Green Mars Part 37

And Art's squint told her she was right. "Well," he said, "whatever. With Sax it's kind of a joke. People talk about the revenge of the lab rats, that kind of thing."

"I don't like it." The idea of another revolution seemed to be gaining a life of its own now, a momentum independent of any real logic; it was just something they were doing, were always going to have done. Out of her control, and out of anyone else's control. Even their collective efforts, scattered and hidden as they were, seemed not to be coordinated or conceived with any clear idea of what they were going to try to do, or why. It was just happening.

She tried to express some of this to Art, and he nodded. "That's history, I guess. It's messy. You just have to ride the tiger and hold on. You've got a lot of different people in this movement, and they all have their own ideas. But look, I think we're doing better than last time. I'm working on some initiatives back on Earth, negotiating with Switzerland and some people at the World Court and so on. And Praxis is keeping us really well informed about what's going on among the metanationals on Earth, which means we won't just get swept into something we don't understand."

"True," Maya admitted. The news and a.n.a.lysis packages sent up from Praxis were more thorough by far than any commercial news shows, and as the metanationals continued to drift into what was being called the metanatricide, they on Mars, in their sanctuaries and safe houses, were able to follow it blow by blow. Subarashii taking over Mitsubishi, and then its old foe Armscor, and then falling out with Amexx, which was working hard on breaking the United States out of the Group of Eleven; they saw it all from the inside. Nothing could have been less like the situation in the 2050s. And that was a comfort, if a very small one.

And then there was Sax on the screen behind Art, and looking at her. He saw who it was, and said, "Maya!"

She swallowed hard. Was she forgiven, then, for Phyllis? Did he understand why she had done it? His new face gave her no clues- it was as impa.s.sive as his old one had been, and harder to read because so unfamiliar still.

She collected herself, asked him what his plans were.

He said, "No plan. We're still making preparations. We need to wait for a trigger trigger. A trigger event. Very important. There are a couple of possibilities I'm keeping an eye against. But nothing yet."

"Fine," she said. "But listen, Sax." And then she told him everything she had been worrying about- the strength of the Transitional Authority troops, bolstered as they were by the big centrist metanats; the constant edging toward violence in the more radical wings of the underground; the feeling that they were falling into the same old pattern. And as she spoke he blinked in his old fashion, so that she knew it was really him listening under that new face- finally listening to her again, so that she went on longer than she had intended to, pouring out everything, her distrust of Jackie, her fear at being in Burroughs, everything. It was like talking to a confessor, or pleading- begging their pure rational scientist not to let things go crazy again. Not to go crazy again himself. She heard herself babbling, and realized how frightened she was.

And he blinked in what seemed a kind of neuter, ratlike sympathy. But in the end he shrugged and said little. This was General Sax now, remote, taciturn, speaking to her from the strange world inside his new mind.

"Give me twelve months," he said to her. "I need twelve more months."

"Okay, Sax." She felt rea.s.sured, somehow. "I'll do my best."

"Thanks, Maya."

And he was gone. She sat there staring at the little AI screen, feeling drained, teary, relieved. Absolved, for the hour.

So she returned to the work with a will, meeting groups almost every week, and making occasional off-the-net trips to Elysium and Tharsis, to talk to cells in the high cities. Coyote took charge of her travel, flying her across the planet in night voyages that reminded her of '61. Michel took charge of her security, protecting her with the help of a team of natives, including several of the Zygote ectogenes, who moved her from safe house to safe house in every city they visited. And she talked and talked and talked. It was not just a matter of getting them to wait, but also coordinating them, forcing them to agree they were on the same side. Sometimes it seemed that she was having an effect, she could see it on the faces of the people who came to listen. Other times her whole effort was devoted to applying the brakes (worn, burning) to radical elements. There were a lot of these now, and more every day: Ann and the Reds, Kasei's Marsfirsters, the Bogdanovists under Mikhail, Jackie's "Booneans," the Arab radicals led by Antar, who was one of Jackie's many boyfriends- Coyote, Dao, Rachel.... It was like trying to stop an avalanche that she herself was caught up in, grasping at clumps even as she rolled down with them. In such a situation the disappearance of Hiroko began to loom as more and more of a disaster.

The attacks of deja vu returned, stronger than ever. She had lived in Burroughs before, in a time like this- perhaps that was all it was. But the feeling was so disturbing when it struck, this profound unshakable conviction that everything had happened before in exactly this way, as ineluctably as if eternal recurrence were really true.... So that she would wake up and go to the bathroom, and certainly all that had happened before in just that way, including all the stiffness and small aches and pains; and then she would walk out to meet with Nirgal and some of his friends, and recognize that it was a genuine attack and not just a coincidence. Everything had happened just like this before, it was all clockwork. Strokes of fate. Okay, she would think, ignore it. That's reality, then. We are creatures of fate. At least you don't know what will happen next.

She talked endlessly with Nirgal, trying to understand him, and get him to understand her. She learned from him, she imitated him in meetings now- his bright friendly quiet confidence, which so obviously drew people to him. They both were famous, they both were talked about on the news, they both were on UNTA's wanted list. They both had to stay off the streets now. So they had a bond, and she learned all she could from him, and she thought he learned from her as well. She had an influence, anyway. It was a good relationship, her best link to the young. He made her happy. He gave her hope.

But to have it all happen in the remorseless grip of an overmastering fate! The seen-again, the always-already: nothing but brain chemistry, Michel said. There was simply a neural delay or repet.i.tion, which was giving her the sensation that the present was a kind of past as well. As maybe it was. So she accepted his diagnosis, and took whatever drugs he prescribed, without complaint and without hope. Every morning and evening she opened the pocket in the container strip he prepared for her every week, and took whatever pills were in it, without asking questions. She did not lash out at him; she no longer felt the urge. Perhaps the night of the vigil in Odessa had cured her. Perhaps he had finally mixed the right c.o.c.ktail of drugs. She hoped so. She went out with Nirgal to meetings, returned to the apartment under the dance studio, exhausted. And yet very often insomniac. Her health got bad, she was sick often, digestive troubles, sciatica, chest pains.... Ursula recommended another course of the gerontological treatment. Always helps, she said. And with the latest genomic mismatch scanning techniques, faster than ever. She would only have to take a week off, at most. But Maya didn't feel like she had a week to take off. Later, she told Ursula. When this is all over.

Some nights when she couldn't sleep, she read about Frank. She had taken the photo from the Odessa apartment with her, and now it was stuck to the wall by her bed in the Hunt Mesa safe house. She still felt the pressure of that electrifying gaze, and so sometimes in the sleepless hours she read about him, and tried to learn more about his diplomatic efforts. She hoped to find things he had been good at to imitate, and also to identify what he had done that she thought had been wrong.

One night in the apartment, after a tense visit to Sabishii and the community still hidden in its mound maze, she fell asleep over her lectern, which had been displaying a book about Frank. Then a dream about him woke her. Restlessly she went out to the living room of the apartment and got a drink of water, and went back and began to read the book again.

This one focused on the years between the treaty conference of 2057 and the outbreak of the unrest in 2061. These were the years when Maya had been closest to him, but she remembered them poorly, as if by flashes of lightning- moments of electric intensity, separated by long stretches of pure darkness. And the account in this particular book sparked no feelings of recognition in her at all, despite that fact that she was mentioned fairly frequently in the text. A kind of historical jamais vu jamais vu.

Coyote was sleeping on the couch, and he groaned in some dream of his own, and woke and looked around to find the source of the light. He padded behind her on the way to the bathroom, looked over her shoulder. "Ah," he said meaningfully. "They say a lot about him." And he went down the hall.

When he came back Maya said, "I suppose you know better."

"I know some things about Frank that they don't, that's for sure."

Maya stared at him. "Don't tell me. You were in Nicosia too." Then she remembered reading that, somewhere.

"I was, now you mention it."

He sat down heavily on his couch, stared at the floor. "I saw Frank that night, throwing bricks through windows. He started that riot single-handed."

He looked up, met her stare. "He was speaking to Selim el-Hayil in the apex park, about a half hour before John was attacked. You figure it out for yourself."

Maya clenched her teeth and stared at the lectern, ignoring him.

He stretched out on the couch and began to snore.

It was old news, really. And as Zeyk had made clear, no one would ever untangle that knot, no matter what they had seen or thought they remembered seeing. No one could be sure of anything that far in the past, not even of their own memories, which shifted subtly at every rehearsal. The only memories one could trust were those unbidden eruptions from the depths, the memoires involuntaires memoires involuntaires, which were so vivid they had to be true- but often concerned unimportant events. No. Coyote's was just one more unreliable account among all the rest.

When the words of the text on the screen started registering again, she read on.

Chalmers's efforts to stop the outbreak of violence in 2061 were unsuccessful because in the end he was simply ignorant of the full extent of the problem. Like most of the rest of the First Hundred, he could never quite imagine the actual population of Mars in the 2050s, which was well over a million; and while he thought that the resistance was led and coordinated by Arkady Bogdanov, because he knew him, he was unaware of the influence of Oskar Schnelling in Korolyov, or of the widespread Red movements such as Free Elysium, or the unnamed disappeareds who left the established settlements by the hundreds. Through ignorance and a failure of the imagination, he addressed only a small fraction of the problem.

Maya pulled back, stretched, looked over at Coyote. Was that really true? She tried to think back into those years, to remember. Frank had been aware, hadn't he? "Playing with needles when the roots are sick." Hadn't Frank said that to her, sometime in that period?

She couldn't remember. Playing with needles when the roots are sick Playing with needles when the roots are sick. The statement hung there, separated from anything else, from any context that could give it meaning. But she had the very strong impression that Frank had been aware that there was a huge unseen pool of resentment and resistance out there; no one had been more aware of it, in fact! How could this writer have missed that! For that matter how could any historian, sitting in a chair and sifting through the records, ever know what they had known, ever capture the way it had felt at the time, the fractured kaleidoscopic nature of the daily crisis? Each moment of the storm they had struggled....

She tried to remember Frank's face, and there came to her an image of him, hunched over miserably at a cafe table, a white coffee cup handle spinning under his feet; and she had broken the coffee cup; but why? She couldn't remember. She clicked forward through the book on the screen, flying through months with every paragraph, the dry a.n.a.lysis utterly divorced from anything like what she could recall. Then a sentence caught her eye, and she read on as if a hand were at her throat, forcing her to: Ever after their first liaison in Antarctica, Toitovna had a hold over Chalmers that he never broke, no matter how much it damaged his own plans. Thus when he returned from Elysium in the final month before the Unrest broke out, Toitovna met him in Burroughs, and they stayed together for a week, during which it was clear to others they were fighting; Chalmers wanted to stay in Burroughs, where the conflict was at a crisis; Toitovna wanted him to return to Sheffield. One night he showed up in one of the cafes by the ca.n.a.l so angry and distraught that the waiters were afraid, and when Toitovna appeared, they expected him to explode. But he only sat there as she reminded him of every connection they had ever had, every debt owed, all their past together, such as it was; and finally he bowed to her wishes, and returned to Sheffield, where he was unable to control the growing violence in Elysium and Burroughs. And so the revolution came.

Maya stared at the screen. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, all wrong- nothing like that had happened! A liaison in Antarctica? No, never!

But she had once confronted him at some restaurant... no doubt it was possible they had been observed... so hard to say. But this book was stupid- stuffed with unwarranted speculation- not history at all. Or maybe all the histories would be like that, if one had really been there and so could judge them properly. All lies. She tried to call it back- she clenched her teeth, and stiffened, and her fingers curled as if she could dig out thoughts with them. But it was like clawing at rock. And now when she tried to remember that particular confrontation in a cafe, no visual image at all came into her mind; the phrases from the book overlaid them, She reminded him of every connection they had ever had She reminded him of every connection they had ever had no! No! A figure hunched at a table, there it was, the image itself- and it finally looked up at her- no! No! A figure hunched at a table, there it was, the image itself- and it finally looked up at her- But it was the youthful face from her kitchen wall in Odessa.

She groaned; she began to cry; she chewed at her clenched fists and wept.

"You okay?" Coyote said blearily from the couch.

"No."

"Find something?"

"No."

Frank was being erased by books. And by time. The years had pa.s.sed, and for her, even for her, Frank Chalmers was becoming nothing but one tiny historical figure among many others, standing out there like a person seen through the wrong end of the telescope. A name in a book. Someone to read about, along with Bismarck, Talleyrand, Machiavelli. And her Frank... gone.

She spent a few hours of most days going over the Praxis reports with Art, trying to find patterns and comprehend them. They were getting such great amounts of data through Praxis that they had the reverse of the problem they had had in the pre-'61 crisis- not too little information, but too much. Every day the screws tightened in a mult.i.tude of crises, and Maya often ended up near despair. Several countries attending the UN, all of them Consolidated or Subarashii clients, requested that the World Court be abolished, as its functions were redundant. Most of the metanats immediately declared their support for this idea, and as the World Court had long ago begun as an agency of the UN, there were those who claimed the action would be legal and have some historical reason for being- but the first result was to disrupt some of the arbitrations in process, leading to fighting in Ukraine and Greece. "Who's responsible?" Maya exclaimed to Art. "Is there anyone doing doing this stuff?" this stuff?"

"Of course. Some metanats have presidents, and they all have executive boards, and they get together and talk things over, and decide what orders to give. It's like Fort and the eighteen immortals in Praxis, although Praxis is more democratic than most. And then the metanat boards appoint the executive committee for the Transitional Authority, and the Authority makes some local decisions, and I could give you their names, but I don't think they're as powerful as the folks back home."

"Never mind." Of course people were responsible. But no one was in control. It was the same on both sides, no doubt. Certainly it was true in the resistance. Sabotage, against the Vast.i.tas ocean platforms particularly, was now pandemic, and she knew whose idea that was. She talked with Nadia about getting in touch with Ann, but Nadia just shook her head. "Not a chance. I haven't been able to talk to Ann since Dorsa Brevia. She's one of the most radical Reds there is."

"As always."

"Well, I don't think she used to be. But it doesn't matter now."

Maya shook her head and went back to work. She spent more and more time working with Nirgal, taking his instruction and advising him in turn. More than ever he was her best contact among the young, and the most powerful, and a moderate to boot; he wanted to wait for a trigger and then organize a concerted action just like she did, and this of course was one of the reasons she gravitated to him. But it was also just a matter of his character, his warmth and high spirits, his regard for her. He couldn't have been more different than Jackie, although Maya knew the two of them had a very close complex relationship, going right back into their childhoods. But they appeared to be estranged these days, which she was not at all unhappy to see, and very much at odds politically. Jackie, like Nirgal, was a charismatic leader, and recruiting big new crowds into her "Boonean" wing of Marsfirst, which advocated immediate action, and thus aligned her much more with Dao than Nirgal, politically in any case. Maya did everything she could to back Nirgal in this split among the natives: in every meeting she argued for policies and actions that were green, moderate, nonviolent, and coordinated from a center. But she could see that the majority of the newly politicized natives in the cities were attracted to Jackie and Marsfirst, which was generally Red, radical, violent, and anarchic- or so she saw it. And the increasing strikes, demonstrations, street fights, sabotage, and ecotage tended to support her a.n.a.lysis.

And it wasn't just most of the new native recruits going to Jackie, but also great numbers of disaffected emigrants, the most recent arrivals. This tendency baffled her, and she complained about it to Art one day after they had gone through the Praxis report.

"Well," he said diplomatically, "it's good to have as many emigrants on our side as possible."

Of course when he wasn't on-line to Earth he was spending much of his time shuttling around between resistance groups trying to get them to agree, so this was his party line. "But why are they joining her her?" Maya demanded.

"Well..." Art said, waggling a hand, "you know, these emigrants arrive, and some of them hear about the demonstrations, or they see one, and they ask around and hear stories, and some hear that if they go out and join in a demonstration then the natives will really like them for it, you know? Some of the young native women maybe, who they hear can be friendly, right? Very Very friendly. So they go out there thinking that maybe if they help out, one of these big girls will take them home at the end of the day." friendly. So they go out there thinking that maybe if they help out, one of these big girls will take them home at the end of the day."

"Come on," Maya said.

"Well, you know," Art said. "It does happen to some of them."

"And so of course our Jackie gets all the new recruits."

"Well, I'm not sure it isn't a factor for Nirgal as well. And I don't know that people are making that much of a party distinction between them. That's a fine point, something you're more aware of than them."

"Hmm."

She remembered Michel, telling her it was important to argue for what she loved, as well as against what she hated. And she loved Nirgal, it was true. He was a wonderful young man, the finest native of them all. Certainly it was not right to scorn those kinds of motivations, that erotic energy taking people into the streets.... Still, if only people would be more sensible sensible. Jackie was doing her d.a.m.nedest to lead them into yet another spastic unplanned revolt, and the results of that could be disastrous disastrous.

"It's part of why people follow you too, Maya."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Come on. Don't be a fool."

Although it was nice to think so. Perhaps she could extend the struggle for control to that level too. Although she would be at a disadvantage. Create a party of the old. Well, in effect that's what they were already. That had been her whole idea, back in Sabishii- that the issei would take over the resistance, and guide it on the right course. And a good number of them had devoted many years of their life to doing just that. But in fact it hadn't worked. They were outnumbered. And the new majority was a new species, with new minds of their own. The issei could only ride the tiger. Do the best they could. She sighed.

"Tired?"

"Exhausted. This work is going to kill me."

"Get some rest."

"Sometimes when I talk to these people I feel like such a cautious conservative coward of a naysayer. Always don't do this, don't do that. I get so sick of it. I wonder sometimes if Jackie isn't right."

"Are you kidding?" Art said, eyes wide. "You're the one holding this show together, Maya. You and Nadia and Nirgal. And me. But you're the one with the, the aura." The reputation as a murderer, he meant. "You're just tired. Get some rest. It's almost the timeslip."

Michel woke her up some other night: on the other side of the planet Armscor security units supposedly integrated into Subarashii had taken control of the elevator from regular Subarashii police, and in the hour of uncertainty a group of Marsfirsters had tried to seize the new Socket outside Sheffield. The attempt had failed, and most of the a.s.sault group had been killed, and Subarashii had ended up back in control of Sheffield and Clarke and everything in between, and most of Tharsis as well. Now it was late afternoon there, and a huge crowd had appeared on the streets of Sheffield to demonstrate against the violence, or the takeover, it was impossible to say; it had no purpose; groggily Maya watched with Michel as police units in walkers and helmets cut the demonstrating groups into segments, and drove them off with tear gas and rubber batons. "Fools!" Maya cried. "Why are they doing this! They'll bring down the whole Terran military on our heads!"

"It looks like they're dispersing," Michel said as he stared into the little screen. "Who knows, Maya. Images like this may galvanize people. They win this battle, but they lose support everywhere."

Maya splayed out over a couch in front of the screen, not yet awake enough to think. "Maybe," she said. "But it's going to be harder than ever to hold people back as long as Sax wants."

Michel waved this off, face to the screen. "How long can he expect you to manage that?"

"I don't know."

They watched as the Mangalavid reporters described the riots as terrorist-sponsored violence. Maya groaned. Spencer was at another AI screen, talking to Nanao in Sabishii. "Oxygen is rising so fast, there has to be something out there without suicide genes. Carbon dioxide levels? Yeah, dropping fast as well.... A bunch of really good carbon-fixing bacteria out there, proliferating like a weed. I've asked Sax about it and he just blinks.... Yeah, he's as out of control as Ann. And she's out there sabotaging every project she can get her hands on."

When Spencer got off, Maya said to him, "Just how long is Sax going to want us to hold out?"

Spencer shrugged. "Until we get something he thinks is a trigger, I guess. Or a coherent strategy. But if we can't stop the Reds and the Marsfirsters, it won't matter what Sax wants."

So the weeks crept by. A campaign of regular street demonstrations began in Sheffield and South Fossa. Maya thought this would only bring more security down on them, but Art argued in their favor. "We've got to let the Transitional Authority know how widespread the resistance is, so that when the moment comes, they don't try to crush us out of ignorance, see what I mean? At this point we need them to feel disliked and outnumbered. h.e.l.l, ma.s.s numbers of people in the streets are about the only thing that scare governments, if you ask me."

And whether Maya agreed or not, there was nothing she could do about it; every day pa.s.sed and she could only work as hard as possible, traveling and meeting group after group, while inside her body her muscles were turning to wire with the tension, and she could barely sleep at night, nothing more than an exhausted hour or two near dawn.

One morning in the northern spring of M-52, year 2127, she woke feeling more refreshed than usual. Michel was still sleeping, and she dressed and went out alone, and walked across the great central promenade to the cafes by the ca.n.a.l. This was the wonderful thing about Burroughs; despite tightened security at the gates and stations, one could still walk around freely inside the city at some hours, and among the throngs there was very little danger of being picked out. So she sat and drank coffee and ate pastries and looked at the low gray clouds rolling overhead, down the slope of Syrtis and toward the dike to the east. Air circulation under the tent was high, to give some kinetic match to the visuals overhead. That was strange, that; how used she had gotten to the sky visuals not matching the feel of the wind under the tents. The long slender arched tube of the bridge from Ellis b.u.t.te to Hunt Mesa was filled with the colorful ant-figures of people, hurrying about their morning's work. Living normal lives; abruptly she got up and paid her bill, and went for a long walk herself. She strolled along the rows of white Bareiss columns, up through Princess Park to the new tents, around the pingo hills where the currently fashionable apartments were located. Here in the high western district one could look back down and see the whole spread of the city, the trees and rooftops split by the promenade and its ca.n.a.ls, the mesas huge and widely s.p.a.ced, resembling vast cathedrals. Their sheer rock sides were cracked and furrowed, horizontal lines of twinkling windows the only clue that they were hollowed out inside, each of them a city of its own, a little world, living together on the red sand plain, under the immense invisible tent, connected by soaring footbridges that glinted like the visible sheen of soap bubbles. Ah, Burroughs!

So she walked back with the clouds, through narrow streets walled by apartment blocks and gardens, to Hunt Mesa and their home under the dance studio. Michel and Spencer were out, and for a long time she just stood in the window and looked at the clouds racing over the city, trying to do Michel's job for him, to la.s.so her moods and pull them back to some kind of stable center. From the ceiling came little uncoordinated thump thump thumps thump thump thumps. Another cla.s.s beginning. Then the thumps were in the hall before the door, and there was a hard knock. She went to answer it, heart pounding like the ceiling.

It was Jackie and Antar, and Art and Nirgal, and Rachel and Frantz and the rest of the Zygote ectogenes, pouring in and talking at the speed of sound, so that she couldn't quite understand them. She greeted them as cordially as she could, given Jackie's presence among them, and then collected herself and removed all hatred from her eyes, and talked with all of them, even Jackie, about their plans. They had come to Burroughs to help organize a demonstration down in the ca.n.a.l park. Word had been sent out through the cells, and they were hoping that a lot of the unaligned citizenry would join them as well. "I hope it doesn't precipitate any crackdowns," Maya said.

Jackie smiled at her, in triumph of course. "Remember, you can never go back," she said.

Maya rolled her eyes and went to put water on the stove, trying to quell her bitterness. They would meet with all the cell leaders in the city, and Jackie would take over the meeting, and exhort them to immediate rebellion, no sense or strategy involved. And there was nothing Maya could do about it- the time for beating the s.h.i.t out of her had pa.s.sed, unfortunately.

So she went around taking off people's coats and giving them bananas and kicking their feet off the couch cushions, feeling like a dinosaur among the mammals, a dinosaur in a new climate, among quick hot creatures who disdained her gallumphing around, who dodged her slow blows and ran end runs behind her dragging tail.

Art came slouching out to help her with the teacups, scruffy and relaxed as always. She asked him what he'd heard from Fort, and he gave her the daily report from Earth. Subarashii and Consolidated were under attack by fundamentalist armies, in what looked like a fundamentalist alliance, although that was an illusion as the Christian and Muslim fundamentalists hated each other, and despised the fundamentalist Hindus. The big metanats had used the new UN to give warning that they would protect their interests with appropriate force. Praxis and Amexx and Switzerland had urged use of the World Court, and India had done so, but no one else. Michel said, "At least they're still afraid of the World Court." But to Maya it looked like the metanatricide was shifting to a war between the well-to-do and the "mortals," which could be much more explosive- total war, rather than decapitations.

She and Art talked the situation over as they served the people in the apartment tea. Spy or not, Art knew Terra, and had an incisive political judgment, which she found helpful. He was like a mellow Frank. Was that right? Somehow she was reminded of Frank, and though she couldn't pin down why, she was obscurely pleased. No one else could have seen any resemblance in this lumbering sly man, it was her perception and hers alone.

Then more people began to crowd into the apartment, cell leaders and visitors from out of town. Maya sat at the back and listened as Jackie spoke to them. Everyone in the resistance, Maya thought as she listened to her, was in it for themselves. The way Jackie used her grandfather as a symbol, waving him like a flag to rally her troops, was sickening. It wasn't John who had gotten her her followers, but her white scoop blouse, the s.l.u.t. No wonder Nirgal was estranged from her.

Now she exhorted them with her usual incendiary message, enthusiastically advocating immediate rebellion, no matter what the agreed-upon strategy was. And to these so-called Booneans, Maya was nothing more than an old paramour of the great man, or perhaps the reason he had been killed: a fossil odalisque, a historical embarra.s.sment, an object of men's desire, like Helen of Troy called back by Faustus, insubstantial and weird. Ach, it was maddening! But she kept a calm face, and got up and walked in and out of the kitchen with her head averted, doing what paramours did, keeping people comfortable and fed. Nothing more to be done, at this point.

She stood in the kitchen, staring out the window at the rooftops below. She had lost whatever influence she had ever had on the resistance. The whole thing was going to come unraveled before Sax or any of the rest of them who counted were ready. Jackie was ranting on cheerily in the living room, organizing a demonstration that might get ten thousand people into the park, maybe fifty, who could say? And if security responded with tear gas and rubber bullets and truncheons, people would get hurt, some killed; killed for no strategic purpose, people who might have lived a thousand years. And still Jackie went on, bright and enthusiastic, burning like a flame. Overhead the sun gleamed through a break in the clouds, bright silver, ominously large. Art came into the kitchen and sat at the table, switching on his AI and sticking his face into it. "Got a note from home Praxis on the wrist." He read the screen, nose practically touching it.

"Are you nearsighted?" Maya said irritably.

"I don't think so... oh man. Ka boom. Is Spencer out there? Get Spencer in here."