down and down in a slow parade of barges and sailboats and cabin cruisers and steamers, and as they dropped in the locks they could see through their clear walls down the string of lakes like a giant staircase of blue stepping-stones, down to the distant bronze plate of the h.e.l.las Sea. Somewhere in the badlands to right and left, the Dao and Harmakhis canyons cut deeply into the redrock plateau, following their more natural courses down the great slope; but with their tents removed the two canyons were not visible until you were right on their rims, and nothing could be seen of them from the ca.n.a.l.

On board their ship, life went on. Apparently it was much the same on the Free Mars barge, where Jackie was said to be doing well. Still seeing Athos when the two boats were docked in the same town. Accepting sympathy graciously, and then turning the topic elsewhere, usually to the campaign business at hand. And their campaign continued to go well. Under Maya's coaching the Green campaign was being run better than before, but anti-immigrant sentiment was strong. Everywhere they went the other Free Mars councillors and candidates spoke at the rallies, and Jackie only made occasional short, dignified appearances. She was a lot more powerful and intelligent a speaker than she used to be. But by watching the others speak Maya got a good sense of who was at the top level of the organization, and several of these people looked very happy to have gained the limelight. One young man, another one of Jackie's young men, named Nanedi, stood out in particular. And Jackie did not seem very pleased to see it; she became cool to him, she turned more and more to Athos, and Mikka, and even Antar. Some nights she appeared a veritable queen among the consorts. But Maya could see under that, to the truth she had witnessed in Anteus. From a hundred meters away she could see the darkness at the heart of things.

Nevertheless, when Peter returned her call, Maya asked him to meet her for a talk about the current elections; and when Peter arrived, Maya rested, watchfully. Something would happen.

Peter looked relaxed, calm. He lived in the Charitum Montes these days, working on the Argyre wilderness project, and also with a co-op making Mars-to-s.p.a.ce planes for people who wanted to bypa.s.s the elevator. Relaxed, calm, even a bit withdrawn. Simon-like.

Antar was already angry at Jackie, for embarra.s.sing him more than usual by her lack of discretion with Athos. Mikka was even angrier than Antar. Now, with Peter on hand, Jackie was baffling and then angering Athos as well, as she devoted all her attention to Peter. She was as reliable as a magnet. But she was attracted to Peter, who was as inert to her as always, iron to her magnet. It was depressing how predictable they were. But useful: the Free Mars campaign was subtly losing momentum. Antar was no longer so bold as to suggest to the Qahiran Mahjaris that they forget about Arabia during its time of troubles. Mikka was intensifying the MarsFirst critique of various Free Mars positions unrelated to immigration, and pulling some of the other members of the executive council into his sphere. Yes- Peter was acting as intensifier to Jackie's impolitic side, making her erratic and ineffective. So it all was working as Maya had planned; one only had to roll men toward Jackie like bowling b.a.l.l.s, and over she would go. And yet Maya felt no sense of triumph.

And then they were pushing out of the final lock into Malachite Bay, a funnel-shaped indentation of the h.e.l.las Sea, its shallow water covered by a sun-beaten windchop. Farther out they pitched gently onto the darker sea, where many of the barges and smaller craft turned north and made toward h.e.l.l's Gate, the largest deepwater harbor on the east coast of h.e.l.las. Their barge followed this parade, and soon the great bridge crossing Dao Vallis appeared over the horizon, then the building-covered walls at the entrance to the canyon; then the masts, the long jetty, the harbor slips.

Maya and Michel went ash.o.r.e, and made their way up the cobbled and staired streets, to the old Praxis dorms under the bridge. There was an autumn harvest festival the next week that Michel wanted to attend, and then they would be off to Minus One Island, and Odessa. After they checked in and dropped their bags, Maya took off for a walk through the streets of h.e.l.l's Gate, happy to be out of the ca.n.a.l boat's confinement, able to get off by herself. It was near sunset, near the end of a day that had begun in the Grand Ca.n.a.l. That trip was over.

Maya had last visited h.e.l.l's Gate back in 2121, during her first piste tour of the basin, working for Deep Waters, and traveling with- with Diana! that was her name! Esther's granddaughter, and a niece of Jackie's. That big cheerful girl had been Maya's introduction to the young natives, really- not only by way of her contacts in the new settlements around the basin, but in herself, in her att.i.tudes and ideas- the way Earth was just a word to her, the way her own generation absorbed all her interest, all her efforts. That had been the first time Maya had begun to feel herself slipping out of the present, into the history books. Only the most intense effort had allowed her to continue to engage the moment, to have an influence on those times. But she had made that effort, had been an influence. It had been one of the great periods of her life, perhaps the last great period of her life. The years since then had been like a stream in the southern highlands, wandering through cracks and grabens and then sinking into some unexpected pothole.

But once, sixty years before, she had stood right here, under the great bridge that carried the piste from cliff to cliff over the mouth of Dao canyon- the famous h.e.l.l's Gate bridge, with the city falling down the steep sun-washed slopes on both sides of the river, facing the sea. At that time there had been only sand out there, except for a band of ice visible on the horizon. The town had been smaller and ruder, the stone steps of the staircase streets rough and dusty. Now they had been polished on their tops by feet toiling up them. The dust had been washed away by the years; everything was clean and had a dark patina; now it was a beautiful Mediterranean hillside harbor, perched in the shadow of a bridge that rendered the whole town a miniature, like something in a paperweight or a postcard from Portugal. Quite beautiful in an autumn's early sunset, all shadowed and florid to the west, everything sepia, the moment trapped in amber. But once she had pa.s.sed through this way with a vibrant young Amazon, when a whole new world was opening up, the native Mars she had helped to bring into being- all of it revealed to her, while she was still a part of it.

The sun set on these memories. Maya returned to the Praxis building, still located up under the bridge, the final staircase to it as steeply pitched as a ladder. Ascending it with pushes on her thighs to help, Maya suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu. She had done this before- not only climbed these steps, but climbed them with the sense that she had climbed them before- with precisely the same feeling that in a yet earlier visit, she had been an effective part of the world.

Of course- she had been one of the first explorers of h.e.l.las Basin, in the years right after Underhill. That had slipped her mind. She had helped to found Lowpoint, and then had driven around, exploring the basin before anyone else had, even Ann. So that later, when working for Deep Waters, and seeing the new native settlements, she had felt similarly removed from the contemporary scene. "My G.o.d," she exclaimed, appalled. Layer on layer, life after life- they had lived so long! It was like reincarnation in a way, or eternal recurrence.

There was some little kernel of hope at the middle of that feeling. Back then, in that first feeling of slipping away, she had started a new life. Yes she had- she had moved to Odessa, and made her mark on the revolution, helping it to succeed by hard work, and a lot of thought about why people support change, about how to change without engendering a bitter backlash, which though perhaps decades removed yet always seemed to smash back into any revolutionary success, wrecking what was good in it. And it looked as though they had indeed avoided that bitterness.

At least until now. Perhaps that was the best way of looking at what was happening in this election; an inevitable backlash of some kind. Perhaps she had not succeeded as much as she had thought- perhaps she had only failed less drastically than Arkady, or John, or Frank. Who could be sure; so hard to say anymore what was really going on in history, it was too vast, too inchoate. So much was happening everywhere that anything might be happening anywhere. Co-ops, republics, feudal monarchies... no doubt there were Oriental satrapies out there in the back country, in some caravan gone wrong... so that any characterization one made of history would have some validity somewhere. This thing she was involved in now, the young native settlements demanding water, going off the net and outside UNTA's control- no- it wasn't that- something else....