"Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

PART ELEVEN Viriditas

It was a disordered time. Population pressures now drove everything. The general plan to get through the hypermalthusian years was obvious, and holding up fairly well; each generation got smaller; nevertheless, there were now eighteen billion people on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and more being bom all the time; and more moving from Earth to Mars all the time; and people on both worlds crying enough, enough!

When Terrans heard Martians crying enough, some of them became enraged. The concept of carrying capacity meant nothing before the sheer numbers, the images on the screens. Uneasily the Martian global government did what it could to deal with this anger. It explained that Mars with its thin new biosphere could not sustain as many people as the fat old Earth. It also set the Martian rocket industry into the shuttle business, and rapidly expanded a program to turn asteroids into floating cities. This program was an unexpected offshoot of what had been serving as part of their prison system. For many years now the punishment for conviction of serious crimes on Mars had been permanent exile from the planet, begun by some years of confinement and servitude on some new asteroid settlement. After they had served their sentence it was a matter of indifference to the Martian government where the exiles went, as long as they did not return to Mars. So inevitably a steady stream of people arrived on Hebe, shipped out and did their time, and then moved somewhere else, sometimes out to the still thinly populated outer satellites, sometimes back into the inner system; but often to one of the many hollowed-asteroid colonies that were being established. Da Vinci and several other co-ops made and distributed shareware for starting up these settlements, and many other organizations did the same, for in truth the program was simple. Surveying teams had found thousands of candidates in the asteroid belt for the treatment, and on the best of them they left behind the equipment to transform them. A team of self-reproducing digging robots went to work on one end of the asteroid, boring into the rock like dogs, tossing most of the rubble into space, and using the rest to make and fuel more diggers. When the rock was hollowed out, the open end was capped and the whole thing was spun, so that centrifugal force provided a gravity equivalent inside. Powerful lamps called sunlines or sunspots were fired up in the centers of these hollowed-out cylinders, and they provided light levels equivalent to the Terran or Martian day, with the g usually adjusted accordingly, so that there were little Mars-equivalent cities, and little Earth-equivalent cities, and cities all across the range in between, and beyond, at least to the light side; many of the little worlds were experimenting with quite low gs.

There were some alliances between these little new city-states, and often ties to founder organizations back on a home world, but there was no overall organization. From the independents, especially those occupied mostly by Martian exiles, there had been in the early days some fairly hostile behavior to passersby, including attempts to impose passage tolls on spaceships, tolls so blatant as to resemble piracy. But now shuttles passing through the belts were moving at very high speeds, and slightly above or below the plane of the ecliptic, to avoid the dust and rubble that was only getting worse with the hollowing of so many rocks. It was difficult to demand a toll from these ships without threatening their total destruction, which invited heavy retribution; and so the trend in tolls had proved to be short-lived.

Now, with both Earth and Mars feeling population pressures that were more and more intense, the Martian co-ops were doing everything they could to encourage the rapid development of new asteroid cities. They were also building large new tented settlements on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, and most recently Uranus, with Neptune and perhaps even Pluto to follow. The big satellites of the inner gas giants were very large moons, really little planets, and all of them now had inhabitants who were beginning terraformingprojects that were more or less long-range, depending on the local situation. None of them could be terra-formed quickly, but all of them appeared to be possible, at least to an extent; and some offered the tantalizing opportunity of a complete new world. Titan, for instance, was beginning to come out of its nitrogen haze, as settlers living in tents on the smaller moons nearby heated and pumped the big moon’s surface oxygen into its atmosphere. Titan had the right volatiles for terrafor-mation, and though it was at great distance from the sun, receiving only one percent the insolation that Earth did, an extensive series of mirrors was adding light, more all the time, and the locals were looking into the possibility of free-hanging deuterium fusion lanterns, orbiting Titan and illuminating it further. This would be an alternative to another device that so far the Saturnians had been averse to using, called a gas lantern. These gas lanterns were now flying through the upper atmospheres of Jupiter and Uranus, collecting and burning helium3 and other gases in flares whose light was reflected outward by electromagnetic disks. But the Saturnians had refused to allow them, because they did not want to disturb the ringed planet’s appearance.

So in all these outer orbits the Martian co-ops were extremely busy, helping Martians and Terrans to emigrate to one of the new little worlds. And as the process continued, and a hundred and then a thousand asteroids and moonlets were given a local habitation and a name, the process took fire, becoming what some called the explosive diaspora, others simply the accelerando. People took to the idea, and the project gathered an energy that was felt everywhere, expressing a growing sense of humanity’s power to create, its vitality and variety. And the accelerando was also understood to be humanity’s response to the supreme crisis of the population surge, a crisis so severe that it made the Terran flood of 2129 look in comparison like no more than a bad high tide. It was a crisis which could have triggered a terminal disaster, a descent into chaos and barbarity; and instead it was being met head-on by the greatest efflorescence of civilization in history, a new renaissance.

Many historians, sociologists, and other social observers attempted to explain the vibrant nature of this most self-conscious age. One school of historians, called the Deluge Group, looked back to the great Terran flood, and declared that it had been the cause of the new renaissance: a forced jump to a higher level. Another school of thought put forth the so-called Technical Explanation; humanity had passed through one of the transitions to a new level of technological competence, they maintained, as it had every half century or so right back to the first industrial revolution. The Deluge Group tended to use the term diaspora, the Technics the term accelerando. Then in the 2170s the Martian historian Charlotte Dorsa Brevia wrote and published a dense multivolumed analytical metahistory, as she called it, which maintained that the great flood had indeed served as a trigger point, and technical advances as the enabling mechanism, but that the specific character of the new renaissance had been caused by something much more fundamental, which was the shift from one kind of global socioeconomic system to the next. She described what she called a “residual/emergent complex of overlapping paradigms,” in which each great socioeconomic era was composed of roughly equal parts of the systems immediately adjacent to it in past and future. The periods immediately before and after were not the only ones involved, however; they formed the bulk of a system, and comprised its most contradictory components, but additional important features came from particularly persistent aspects of more archaic systems, and also faint hesitant intuitions of developments that would not flower until much later.

Feudalism, therefore, to take one example, was for Charlotte made up of a clash of the residual system of absolute religious monarchy, and the emergent system of capitalism — with important echoes of more archaic tribal caste, and faint foreshadowings of later individualist humanisms. The clashing of these forces shifted over time, until the Renaissance of the sixteenth century ushered in the age of capitalism. Capitalism then was composed of clashing elements of the residual feudalism, and an emergent future order that was only now being defined in their own time, which Charlotte called democracy. And now, Charlotte claimed, they were, on Mars at least, in the democratic age itself. Capitalism had therefore, like all other ages, been the combination of two systems in very sharp opposition to each other. This incompatibility of its constituent parts was underlined by the unfortunate experience of capitalism’s critical shadow, socialism, which had theorized true democracy, and called for it, but in the attempt to enact it had used the methods at hand in its time, the same feudal methods so prevalent in capitalism itself; so that both versions of the mix had ended up about as destructive and unjust as their common residual parent. The feudal hierarchies in capitalism had been mirrored in the lived socialist experiments; and so the whole era had remained a highly charged chaotic struggle, exhibiting several different versions of the dynamic struggle between feudalism and democracy.

But the democratic age had finally, on Mars, emerged from the capitalist age. And this age too, following the logic of Charlotte’s paradigm, was necessarily a dash of residual and emergent — between the contentious, competitive residuals of the capitalist system, and some emergent aspects of an order beyond democracy — one that could not be fully characterized yet, as it had never existed, but which Charlotte ventured to call Harmony, or General Goodwill. This speculative leap she made partly by studying closely how different cooperative economics was from capitalism, and partly by taking an even larger metahistorical perspective, and identifying a broad general movement in history which commentators called her Big Seesaw, a movement from the deep residuals of the dominance hierarchies of our primate ancestors on the savanna, toward the very slow, uncertain, difficult, unpredetermined, free emergence of a pure harmony and equality which would then characterize the very truest democracy. Both of these long-term clashing elements had always existed, Charlotte maintained, creating the big seesaw, with the balance between them slowly and irregularly shifting, over all human history: dominance hierarchies had underlain every system ever realized so far, but at the same time democratic values had been always a hope and a goal, expressed in every primate’s sense of self, and resentment of hierarchies that after all had to be imposed, by force. And so as the seesaw of this meta-metahistory had shifted balance over the centuries, the noticeably imperfect attempts to institute democracy had slowly gained power. Thus a very small percentage of humans had counted as true equals in slave-holding societies like ancient Greece or revolutionary America, and the circle of true equals had only enlarged a bit more in the later “capitalist democracies.” But as each system passed on to the next, the circle of equal citizens had bloomed wider, by a slight or great margin, until now not only were all humans (in theory, anyway) equal, but consideration was beinggiven to other animals, andeven to plants, ecosystems, and the elements themselves. These last extensions of “citizenship” Charlotte considered to be among the foreshadowings of the emergent system that might come after democracy per se, Charlotte’s postulated period of Utopian “harmony.” These glimmerings were faint, and Charlotte’s distant hoped-for system a vague hypothesis; when Sax Russell read the later volumes of her work, poring avidly over the endless examples and arguments (for this account is a severe abridgment of her work, a mere abstract only), reading in an excited state at finding a general paradigm that might clarify history for him at last, he wondered if this putative age of universal harmony and goodwill would ever actually come about; it seemed to him possible or even likely that there was some sort of asymptotic curve in the human story — the ballast of the body, perhaps — which would keep civilization struggling there in the age of .democracy, struggling always upward, also away from relapse, and never getting much further along; but it also seemed to him that this state itself would be good enough to call a successful civilization. Enough was as good as a feast, after all.

In any case, Charlotte’s metahistory was very influential, providing for the explosively accelerating diaspora a kind of master narrative, by which they could orient themselves; and so she joined the small list of historians whose analyses had affected the flow of their own time, people like Plato, Plutarch, Bacon, Gibbon, Chamfort, Carlyle, Emerson, Marx, Spengler — and on Mars before Charlotte, Michel Duval. People now ordinarily understood capitalism to have been the clash of feudalism and democracy, and the present to be the democratic age, the clash of capitalism and harmony. And they also understood that their own era could still become anything else as well — Charlotte was insistent that there was no such thing as historical determinism, but only people’s repeated efforts to enact their hopes; then the analyst’s retroactive recognition of such hopes as came true created an illusion of determinism. Anything could have happened; they could have fallen apart into general anarchy, they could have become a universal police state to “control” the crisis years; but as the great metanationals of Terra had in reality all mutated into Praxis-like worker-owned cooperatives, with people in control of their own work — democracy it was, for the moment. They had enacted that hope.

And now their democratic civilization was accomplishing something that the previous system could never have accomplished, which was simply survival in the hypermalthusian period. Now they could begin to see that fundamental shift in systems, in this twenty-second century they were enacting; they had shifted the balance, in order to survive the new conditions. In the cooperative democratic economy, everyone saw the stakes were high; everyone felt responsible for their collective fate; and everyone benefited from the frenetic burst of coordinated construction that was going on everywhere in the solar system.

This flowering civilization included not only the solar system beyond Mars, but the inner planets as well. In the flush of energy and confidence humanity was working back in to areas previously considered uninhabitable, and now Venus was attracting a crowd of new terraformers, who were following up on the gesture made by Sax Russell with the relocation ofMars’s great mirrors, and had elaborated a grand vision for the eventual inhabitation of that planet, the sister to Earth in so many ways.

And even Mercury had its settlement. Although it had to be admitted that for most purposes, Mercury was too close to the sun. Its day lasted fifty-nine Terran days, its year eighty-eight Terran days, so that three of its days equaled two years, a pattern that was not a coincidence but a node on the way to being tidally locked, like Luna around the Earth. The combination of these two spins gave Mercury a very slow roll through its solar day, during which the brightside hemisphere became much too hot, while the nightside hemisphere became extremely cold. The lone city currently on the planet was therefore a kind of enormous train, running around the planet on tracks set on the northern forty-fifth latitude. These tracks were made of a metalloceramic alloy that was the first of the Mercurial physicists’ many alchemical tricks, a matrix that withstood the eight-hundred-K heat of midbrightside. The city itself, called Terminator, then ran over these tracks at a speed of about three kilometers per hour, which kept it within the planet’s terminator, the zone of predawn shadow that was in most terrain about twenty kilometers wide. A slight expansion of the tracks exposed to the morning sun farther to the east drove the city ever westward, as it rested on tightly fitting sleeves shaped to slide the city away from the expansion. This motion was so inexorable that resistance to it in another part of the sleeves generated great amounts of electrical power, as did the solar collectors trailing the city, and set on the very top of the high Dawn Wall, catching the first blasting rays of sunlight. Even in a civilization where energy was cheap, Mercury was amazingly blessed. And so it joined the worlds farther out, and became one of the brightest of all. And a hundred new floating worlds opened every year — cities in flight, little city-states, each with its own charter, settler mix, landscape, style.

And yet still, with all the blossoming of human effort and confidence of the accelerando, there was a sense of tension in the air, of danger. For despite all the building, emigration, settlement, and inhabitation, there were still eighteen billion on Earth, and eighteen million on Mars; and the semipermeable membrane between the two planets was curved taut with the osmotic pressure of that demographic imbalance. Relations between the two were tense, and many feared that a prick of the taut membrane could tear everything asunder. In this pressured situation, history was little comfort; so far they had dealt with it well, but never before had humanity responded to a crisis of need with any long-term consistent sensible sanity; mass madness had erupted before; and they were the exact same animals that in previous centuries, faced with matters of subsistence and survival, had slaughtered each other indiscriminately. Presumably it could happen again. So people built, argued, grew furious; waited, uneasily, for signs that the oldest superelderly were dying; stared hard at every child they saw. A stressed renaissance, then, living fast, on the edge, a manic golden age: the Accelerando. And no one could say what would happen next.

Zo sat at the back of a roomfull of diplomats, looking out the window at Terminator as the oval city rolled majestically over the blasted wastelands of Mercury. The herni-ellipsoidal space under the city’s high clear dome would have been a pretty airspace to fly in, but the local authorities had banned it as too dangerous — one of many fascist regulations that bound life here — the state as nanny, what Nietzsche so aptly called the slave mentality, still alive and well here at the end of the twenty-second century, in fact popping up everywhere, hierarchy reerecting its comforting structure in all these new provincial settlements, Mercury, the asteroids, the outer systems — everywhere except on noble Mars.

Here on Mercury it was particularly bad. Meetings between the Martian delegation and the Mercurians had been going on in Terminator for weeks, and Zo was tired of them, both the meetings and the Mercurial negotiators, a secretive self-important group of oligarchic mullahs haughty and fawning at the same time, who had not yet comprehended the new order of things in the solar system. She wanted to forget them and their little world, to go home and fly.

On the other hand, in her cover as a lowly staff assistant she had up to this point been an entirely minor figure in the proceedings, and now that negotiations were grinding to a halt, stalled on the stubborn incomprehension of these happy slaves, her turn had come at last. As the meeting broke up, she took aside an aide to the highest leader in Terminator, who was called rather picturesquely the Lion of Mercury, and she asked the aide for a private meeting. The young man, an ex-Terran, was agreeable — Zo had made sure of his interest long before — and they retired to a terrace outside the city offices.

Zo put a hand to the man’s arm, said kindly, “We’re very concerned that if Mercury and Mars don’t make a solid partnership, Terra will wedge between us and play us off against each other. We’re the two largest collections of heavy metals left in the solar system, and the more civilization spreads, the more valuable that becomes. And civilization is certainly spreading. This is the Accelerando, after all. Metals are valuable.”

And Mercury’s natural fund of metals, though hard to mine, was truly spectacular; the planet was only a little bigger than Luna and yet its gravity nearly equaled that of Mars, a very tangible sign of its heavy iron core, and its accompanying array of more precious metals, seamed all through the meteor-battered surface.

“Yes … ?” the young man said.

“We feel that we need to establish a more explicit…”

“Cartel?”

“Partnership.”

The young Mercurian smiled. “We aren’t worried about being pitted against Mars by anyone.”

“Obviously. But we are.”

For a time there, at the beginning of its colonization, Mercury had seemed to be very flush. Not only did the colonists have metals, but being so close to the sun, they had the possibility of tapping a great deal of solar energy. Just the resistance set up between the city’s sleeves and the expanding tracks they slid over created enormous amounts of it, and there was even more in solar-collection potential; collectors in Mercurial orbit had started lazing some of that sunlight out to the new outer-solar-system colonies. From the first fleet of track-laying cars, in 2142, through the rolling construction of Terminator in the 2150s, and throughout the 2160s and 70s, the Mercurians had thought they were rich.

Now it was 2181, however, and with the successful wide deployment of various kinds of fusion power, energy was cheap, and light was reasonably plentiful. The so-called lamp satellites, and the gas lanterns burning in the uoper atmospheres of the gas giants, were being built and lit all over the outer system. As a result Mercury’s copious solar resources had been rendered insignificant. Mercury had become once again nothing more than a metal-rich but dreadfully hot-and-cold place, a hardship assignment. And unterraformable to boot.

, Quite a crash in their fortunes, as Zo reminded the young man without much subtlety. Which meant they needed to cooperate with their more conveniently located allies in the system. “Otherwise the risk of Terran return to dominance is very real.”

“Terra is too enmeshed in its own problems to endanger anyone else,” the young man said.

Zo shook her head gently. “The more trouble Terra is in, the worse danger for the rest of us. That’s why we’re worried. That’s why we’re thinking that, if you don’t want to enter into an agreement with us, we may just have to build another city and track system on Mercury, down in the southern hemisphere, and cruise in the terminator down there. Where some of the best metal deposits are.”

The young man was shocked. “You couldn’t do that without our permission.”

“Couldn’t we?”

“No city on Mercury can exist if we don’t want it to.”

“Why, what will you do?”

The young man was silent.

Zo said, “Anyone can do what they want, eh? This is true for everyone ever born.”

The young man thought it over. “There’s not enough water.”

“No.” Mercury’s water supply consisted in its entirety of small ice fields lying inside craters at the two poles, where they remained in permanent shadow. These crater glaciers contained enough water for Terminator’s purposes, but not much more. “A few comets directed at the poles would add more, however.”

“Unless their impact blasted all the water on the poles away! No, that wouldn’t work! The ice in those polar craters is only a tiny fraction of the water from billions of years of comets, hitting all over the planet. Most of the water was lost to space on impact, or burned off. The same thing would happen if comets struck up there now. You’d get a net loss.”

“The AI modelers suggest all kinds of possibilities. We could always try it and see.”

The young man stepped back, affronted. And rightly so; you couldn’t put a threat much more explicitly than that. But in slave moralities the good and the stupid tended to become much the same, so one had to be explicit. Zo held her expression steady, though the young man’s indignation had a commedia dell’arte quality that was quite funny. She stepped closer to him, emphasizing their difference in height; she had half a meter on him.

“I’ll give the Lion your message,” he said through his teeth.

“Thanks,” Zo said, and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek.

These slaves had created for themselves a ruling caste of physicist-priests, who were a black box for those on the outside, but like all good oligarchies predictable and powerful in their exterior action. They would take the hint, and be able to act on it. An alliance would follow. So Zo left their offices, and walked happily down the stepped streets of the Dawn Wall. Her work was done, and so very likely the mission would soon return to Mars.

She entered the Martian consulate midway down the wall, sent a call to Jackie letting her know that the next move had been made. After that she walked out onto the balcony to have a smoke.

Her color vision surged under the impact of the chromotropics lacing her cigarette, and the little city below her became quite stunning, a Fauvist fantasia. Against the Dawn Wall the terracing rose in ever-narrower strips, until the highest buildings (the offices of the city rulers, naturally) were a mere line of windows under the Great Gates and the clear dome above it. Tile roofs and balconies were nestled under the green treetops below her, the balconies all floored and walled by mosaics. Down on the oval flat that held the greater part of the city, the roofs were bigger and closer together, the greenery bunched in crops that glowed under the light that bounced down from filtered mirrors in the dome; altogether it looked like a big Faberge egg, elaborate, colorful, pretty in the way that all cities were.

But to be trapped inside one… well, there was nothing for it but to pass the hours in as entertaining a manner as possible, until she got the word to go home. Part of one’s nobility was devotion to duty, after all.

So she strode down the wall’s staircase streets to Le Dome, to party with Miguel and Arlene and Xerxes, and the band of composers, musicians, writers and other artists and aesthetes who hung out at the cafe. It was a wild bunch. Mercury’s craters had all been named centuries before after the most famous artists in Terran history, and so as Terminator • rolled along it passed Diirer and Mozart, Phidias and Purcell, Turgenev and Van Dyke; and elsewhere on the planet were Beethoven, Imhotep, Mahler, Matisse, Murasaki, Milton, Mark Twain; Homer and Holbein touched rims; Ovid starred the rim of the much larger Pushkin, in one of many reversals of true importance; Goya overlapped Sophocles, Van Gogh was inside Cervantes; Chao Meng-fu was full of ice; and so on and so forth, in a most capricious manner, as if the naming committee of the International Astronomical Union had one night gotten hilariously drunk and started tossing named darts at a map; there was even a clue commemorating this party, a huge escarpment named Pourquoi Pas.

Zo thoroughly approved the method. But the effect on the artists currently living on Mercury had been catastrophic in the extreme. Constantly confronted as they were with Terra’s unmatchable canon, an overwhelming anxiety of influence had crippled them. But their partying had taken on a corresponding greatness that Zo quite enjoyed.

On this evening, after a considerable amount of drinking in the Dome, during which time the city rolled between Stravinsky and Vyasa, the group took off through the narrow alleyways of the city, looking for trouble. A few blocks away they barged in on a ceremony of Mithraists or Zo-roastrians, sun worshipers in any case, influential in local government and indeed perhaps the heart of it, and their catcalls quickly broke up the meeting and stimulated a fist-fight, and in short order they had to run to avoid arrest by the local constabulary, the spasspolizei as the Dome crowd called them.

After that they went to the Odeon, but were kicked out for being unruly; then they cruised the alleyways of the entertainment dfstrict, and danced outside a bar where loud bad industrial was being played. But there was something missing. Forced gaiety was so pathetic, Zo thought, looking down at their sweaty faces. “Let’s go outside,” she suggested. “Let’s go out on the surface and play piper at the gates of dawn.”

No one except Miguel showed any interest. They were worms in a bottle, they had forgotten the ground existed. But Miguel had promised to take her out many times, and now, with her time on Mercury short, he was finally just bored enough to agree to go.

Terminator’s tracks were numerous, each smooth gray cylinder held several meters off the ground by an endless row of thick pylons. As the city slid majestically westward, it passed small stationary platforms leading to underground transfer bunkers, baked ballardian space-plane runways, and crater-rim refuges. Leaving the city was a controlled activity, no surprise, but Miguel had a pass, and so the two of them activated the south city doors with it, and stepped into the lock and across into an underground station called Hammersmith. There they suited up, in bulky but flexible spacesuits, and went out through a lock into a tunnel, and up onto the blasted dust of Mercury.

Nothing could have been more clean and spare than this waste of black and gray. In such a context Miguel’s drunken giggling bothered Zo more than usual, and she turned down her helmet intercom until it was no more than a whisper.

Walking east of the city was dangerous; even standing still was dangerous; but to see the sun’s edge, that’s what they had to do. Zo kicked at the rocks as they wandered southwest, to get an angle on their view of the city. She wished she could fly over this black world; presumably some kind of rocket backpack would do the trick, but no one had bothered to work it up, as far as she knew. So they trudged along instead, keeping a sharp eye to the east. Very soon the sun would rise over that horizon; above them now, in the ultrathin neon-argon atmosphere, fine dust kicked up by electron bombardment turning to a faint white mist in the solar bombardment. Behind them the very top of the Dawn Wall was a blaze of pure white, impossible to look at even through the heavy differential filtering of their helmet face masks.

Then the rocky flat horizon ahead of them to the east, near Stravinsky Crater, turned into a silver nitrate image of itself. Zo stared into the explosive phosphorescent dancing line, rapt: Sol’s corona, like a forest fire in some silver forest just over the horizon. Zo’s spirit flashed likewise, she would have flown like Icarus into the sun if she could, she felt like a moth wanting the flame, a kind of spiritual sexual hunger, and indeed she was crying out in just the same involuntary orgasmic cries, such a fire, such a beauty. The solar rapture, they called this back in the city, and well named. Miguel felt it as well; he was leaping from boulder tops eastward, arms spread wide, like Icarus trying to launch himself.

Then he came down awkwardly in the dust, and Zo could hear his cry even with her intercom volume turned almost off. She ran to him and saw the impossible angle of his left knee, cried out herself and knelt at his side. Through the suit the ground was frigid. She helped him up, his arm over her shoulder. She turned up the volume on her intercom, even though he was groaning loudly. “Shut up,” she said. “Concentrate, pay attention.”

They got into a rhythm, hopping west after the receding Dawn Wall, still incandescent across the top of its tall bell curve. It was receding from them, there was no time to be lost. But they kept falling. The third time, sprawled in the dust, the landscape a blinding mix of pure white and pure black, Miguel screamed in pain and then panted out, “Go on, Zo, go save yourself! No reason both of us should die out here!”

“Oh fuck that,” Zo said, picking herself up.

“Go!”

“I won’t! Shut up now, let me try carrying you.”

He weighed about what he would on Mars, seventy kilos with the suit, she guessed, more a matter of balance than anything else, so while he babbled on hysterically, “Let me go, Zo, truth is beauty, beauty truth, that is all you know and all you need to know,” she leaned over and put her arms under his back and knees, which caused him to shriek. “Shut up!” she cried. “Right now this is the truth, and therefore beautiful.” And she laughed as she started to run with him in her arms.

He blocked her view of the ground directly before them, so she had to look forward in the blaze-and-black, with sweat in her eyes. It was hard going, and twice more she fell; but while running she thumped along at a good speed back toward the city.

Then she felt sunlight on her back. It was like the pricking of needles, even through her insulated suit. Massive surge of adrenaline; blinded by the light; some kind of valley aligned to the dawn; then back into the patchy zone of light-shot shadows, a crazy chiaroscuro; then, slowly, back into the terminator proper, everything shadowed and dim except for the fiery city wall, blazing far above. She was gasping hard for air, sweating heavily, hot from exertion now rather than sunlight. And yet still the sight of the incandescent arc at the top of the city was enough to make one into a Mithraist.

Of course even when the city was directly over them, there was no immediate way of getting back up into it. She had to run past it, on to the next underground station. Complete focus on running, for minute after minute. Lactic-acid pain. And there it was, up ahead on the horizon, a door in a hill beside the tracks; pound and pound over the smoothed regolith. Violent hammering on the door got the two of them let into the lock and inside, where they were arrested; but Zo just laughed at the spasspolizei, and got her helmet off, and Miguel’s, and kissed the sobbing Miguel repeatedly for his clumsiness. In his pain he didn’t notice, he was latched onto her as a drowning man to a lifesaver. She only succeeded in disengaging herself from his grasp by banging him gently on his hurt knee. She laughed out loud at his howl, feeling a rush pour through her; such adrenaline, so beautiful, rarer by far than any sexual orgasm, thus more precious. So she kissed Miguel again and again, kisses that he did not notice, and then she barged through the spasspolizei, claiming diplomatic status and a need for haste. “Get him some drugs, you fools,” she said. “A shuttle for Mars is leaving tonight, I have to go.”

“Thank you, Zo!” Miguel cried. “Thank you! You saved my life!”

“I saved my trip home,” she said, and laughed at his expression. She returned to kiss him some more. “It’s me should be thanking you! Such an opportunity! Thank you, thank you.”

“No, thank you!”

“No, thank you!”

And even in his agony he laughed. “I love you, Zo.”

“And I love you.”

But if she didn’t hurry she would miss her shuttle.

The shuttle was a pulsed fusion rocket. and they would reach Earth the day after tomorrow. And in a decent gravity the whole time, except for during the somersault.

All manner of things were changing because of this sudden shrinkage of the solar system. One small result was that Venus was no longer needed as a gravity handle for rocket travel, and so it was coincidence only that had Zo’s shuttle, the Nike of Samothrace, passing fairly near to the shaded planet. Zo joined the rest of the passengers in the big skylight ballroom to look at it as they passed. The clouds of the planet’s superheated atmosphere were dark; the planet appeared as a gray circle against the black of space. The terraforming of Venus was proceeding apace, the whole planet in the shade of a parasol, which was Mars’s old soletta with its mirrors repositioned so that they did just the opposite of what they had done in front of Mars; rather than redirect light onto the planet, they reflected it all away. Venus rolled in darkness.

This was the first step of a terraforming project that many people deemed mad. Venus had no water, a stupendously thick superheated carbon-dioxide atmosphere, a day longer than its year, and surface temperatures that would melt lead and zinc. Not a promising set of initial conditions, it was true, but people had begun to try anyway, humanity’s reach continuing to exceed its grasp, even as its grasp became godlike; Zo thought it was wonderful. The people who had initiated the project were even claiming it could happen faster than the terraforming of Mars. This was because the complete removal of sunlight had profound effects; the temperature in the thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere (ninety-five bar at the surface!) had been dropping by five K a year for the last half century. Soon the “Big Rain” would begin to fall, and in just a couple hundred years the carbon dioxide would all be on the planet, in dry-ice glaciers covering the low parts of the surface. At that point the dry ice was to be covered by an insulating layer of diamond coating or foamed rock, and once sealed off, water oceans would be introduced. The water was going to come from somewhere else, as Venus’s natural inventory would cover it to a depth of a centimeter or less. The Venusian terraformers, mystics of a new kind of viriditas, were currently negotiating with the Saturnian League for the rights to the ice moon Enceledus, which they hoped to drive down into Venusian orbit and break up in successive passes through the atmosphere. This moon’s water once rained onto Venus would create shallow oceans over about seventy percent of the planet, entirely covering the wrapped carbon-dioxide glaciers. An atmosphere of oxygen and hydrogen would be left in place, some light would be let through the parasol, and at that point human settlements would become possible, on the two high continents Ishtar and Aphrodite. After that, they would have all the remaining problems of terraforming that Mars had been dealing with, and they would also have the very long-term, specifically Venusian projects of removing the CO₂ ice sheets from the planet somehow, and also imparting enough spin to the planet to give it a reasonable diurnal cycle; for the short term, days and nights could be established using the parasol as a giant circular Venetian blind, but in the long run they did not want to rely on something so fragile. With a quiver she imagined it: some centuries hence, a biosphere and civilization established on Venus, the two continents inhabited, the beautiful Diana Rift a fair valley, billions of people and animals — and then one day the parasol knocked awry, and ssssss, a whole world roasted. Not a happy prospect. And so now, even before the massive flooding and scouring of the Big Rain, they were trying to lay metallic windings as physicalized latitude lines around the planet, windings that would, when a fleet of solar-powered generators were placed in fluctuating orbits around the planet, make the planet in effect the armature of a giant electric motor, the magnetic forces of which would create the torque that would increase the planet’s spin. The system’s designers claimed that, in about the same time it would take to freeze out the atmosphere and drop an ocean, the impetus of this “Dyson motor” could speed Venus’s rotation enough to give the planet a weeklong day; so there they would be, in perhaps three hundred years, down on the transmogrified world, planting crops. The surface would be massively eroded of course, and still very volcanic, with carbon dioxide trapped under the seas ready to burst out and poison them, and weeklong days cooking and freezing them; but there they would be nevertheless, everything stripped, raw, new.

The plan was insane. It was beautiful. Zo stared up through the ballroom ceiling at the gibbous gray globe, hopping from foot to foot in her excitement, in her horror and admiration, hoping to catch a glimpse of the little dots of the new asteroid moons that were home to the terraform-ing mystics, or perhaps the coronal arc of a reflection from the annular mirror that used to be Mars’s. No luck there — only the gray disk of the shaded evening star, the signet of people who had taken on a task that recontextualized humanity as a kind of god bacteria, chewing away at worlds, dying to prepare the ground for later life — dwarfed most grandiosely in the cosmic scheme of things, in an almost Calvinistic masochist-heroism — a parodic travesty of the Mars project — and yet just as magnificent. They were specks in this universe, specks! But what ideas they had. People would do anything for the sake of an idea, anything.

Even visit Earth. Steaming, clotted, infectious, a human anthill stuck with a stick; the panic pullulation ongoing in the dreadful mash of history; the hypermalthusian nightmare at its worst; hot, humid, and heavy; and yet still, or perhaps because of all that, a great place to visit. And Jackie wanted her to check in with a couple of people in India anyway. So Zo had taken the Nike, and would later catch a Mars shuttle from Earth. Before she went to India to talk to Jackie’s contacts, however, she made her regular pilgrimage to Crete, to see the ruins that here were still called Minoan, although in Dorsa Brevia she had been taught to call them Ariadnean. Minos had been the one to wreck the ancient matriarchy, after all, so it was one of the many travesties of Terran history that the destroyed civilization should now be named after the destroyer. But names could be changed.

She wore a rented exoskeleton, made for off-world visitors oppressed by the g. Gravity was destiny, as they said, and Earth had a lot of destiny. The suits were like birdsuits without wings, conformable bodysuits that moved with one’s muscles while providing some undersupport; body bras. They did not entirely ease the effect of the planet’s pull, for breathing was still an effort, and Zo’s limbs felt heavy within the suit, so to speak, pressed down uncomfortably against the fabric. She had gotten used to walking around in the suits on previous trips, and it was a fascinating exercise, like weight lifting, but not one that she liked very much. Better than the alternative, however. She had tried that too, but it was a terrible distraction, it kept one from really seeing, really being there.

So she walked around the ancient site of Gournia, in the peculiar, somewhat submarine flow of the suit. Gournia was her favorite of all the Ariadnean ruins, the only ordinary village of that civilization to have been found and excavated; the other sites were all palaces. This village had probably been a satellite of the palace at Malia: now a warren of waist-high walls made of stacked stones, covering a hilltop overlooking the Aegean. All the rooms were very small, often one meter by two, with alleys running between shared walls; little labyrinths, yes, and very much like the whitewashed villages that still dotted the countryside. People said that Crete had been hard hit by the great flood, as the Ariadneans had been by theirs following the explosion of Thera; and it was true that all the pretty little fishing harbors were flooded to one extent or another, and the Ariadnean ruins at Zakros and Malia entirely drowned. But what Zo saw on Crete was an everlasting vitality. There was no other place on Earth she had seen that had handled the population surge as well; everywhere small whitewashed villages clung to the land, like beehives, covering hilltops, filling valleys, and surrounded by crops and orchards, with the dry knobby hills still sticking out of the cultivated land, in sculptured ridges rising to the central spine of the island. The island’s population had risen to over forty million, she had heard, and yet the island still looked much the same; there were just more villages, built to match the pattern not only of the existing ones but of the ancient ones like Gour-nia and Itanos as well. Town planning with a continuity five thousand years old, continuity with that first peak of civilization or final peak of prehistory, so tall as to be glimpsed even by classical Greece a thousand years later, enduring by oral transmission alone as the myth of Atlantis — and then also in the shapes of all their subsequent lives, not only on Crete, but now on her Mars as well. Because of the names used in Dorsa Brevia, and that culture’s valorization of the Ariadnean matriarchy, the two places had developed a relationship; many Martians came to Crete to visit the ancient sites, and there were new hotels near all of them now, built on a slightly larger scale to accommodate the tall young pilgrims, visiting the holy places station to station — Phaistos, Gournia, Itanos, Malia and Zakros under the water, even the ridiculous “reconstruction” at Knossos. They came and saw how it had all begun, back in the morning of the world. Zo too — standing in the brilliant blue Aegean light, straddling a stone alleyway five thousand years old, she felt pouring into her the reverberations of that greatness, up through the spongy red stones underfoot and into her own heart. Nobility that would never end.

The rest of Earth, however, was Calcutta. Well, that wasn’t really fair. But Calcutta itself was definitely Calcutta. Fetid humanity at its most compacted; whenever she went out of her room Zo had at least five hundred people in her field of vision, and often a few thousand. There was a frightful exhilaration in the sight of all this life in the streets, a world of dwarfs and midgets and other assorted small people, all of whom saw her and clumped like baby birds to a parent who could feed them. Although Zo had to admit that the clumping was friendlier than that, composed more of curiosity than hunger — indeed they seemed more interested in her exoskeleton than her. And they seemed happy enough, thin but not emaciated, even when they were clearly permanently camped on the streets. The streets themselves were co-ops now, people had tenure, swept them, regulated the millions of little markets, grew crops in every plaza, and slept among them too. That was life on Earth in the late Holocene. After Ariadne it had been downhill all the way.

Zo went up to Prahapore, an enclave in the hills to the north of the city. This was where one of Jackie’s Terran spies lived, in the midst of a jammed dorm of harried civil servants, all living at their screens and sleeping under their desks. Jackie’s contact was a translator programmer, a woman who understood Mandarin, Urdu, Dravidian and Vietnamese, as well as her Hindu and English; she also was important in an extensive eavesdropping network, and could keep Jackie informed concerning some of the Indian-Chinese conversations about Mars.

“Of course they both will send more people to Mars,” the heavyset woman said to Zo, after they were out in the compound’s little herb garden. “That’s a given. But it does look like both governments feel they have their populations in a long-term solution. No one expects to have more than one child anymore. It’s not only the law, it’s the tradition.”

“The uterine law,” Zo said.

The woman shrugged. “Possibly so. A very strong tradition, in any case. People look around, they see the problem. They expect to get the longevity treatment, and they expect to have a sterility implant at that time. And in India, anyway, they feel lucky if they get the permits to remove the implants. And after having one child, people expect to be sterilized for good. Even the Hindu fundamentalists have changed on this, the social pressure on them was so great. And the Chinese have been doing this for centuries. The longevity treatment only reinforced what they had already been doing.”

“So Mars has le^ss to fear from them than Jackie thinks.”

“Well, they still want to send up emigrants, that’s part of the overall strategy. And resistance to the one-child rule has been stronger in some Catholic and Muslim countries, and several of those nations would like to colonize Mars as if it were empty. The threat shifts now, from India and China to the Philippines, Brazil, Pakistan.”

“Hmm,” Zo said. Talk of immigration always made her feel oppressed. Threatened by lemmings. “What about the exmetas?”

“The old Group of Eleven is rebanding in support of the strongest of the old metanats. They will be looking for places to develop. They’re much weaker than before the flood, but they still have a lot of influence in America, Russia, Europe, South America. Tell Jackie to watch what Japan does in the next few months, she’ll see what I mean.” They connected up wristpads so that the woman could make a secure transfer of detailed information for Jackie.

“Okay,” Zo said. Suddenly she was tired, as if a heavy man had crawled into the exoskeleton with her and were dragging her down. Earth, what a drag. Some people said they liked the weight, as if they needed that pressure to be convinced of their own reality. Zo wasn’t like that. Earth was the very definition of exoticism, which was fine, but suddenly she longed to be home. She unplugged her wristpad from the translator’s, imagining all the while that perfect middle way, that perfect test of will and flesh: the exquisite gravity of Mars.

Then it was down the space elevatorfrom Clarke, a trip that took longer than the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.

The little town had grown since its early days as the terraforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be seen — a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible one from the other — more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underbill or Senzeni Na, or the icy hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge, causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which made it a birding paradise.

Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars apparatchiks working for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she wanted to fly. So she checked her old San-torini hawksuit out of storage at the gliderport, and went to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the smooth muscly texture of the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the smooth path, trailing her tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural overhang that had been artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked to the edge of this slab and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters down, to the umber floor of Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline she tipped forward and fell off the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind picking up in a swift whoosh over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity, which she recognized by the pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her arms, and felt the suit stiffen and help her muscles to hold the beautiful wings wide, and with a loud crumping smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun, turned her head, arched her back, pointed her toes and set the tail feathers, left right left; and the wind was pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and arms together, turn then in a tight gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor, around and around: flying. Zo the hawk, wild and free. She was laughing happily, and tears streamed this way and that in her goggles, dashed away by the force of the g.

The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding the updraft most fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting down one of the clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and it was possible to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity. Zo too, when she had gotten about five thousand meters above Overlook, and was breathing the pure oxygen of her helmet’s enclosed air system, turned her head right and dipped her right wing, and curved through the exhilaration of a run across the wind, feeling it keen over her body in a rapid continuous fingering. No sound but the hard whoosh of wind in her wings. The somatic pressure of the wind all over her body was a subtly sensuous massage, and she felt it through the tightened suit as if the suit were not there, as if she were naked and feeling the wind directly on her skin, as she wished she could be. A good suit reinforced this impression, of course, and she had used this one for three m-years before leaving for Mercury; it fit like a glove, it was great to be back in it.

She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver called Jesus Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and began to dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly over her, and she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal velocity. Passing the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as the cliff was, at full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap in the face, and it took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and skill and nerve, and the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and popped her wings, and felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous pressure even though the suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing precen-tage of the load. Tail feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then she was jinking across the chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse off it.

She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into developing high clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing pleasure to tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.

She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward Overlook, feeling tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of fliers, if there was a bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely than birders had ever before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and flutter to try to learn the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this cliff would be innocently wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of fliers would be above it following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.

Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the placement of the wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that she craved but could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing clouds, indigo sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms when she peeled over into a stoop … eternal moments of no-mind. The best, cleanest use of human time.

But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the hawk to its day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail her landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if she had never left.

The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside, and it was a mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by fliers, and tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and roving and talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the night. And there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and Ella and Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and delighted to see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to celebrate the reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail catching up on gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making ribald commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends spotted in the crowd.

Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the crowds of Topside, and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the bathhouses. They piled into the changing room and took off their clothes, and wandered naked through the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep, ankle-deep, chest-deep — hot, cold, lukewarm — splitting up, finding each other later, having sex with scarcely visible strangers, Zo working slowly through several partners to her own orgasm, purring happily as her body clamped down on itself and her mind went away. Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at the sight of the stars in the skylight overhead, at the feel of warm water and of some boy who came in her and stayed in her, nearly hard, and three minutes later stiffened and started humping again, laughing at the approach of another bright orgasm. After that she sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar and found the others there, Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was usually the best, with an exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a good bit of semen left to ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an effort, you have to be wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third anyway.” Zo and Rose and the rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many other ways, being female was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely had several wonderful orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the status orgasmus, a kind of running continuous orgasm that could last half an hour if one were lucky and one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this that they studied assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they all agreed: one had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd … lately they had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily Zo demanded proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her and the rest down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep lay on his back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted up by the others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then the whole group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an un-differentiated mass of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they all kept going, more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then she was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going, until she cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and kept her going until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled violently off Imhotep and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even stand. Someone said they had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like two, or eternity. All her abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt. “Cold bath,” she said, and crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.

But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that could appeal. Any more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and Xerxes, and then a thin woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored. Flesh flesh flesh. Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further into it; other times it became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and outsides, who cared.

She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was morning, the sun bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the empty streets to her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big breakfast, fall into bed, delicious sleep.

But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our Zoya.” She had always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.

Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”

Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why didn’t you check in when you got back?”

“I wanted to fly.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.”

Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the head. “You’re looking good.”

Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sunburned and therefore wrinkled — younger but somehow preserved, as if she were a twin sister of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade, she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which was not so much body as spirit — a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female year after year, a heroic struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained — and she was still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.

Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be irritated.

Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly until Zo straightened up.

“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”

Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”

“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”

“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able to generate what they need, now.”

“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”

“That’s right.”

“But what do they want for them?”

“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or Mars.”

“It isn’t domination.”

“Of course not.” Zo kept a straight face. “But the big worlds, you know — ”

“Are big.” Jackie nodded. “But add all these little ones together, and they’re big too.”

“Who’s going to add them?” Zo asked.

Jackie ignored the question. The answer was obvious anyway: Jackie would. Jackie was locked into a long-term battle with various forces on Earth, for what came down to the control of Mars; she was trying to keep them from being inundated by the immense home world; and as human civilization continued to spread throughout the solar system, Jackie considered the new little settlements pawns in this great struggle. And indeed if there were enough of them, they might make a difference.

“There’s not much reason to worry about Mercury,” Zo reassured her. “It’s a dead end, a provincial little town, run by a cult. No one can settle very many people there, no one. So even if we do manage to bring them on board, they won’t matter much.”

Jackie’s face took on its world-weary look, as if Zo’s analysis of the situation were the work of a child — as if there were hidden sources of political power on Mercury, of all places. It was irritating, but Zo restrained herself and did not show her irritation.

Antar came in, looking for them; he saw them and smiled, came over and gave Jackie a quick kiss, Zo a longer one. He and Jackie conferred for a while about something or other, in whispers, and then Jackie told him to leave.

There was a great deal of the will to power in Jackie, Zo saw once again. Ordering Antar around gratuitously; it was a flaunting of power that one saw in many nisei women, women who had grown up in patriarchies and therefore reacted virulently against them. They did not fully understand that patriarchy no longer mattered, and perhaps never had — that it had always been caught in the Kegel grip of uterine law, which operated outside patriarchy with a biological power that could not be controlled by any mere politics. The female hold on male sexual pleasure, on life itself — these were realities for patriarchs as much as anyone, despite all their repression, their fear of the female which had been expressed in so many ways, purdah, clitoridectomy, foot binding and so on — ugly stuff indeed, a desperate ruthless last-ditch defense, successful for a time, certainly — but now blown away without a trace. Now the poor fellows had to fend for themselves, and it was hard. Women like Jackie had them whipped. And women like Jackie liked to whip them.

“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”

“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a front.”

After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.

Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”

“Okay.”

Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.

Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”

Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The coop was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chlbroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get biomes through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.

The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.

Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites.

The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and greenhouse-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.

One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.

Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”

“Yes,” Zo said.

“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.

“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.

“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.

The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.

They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.

His forehead wrinkled at this.

“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.

“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”

“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff” — she gestured at the green fronds around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees — “this stuff is nameless, really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”

He thought about this.

“Where do you fly?” he said a kilometer down the overgrown trail.

“Everywhere.”

“Do you have favorite places?”

“I like Echus Overlook.”

“Good updrafts?”

“Very good. I was there until Jackie descended on me and put me to work.”

“It’s not your work?”

“Oh yes, yes. But my co-op is good at flex time.”

“Ah. So you will stay here awhile?”

“Only until the Galilean shuttle leaves.”

“Then you will emigrate?”

“No no. A tour, for Jackie. Diplomatic mission.”

“Ah. Will you visit Uranus?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like to see Miranda.”

“Me too. That’s one reason I’m going.”

“Ah.”

They crossed a shallow creek, stepping on exposed flat stones. Birds called, insects whirred. Sunlight filled the entire crater bowl now, but under the forest canopy it was still cool, the air shot with parallel columns and wires of slanting yellow light. Russell crouched to stare into the creek they had crossed.

“What was my mother like as a child?” Zo asked.

“Jackie?”

He thought about it. A long time passed. Just as Zo was concluding with exasperation that he had forgotten the question, he said, “She was a fast runner. She asked a lot of questions. Why why why. I liked that. She was the oldest of that generation of ectogenes, I think. The leader anyway.”

“Was she in love with Nirgal?”

“I don’t know. Why, have you met Nirgal?”

“I think so, yes. With the ferals once. What about with Peter Clayborne, was she in love with him?”

“In love? Later, maybe. When they were older. In Zygote, I don’t know.”

“You aren’t much help.”

“No.”

“Forgotten it all?”

“Not all. But what I remember is — hard tc characterize. I remember Jackie asking about John Boone one day, just in the way you’re asking about her. More than once. She was pleased to be his granddaughter. Proud of him.”

“She still is. And I’m proud of her.”

“And — I remember her crying, once.”

“Why? And don’t say I don’t know!”

This balked him. Finally he looked up at her, with a smile almost human. “She was sad.”

“Oh very good!”

“Because her mother had left. Esther?”

“That’s right.”

“Kasei and Esther broke up, and Esther left for — I don’t know. But Kasei and Jackie stayed in Zygote. And one day she got to school early, on a day I was teaching. She asked why a lot. And this time too, but about Kasei and Esther. And then she cried.”

“What did you say to her?”

“I don’t… Nothing, I suppose. I didn’t know what to say. Hmm… I thought she perhaps should have gone with Esther. The mother bond is crucial.”

“Come on.”

“You don’t agree? I thought all you young natives were sociobiologists.”

“What’s that?”

“Urn — someone who believes that most cultural traits have a biological explanation.”

“Oh no. Of course not. We’re much freer than that. Mothering can be any kind of thing. Sometimes mothers are nothing but incubators.”

“I suppose so — ”

“Take my word for it.”

“… But Jackie cried.”

On they hiked, in silence. Like a lot of the big craters, Moreux turned out to have several pie-wedge watersheds, converging on a central marsh and lake. In this case the lake was small and kidney-shaped, curving around the rough low knobs of a central peak complex. Zo and Russell came out from under the forest canopy on an indistinct trail that faded into elephant grass, and they would have gotten quickly lost except for the stream, which was oxbowing through the grass toward a meadow and then the marshy lake. Even the meadow was dominated by elephant grass, great circular clumps of it that stood well overhead, so that they often had a view of nothing but giant grasses and sky.

The long blades of grass gleamed under the lilac midday zenith. Russell stumbled along well behind Zo, his round sunglasses like mirrors in his face, reflecting the grass bundles as he looked this way and that. He appeared utterly foxed, amazed at the surroundings, and he muttered into an old wristpad that hung on his wrist like a manacle.

A final oxbow into the lake had created a fine sand-and-pebble beach, and after testing with a stick for quicksand at the waterline, and finding the sand firm, Zo stripped off her sweaty singlet and walked out into the water, which got nice and cold a few meters offshore. She dove under, swam around, hit her head on the bottom. There was a beached boulder standing over some deep water, and she climbed it and dove in three or four times, doing a forward flip in the water right after entry; this forward somersault, difficult and graceless in the air, caused a quick little tug of weightless pleasure in the pit of her stomach, a feeling as close to orgasm as any nonorgasm she had ever felt. So she dove several times, until the sensation wore off and she was cooled. Then she walked out of the lake and lay on the sand, feeling its heat and the solar radiation cook both sides of her. A real orgasm would have been perfect, but despite the fact that she was laid out before him like a map of sex, Russell sat cross-legged in the shallows, absorbed apparently by the mud, naked himself except for sunglasses and wristpad. A farmer-tanned little bald wizened primate, like her image of Gandhi or Homo habilis. It was even a bit sexy how different he was, so ancient and small, like the male of some turtle-without-a-shell species. She pulled her knee to the side and shifted up her bottom in an unmistakable present posture, the sunlight hot on her exposed vulva.

“What amazing mud,” he said, staring at the glop in his hand. “I’ve never seen anything like this biome.”

“No.”

“Do you like it?”

“This biome? I suppose so. It’s a bit hot and overgrown, but interesting. It makes a change.”

“So you don’t object. You’re not a Red.”

“A Red?” She laughed. “No, I’m a whig.”

He thought that one over. “Do you mean to say that greens and Reds are no longer a contemporary political division?”

She gestured at the elephant grass and saal trees backing the meadow. “How could they be?”

“Very interesting.” He cleared his throat. “When you go to Uranus, will you invite a friend of mine?”

“Maybe,” Zo said, and shifted her hips back a bit.

He took the hint, and after a moment leaned forward and began to massage the thigh nearest him. It felt like a monkey’s little hands on her skin, clever and knowing. He could lose his whole hand in her pubic hair, a phenomenon he appeared to like, as he repeated it several times and got an erection, which she held hard as she came. It was not like being tabled, of course, but any orgasm was a good thing, especially out in the sun’s hot rain. And although his handling of her was basic, he did not exhibit any of that hankering for simultaneous affection which so many of the old ones had, a sentimentality which interfered with the much more acute pleasures that could be achieved one person at a time. So when her shuddering had stilled she rolled on her side, and took his erection in her mouth — like a little finger she could wrap her tongue entirely around — while giving him a good view of her body. She stopped once to look herself, big rich taut curves, and saw that the span of her hips stood nearly as high as his shoulders. Then back to it, vagina dentata, so absurd those frightened patriarchal myths, teeth were entirely superfluous, did a python need teeth, did a rock stamp need teeth? Just grab the poor creatures by the cock and squeeze till they whimpered, and what were they going to do? They could try to stay out of the grip, but at the same time it was the place they most wanted to be, so that they wandered in the pathetic confusion and denial of that double bind — and put themselves at the risk of teeth anyway, any chance they got; she nipped at him, to remind him of his situation; then let him come. Men were so lucky they weren’t telepathic.

Afterward they took another dip in the lake, and back on the sand he pulled a loaf of bread from his day pack. They broke the loaf in half and ate.

“Were you purring, then?” he said between swallows.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You had the trait inserted?”

She nodded, swallowed. “Last time I took the treatment.”

“The genes are from cats?”

“From tigers.”

“Ah.”

“It turns out to be a minor change in the larynx and vocal cords. You should try it, it feels really good.”

He was blinking and did not answer.

“Now who’s this friend you want me to take to Uranus?”

“Ann Clayborne.”

“Ah! Your old nemesis.”

“Something like that.”

“What makes you think she would go?”

“She might not. But she might. Michel says she’s trying some new things. And I think Miranda would be interesting to her. A moon knocked apart in an impact, and then reassembled, moon and impactor together. It’s an image I’d … like her to see. All that rock, you know. She’s fond of rock.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Russell and Clayborne, the green and the Red, two of the most famous antagonists in all the melodramatic saga of the first years of settlement. Those first years: a situation so claustrophobic Zo shuddered to think of it. Clearly the experience had brecciated the minds of all those who had suffered through it. And then Russell had had even more spectacular damage inflicted later on, as she recalled; hard to remember; all the First Hundred’s stories tended to blur together for her, the Great Storm, the lost colony, Maya’s betrayals — all the arguments, affairs, murders, rebellions, and so on — such sordid stuff, with scarcely a moment of joy in the whole thing, as far as she could tell. As if the old ones had been anaerobic bacteria, living in poison, slowly excreting the necessary conditions for the emergence of a fully oxygenated life.

Except perhaps for Ann Clayborne, who seemed, from the stories, to have understood that to feel joy in a rock world, you had to love rock. Zo liked that attitude, and so she said, “Sure, I’ll ask her. Or you should, shouldn’t you? You ask, and tell her I’m agreeable. We can make room in the diplomatic group.”

“It’s a Free Mars group?”

“Yes.”

“Hmm.”

He asked her questions about Jackie’s political ambitions, and she answered when she could, looking down her body and its curves, the hard muscles smoothed by the fat under the skin — hipbones flanking the belly, navel, wiry black pubic hair (she brushed bread crumbs out of it), long powerful thighs. Women’s bodies were much more handsomely proportioned than men’s, Michelangelo had been wrong about that, although his David made a best case for his argument, a flier’s body if ever there was one.

“I wish we could fly back up to the rim,” she said.

“I don’t know how to fly the birdsuits.”

“I could have carried you on my back.”

“Really?”

She glanced at him. Another thirty or thirty-five kilos…“Sure. It would depend on the suit.”

“It’s amazing what those suits can do.”

“It’s not just the suits.”

“No. But we weren’t meant to fly. Heavy bones and all. You know.”

“I do. Certainly the suits are necessary. Just not sufficient.”

“Yes.” He was looking at her body. “It’s interesting how big people are getting.”

“Especially genitals.”

“Do you think so?”

She laughed. “Just teasing.”

“Ah.”

“Although you would think the parts would grow that had increased use, eh?”

“Yes. Depth of chests have grown greater, I read.”

She laughed again. “The thin air, right?”

“Presumably. It’s true in the Andes, anyway. The distances from spine to sternum in Andean natives are nearly twice as large as they are in people who live at sea level.”

“Really! Like the chest cavities of birds, eh?”

“I suppose.”

“Then add big pecs, and big breasts…”

He didn’t reply.

“So we’re evolving into something like birds.”

He shook his head. “It’s phenotypic. If you raised your kids on Earth, their chests would shrink right back down.”

“I doubt I’ll have kids.”

“Ah. Because of the population problem?”

“Yes. We need you issei to start dying. Even all these new little worlds aren’t helping that much. Earth and Mars are both turning into anthills. You’ve taken our world from us, really. You’re kleptoparasites.”

“That sounds redundant.”

“No, it’s a real term, for animals that steal food from their young during exceptionally hard winters.”

“Very apt.”

“We should probably kill you all when you turn a hundred.”

“Or as soon as we have children.”

She grinned. He was so imperturbable! “Whichever comes first.”         :

He nodded as if this were a sensible suggestion. She laughed, although it was vexing too: “Of course it will never happen.”

“No. But it won’t be necessary.”

“No? You’re going to act like lemmings and run off cliffs?”

“No. Treatment-resistant diseases are appearing. Older people are dying. It’s bound to happen.”

“Is it?”

“I think so.”

“You don’t think they’ll figure out ways to cure these new diseases, keep stringing things along?”

“In some cases. But senescence is complex, and sooner or later…” He shrugged.

“That’s a bad thought,” Zo said.

She stood, pulled the dried fabric of her singlet up her legs. He stood and dressed too.

“Have you ever met Bao Shuyo?” he asked.

“No, who’s she?”

“A mathematician, living in Da Vinci.”

“No. Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

They hiked uphill through the forest, from time to time stopping to look after the quick blur of an animal. A big jungle chicken, what looked like a lone hyena, standing looking down a wash at them… Zo found she was enjoying herself. This issei was unteasable, unshockable; and his opinions were unpredictable, which was an unusual trait in the old, indeed in anyone. Most of the ancient ones Zo had met seemed especially bound in the tightly warped space-time of their values; and as the way people lived their values was in inverse proportion to how tightly they were bound in them, the old had ended up Tartuffes to a man, or so she had thought, hypocrites for whom she had no patience at all. She despised the old and their precious values. But this one didn’t seem to have any. It made her want to talk more with him.

When they got back to the village she patted him on the head. “That was fun. I’ll talk to your friend.”

“Thanks.”

A few days later she gave Ann Clayborne a call. The face that appeared on the screen was as forbidding as a skull.

“Hi, I’m Zoya Boone.”

“Yes?”

“It’s my name,” Zo said. “That’s how I introduce myself to strangers.”

“Boone?”

“Jackie’s daughter.”

“Ah.”

Clearly she didn’t like Jackie. A common reaction; Jackie was so wonderful that a lot of people hated her.

“I’m also a friend of Sax Russell’s.”

“Ah.”

Impossible to read what she meant by that one.

“I was telling him that I’m on my way out to the Uranian system, and he said you might be interested in joining me.”

“He did?”

“He did. So I called. I’m going to Jupiter and then Uranus, with two weeks on Miranda.”

“Miranda!” she said. “Who are you again?”

“I’m Zo Boone! What are you, senile?”

“Miranda, you said?”

“Yes. Two weeks, maybe more if I like it.”

“If you like it?”

“Yes. I don’t stay places I don’t like.”

Clayborne nodded as if that were only sensible, and so Zo added mock solemnly, as if to a child, “There’s a lot of rock there.”

“Yes yes.”

A long pause. Zo studied the face on the screen. Gaunt and wrinkled, like Russell, only in her case almost all the wrinkles were vertical. A face hacked out of wood. Finally she said, “I’ll think about it.”

“You’re supposed to be trying new things,” Zo reminded her.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“Sax told you that?”

“No — I asked Jackie about you.”

“I’ll think about it,” she said again, and cut the connection.

So much for that, Zo thought. Still she had tried, and therefore felt virtuous, a disagreeable sensation. These issei had a way of pulling one into their realities; and they were all mad.

And unpredictable as well; the next day Clayborne called back, and said she would go.

In person Ann Claybomeproved to be indeed as withered and sun-dried as Russell, but even more silent and strange — waspish, laconic, prone to brief ill-tempered outbursts. She showed up at the last minute with a single backpack and a slim black wristpad, one of the latest models. Her skin was a nut brown, and marked by wens and warts and scars where skin disorders had been removed. A long life spent outdoors, and in the early days too, when UV bombardment had been intense; in short, she was fried. A bakehead, as they said in Echus. Her eyes were gray, her mouth a lizard slash, the lines from the corners of her mouth to her nostrils like deep hatchet chops. Nothing could be more severe than that face.

During the week of the voyage to Jupiter she spent her time in the little ship park, walking through the trees. Zo preferred the dining hall, or the big viewing bubble where a small group gathered in the evening watch, to eat tabs of pandorph and play go, or smoke opium and look at the stars. So she seldom saw Ann on the trip out.

They shot over the asteroid belt, slightly out of the plane of the ecliptic, passing over several of the hollowed-out little worlds, no doubt, though it was hard to tell; inside the rock potatoes shown on the ship’s screens there might be rough shells like finished mines, or towns landscaped into beautiful estates; societies anarchic and dangerous, or settled by religious groups or Utopian collectives, and painfully peaceable. The existence of such a wide variety of systems, coexisting in a semianarchic state, made Zo doubt that Jackie’s plans for organizing the outer satellites under a Martian umbrella would ever succeed; it seemed to her that the asteroid belt might serve as a model for what the entire solar system’s political organization would become. But Jackie did not agree; the asteroid belt was as it was, she said, because of its particular nature, scattered through a broad band all around the sun. The outer satellites on the other hand were clumped in groups around their gas giants, and were certain to become leagues because of that; and were such large worlds, compared to the asteroids, that eventually it would make a difference with whom they allied themselves in the inner system.

Zo was not convinced. But their deceleration brought them into the Jovian system, where she would have a chance to put Jackie’s theories to the test. The ship ran a cat’s cradle through the Galileans to slow down further, giving them close-ups of the four big moons. All four of them had ambitious terraforming plans, and had started to put them into action. The outer three, Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa, had similar initial conditions to deal with; they were all covered by water ice layers, Callisto and Ganymede to a depth of a thousand kilometers, Europa to a depth of a hundred kilometers. Water was not uncommon in the outer solar system, but it was by no means ubiquitous either, and so these water worlds had something to trade. All three moons had large amounts of rock scattered over their icy surfaces, the remnants of meteoric impact for the most part, carbonaeous chondrite rubble, a very useful building material. The settlers of the three moons had, on their arrival some thirty m-years before, rendered the chondrites and built tent frameworks of carbon nanotube similar to that used in Mars’s space elevator, tenting spaces twenty or fifty kilometers across with multilayered tent materials. Under their tents they had spread crushed rock to create a thin layer of ground — the ultimate permafrost — in some places surrounding lakes they had melted into the ice.

On Callisto the tent town built to this plan was called Lake Geneva; this was where the Martian delegation went to meet with the various leaders and policy groups of the Jovian League. As usual Zo accompanied the delegation as a minor functionary and observer, looking for opportunities to convey Jackie’s messages to people who could discreetly do something about it.

This particular meeting was part of a biannual series the Jovians held to discuss the terraforming of the Galileans, and so a good context for Jackie’s interests to be expressed. Zo sat at the back of the room next to Ann, who had decided to sit in on the meeting. The technical problems of terra-forming these moons were big in scale, but simple in concept. Callisto, Ganymede and Europa were being dealt with in the same way, at least at the beginning: mobile fusion reactors were out roaming their surfaces, heating the ice and pumping gases into early hydrogen/oxygen atmospheres. Eventually they hoped to create equatorial belts where gathered rock had been crushed to create ground over the ice; atmospheric temperatures would then be kept near freezing, so that tundra ecologies could be established around a string of equatorial lakes, in a breathable oxygen/hydrogen atmosphere.

lo, the innermost of the Galileans, was more difficult, but intriguing; rail-gun launchers were firing large missiles of ice and chaldates down to it from the other three big moons; being so close to Jupiter it had very little water, its surface made up of intermixed layers of basalt and sulfur — the sulfur spewing out onto the surface in spectacular volcanic plumes, driven by the tidal action from Jupiter and the other Galileans. The plan for lo’s terraformation was more long-term than most, and was to be driven in part by an infusion of sulfur-eating bacteria into hot sulfur springs around the volcanoes.

All four of these projects were slowed by the lack of light, and space mirrors of tremendous size were being built at Jupiter’s Lagrange points, where the complications of the Jovian system’s gravitational fields were reduced; sunlight would be directed from these mirrors to the equators of the four Galileans. All four moons were tidally locked around Jupiter, so their solar days depended on the length of their orbits around Jupiter, ranging from forty-two hours for lo to fifteen days for Callisto; and whatever the length of their days, they all received during them only four percent as much sunlight as the Earth. But the truth was that the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth was stupendously excessive, so that four percent was actually a lot of light, when it came to visibility — seventeen thousand times as much as the full moon on Earth — but not much heat, if one wanted to terraform. They therefore were cadging light any way they could; Lake Geneva and all the settlements on the other moons were located facing Jupiter, to take advantage of the sunlight reflected from that giant globe in the sky; and flying “gas lanterns” had been dropped into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter, clusters of them igniting some of the planet’s helium3 in points of light that were too brilliant to look directly at for more than a second; the fusion burns were suspended before electromagnetic reflecting dishes that put all the light out into the planet’s plane of the ecliptic. Thus the banded monster ball was now made an even more spectacular sight by the achingly bright diamond dots of some twenty gas lanterns wandering its face.

The space mirrors and the gas lanterns together would still leave the settlements with less than half the sunlight Mars got, but it was the best they could do. That was life in the outer solar system, a somewhat dim business all around, Zo judged. Even gathering that much light would require the manufacture of a massive infrastructure; and this was where the Martian delegation came in. Jackie had arranged to offer a lot of help, including more fusion behemoths, more gas lanterns, and also Martian experience in space mirrors and terraforming techniques generally, through an association of aerospace co-ops interested in obtaining more projects now that the situation in Martian space was largely stabilized. They would contribute capital and expertise, in return for preferential trade agreements, supplies of heliunij culled from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, and the opportunity to explore, mine, and possibly join terraforming efforts on Jupiter’s clutch of smaller moons, all eighteen of them.

Invested capital, expertise, trade; this was the carrot, and a big one. Clearly if the Galileans accepted it, the tendrils of association with Mars would be there, and Jackie could then follow that up with political alliances of various sorts; and pull the Jovian moons into her web. This eventuality was as clear to the Jovians as it was to anyone, however, and they were doing what they could to get what they wanted without giving too much in return. No doubt they would soon be playing the Martians off against similar offers from the Terfan exmetas and other organizations.

This was where Zo came in; she was the stick. Public carrot, private stick; this was Jackie’s method, in all phases of life.

Zo revealed Jackie’s threats in tiny indirect glimpses, to make them seem even more threatening. Brief meeting with officials from lo: the ecopoetic plan, Zo said to them, casually, seemed far too slow. It would be thousands of years before their bacteria chewed the sulfur into useful gases, and meanwhile Jupiter’s intense radio field, which enveloped lo and added to its problems, would mutate the bacteria beyond recognition. They needed an ionosphere, they needed water, it was possible they even needed to think about pulling the moon out into a higher orbit around their great gas god. Mars, home of terraforming expertise and the healthiest wealthiest civilization in the solar system, could help them with all that, give them special help. Or even discuss with the other Galileans the notion of taking over the project, in order to bring it up to speed.

After that, casual conversations with various authorities from the ice Galileans: in cocktail parties after workshops, in bars after the parties, walking in groups along Lake Geneva’s signature lakefront promenade, under the sonolu-minescent streetlights suspended from the tent framework. The delegates from lo, she told these people, are looking into cutting a separate deal on their own. They had the situation with the most potential, when all was said and done; hard ground to stand on, heat, heavy metals; great tourist potential. Zo ventured that they seemed to be willing to use these advantages to strike out on their own, and fractionate the Jovian League.

Ann followed Zo and the others on some of these walks, and Zo let her listen in on a couple of the conversations, curious to see what she would make of them. She followed them down the waterfront promenade, which was set on the low meteor crater rim they had used to contain the lake. The slosh craters here beat any slosh crater on Mars by a long shot; the icy rim of this one was only a few meters higher than the general surface of the moon, forming a round levee from which one could look over the water of the lake, or back onto the grassy streets of the town, or beyond the streets to the rubbly ice plain outside the tent, visibly curving to the nearby horizon. The extreme flatness of the landscape outside the tent gave an indication of its nature — a glacier covering a whole world, ice a thousand kilometers deep, ice which ate every meteor impact and tidal cracking, and quickly flowed back to flatness again.

On the surface of the lake small black waves formed interference patterns on the flat sheet of water, which was white like the lake’s ice bottom, tinted yellow by the great ball of Jupiter looming gibbous overhead, all its bands of creamy yellow and orange visibly swirled at their edges and around the pinprick lanterns.

They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgrass gleamed greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars’s military might, mentioned again that lo was considering defection from their league.

The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.

“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.

“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”

“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”

Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.

“Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone,” Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge over a white-bottomed canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to come around into view.”

The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut la/y spirals up near the tent frame. Zo watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives greyhounding past — “You really are more interested in rocks than people,” Zo said, half-admiring, half-irritated.

Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the arm, pulled her along. “The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years old, they’ve lived in point-one g all their lives, they don’t care about Earth or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five thousand years. They’re the next step in evolution, for ka’s sake, and here you are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this galaxy. You’re just as crazy as they said.”

This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underbill.”

Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”

“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.

Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a muffled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the locals, “This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Europa who talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don’t know if they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk, like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Stellariz-ing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you needed then.”

“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.

“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”

“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.

“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”

Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.

Back on the lakeshore Ann and Zo walked the promenade. “You’re so blatant,” Ann said.

“On the contrary. It’s very subtle. They don’t know if I’m speaking for me, or for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it reminds them of the larger context. It’s too easy for them to get wrapped up in the Jovian situation and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a single political body; people need help thinking about that, they can’t conceptualize it.”

“You need help yourself. It’s not Renaissance Italy, you know.”

“Machiavelli will always remain true, if that’s what you mean. And they need to be reminded of that here.”

“You remind me of Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Frank Chalmers.”

“Now there’s an issei I admire,” Zo said. “What I’ve read about him, anyway. He was the only one of you who wasn’t a hypocrite. And he was the one that got the most done.”

“You don’t know anything about it,” Ann said.

Zo shrugged. “The past is the same for all of us. I know as much about it as you do.”

A group of the Jovians walked by, pale and big-eyed, utterly absorbed by their own talk. Zo gestured: “Look at them! They’re so focused. I admire them too, really — throwing themselves so energetically into a project that won’t be completed until long after their death — it’s an absurd gesture, a gesture of defiance and freedom, a divine madness, as if they were sperm wiggling madly toward an unknown goal.”

“That’s all of us,” Ann said. “That’s evolution. When do we go to Miranda?”

Around Uranus, four times as far from the sun as Jupiter, objects were struck by one quarter of a percent the light that would have struck them on Earth. This was a problem for powering major terraforming projects, although as Zo found when they entered the Uranian system, it still provided quite enough illumination for visibility; the sunlight was 1,300 times as bright as the full moon on Earth, the sun still a blinding little chip in the black array of stars, and though things in the region were a bit dim and drained of their color, one could see them perfectly well. Thus the great power of the human eye and spirit, functioning well so far from home.

But there were no big moons around Uranus to attract a major terraforming effort; Uranus’s family consisted of fifteen very small moons, none larger than Titania and Oberon at six hundred kilometers in diameter, and most considerably smaller — a collection of little asteroids, really, named after Shakespeare’s women for the most part, all circling the blandest of the gas giants, blue-green Uranus, rolling around with its poles in the plane of the ecliptic, its eleven narrow graphite rings scarcely visible fairy loops. All in all, not a promising system for inhabitation.

Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no surprise to Zo; there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on Pluto, on Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent out to it, they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens already squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of outside interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.

The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the biggest and farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the travelers from Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a ferry down to the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.

This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that were common to all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more meager than the light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully three-dimensional space, with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell waiters, cliffside balconies and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards and trampolines, hanging restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by bright white floating lamp globes. Zo saw immediately that so much paraphernalia in the air made flying inside the tent impossible; but in this gravity daily life was a kind of flight, and as she bounded in the air with a flex of her foot, she decided to join those residents who treated daily life that way; she danced. And in fact very few people tried to walk in the Terran way; here human movement was naturally airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan loops. The lowest level of the city was netted.

The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the system, although of course they were mostly Martian or Terran. At this point there were no native Uranians, except for a single creche of young children who had been born to mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied, and recently they had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, to swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in the planet’s blue-green like pinpricks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond necklace around the middle of the giant. These lanterns had increased the system’s light enough so that everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much more color there was in things, but Zo was not impressed. “I’d hate to have seen it before,” she said to one of the local enthusiasts, “it’s Monochromomundos.” Actually all the buildings in the town were brightly painted in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath happened to be was sometimes beyond Zo’s telling. She needed a pupil dilator.

But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of moving on after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, “the next great problem,” or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in here for good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to the low g, to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding in comets from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or three of the smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer bodies to work with, “artificial Mirandas” as one person called them.

Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a railing, unable to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto streets covered with luxuriant green grass. She looked up: aquamarine giant, slender dim rings; a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human standard, and perhaps untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity. But back in the meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet’s subtle beauties, inventing an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to modify everything they could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors, the cool warmth of the tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a dream… Some of them had even become patriots to the point of arguing against radical transformation; they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place could logically sustain.

And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to Ann in a group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her, kiss the top of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw the look on Ann’s face and laughed. “Come on,” she said to the group, who apparently had been assigned a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda. The local version of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no sense at all, and long after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on Mars. But they flowed or pulled themselves into position around a table set out in the middle of the tent on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the discussion rangecTall over the system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of the tent, with the diamond necklace in its round jade setting shining down on them; it seemed the center of town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such oases, and no doubt they seemed like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real town, but Oberon could hold scores of towns like it, and so would Titania, Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, these satellites all had surfaces covering hundreds of square kilometers. This was the attraction of these sun-forsaken moons: free land, open space — a new world, a frontier, with its ever-receding chance to start new, to found a society from scratch. For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or gravity. And so they had gathered the programs and the starter robots, and taken off for the high frontier with plans for a tent and a constitution, to be their own first hundred.

But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in hearing about Jackie’s plans for a systemwide alliance. And already there had been local disagreements strong enough to have caused trouble; among the people sitting around the table were some serious enemies, Zo could tell. She watched their faces closely as the head of their delegation, Marie, laid out the Martian proposal in the most general terms: an alliance designed to deal with the massive’ historical-economic-numerical gravity well of Earth, which was huge, teeming, flooded, mired in its past like a pig in a sty, and still the dominant force in the diaspora. It was in the best interests of all the other settlements to band with Mars and present a united front, in control of their own immigration, trade, growth — in control of their destinies.

Except none of the Uranians, despite their arguments with each other, looked at all convinced. An elderly woman who was the mayor of Hippolyta spoke, and even the Mir-andan “Reds” nodded: they would deal with Earth on their own. Earth or Mars was equally dangerous to freedom. Out here they planned on dealing with all potential alliances or confrontations as free agents, in temporary collusion or opposition with equals, depending on circumstances. There was simply no need for any more formal arrangements to be made. “All that alliance stuff smacks of control from above,” the woman concluded. “You don’t do it on Mars, why try it out here?”

“We do do it on Mars,” Marie said. “That level of control is emergent from the complex of smaller systems below it, and it’s useful for dealing with problems at the holistic level. And now at the interplanetary level. You’re confusing totalization with totalitarianism, a very serious error.”

They did not look convinced. Reason had to be backed with leverage; that was why Zo was along. And the application of leverage would go easier with the reasoning laid out like this beforehand.

Throughout the dinner Ann remained silent, until the general discussion ended and the Miranda group began to ask her questions. Then she came alive, as if switched on, and asked them in return about current local planetology: the classification of different regions of Miranda as parts of the two colliding planetessimals, the recent theory that identified the tiny moons Ophelia, Desdemona, Bianca, and Puck as ejected pieces of the Mirandan collision, and so on. Her questions were detailed and knowledgeable; the guardians were thrilled, in transports, their eyes as big as lemurs’ eyes. The rest of the Uranians were likewise pleased to see Ann’s interest. She was The Red; now Zo saw what that really meant; she was one of the most famous people in history. And it seemed possible that all the Uranians had a little Red in them; unlike the settlers of the Jovian and Saturnian systems, they had no plans for large-scale terraforming, they planned to live in tents and go out on the primal rock for the rest of their lives. And they felt — at least its guardian group felt — that Miranda was so unusual that it had to be left entirely alone. That was a red idea, of course. Nothing humans did there, one of the Uranian Reds said, would do anything but reduce what was most valuable about it. It had an intrinsic worth that transcended even its value as a pla-netological specimen. It had its dignity. Ann watched them carefully as they said this, and Zo saw in her eyes that she did not agree, or even quite understand. For her it was a matter of science — for these people, a matter of spirit. Zo actually sympathized more with the locals’ view than Ann’s, with its cramped insistence on the object. But the result was the same, they both had the Red ethic in its pure form: no terraforming on Miranda, of course, also no domes, no tents, no mirrors; only a single visitor’s station and a few rocket pads (though this too appeared to be controversial within the guardian group); a ban on anything except no-impact foot travel, and rocket hops high enough over the surface to avoid disturbing the dust. The guardian group conceived of Miranda as wilderness, to be walked through but never lived on, never changed. A climber’s world, or even better, a flier’s world. Looked at and nothing more. A natural work of art.

Ann nodded at all this.: And there — there it was, something more in her than the crimping fear: a passion for rock, in a world of rock. Fetishes could fix on anything. And all these people shared the fetish. Zo found it peculiar to be among them, peculiar and intriguing. Certainly her leverage point was coming clear. The guardian group had arranged a special ferry to Miranda, to show it to Ann. No one else would be there. A private tour of the strangest moon of all, for the strangest Red. Zo laughed. “I’d like to come along,” she said earnestly.

And the Great No said yes. That was Ann on Miranda.

It was the smallest of Uranus’s five big moons, only 470 kilometers in diameter. In its early years, some 3.5 billion years before the present, its smaller precursor had run into another moon of about the same size; the two had shattered, then clumped, then, in the heat of the collision, coalesced into a single ball. But the new moon had cooled before the coalescing was quite finished.

The result was a landscape out of a dream, violently divergent and disarranged. Some regions were as smooth as skin, others were ripped raw; some were metamorphosed surfaces of two proto-moons, others were exposed interior material. And then there were the deeply grooved rift zones, where the fragments met, imperfectly. In these zones extensive parallel groove systems bent at acute angles, in dramatic chevron formations, a clear sign of the tremendous torques involved in the collision. The big rifts were so large that they were visible from space as hack marks, incised scores of kilometers deep into the side of the gray sphere.

They came down on a plateau next to the biggest of these hacked chasms, called Prospero’s Rift. They suited up, then left the spacecraft, and walked out to the rift’s edge. A dim abyss, so deep that the bottom looked to be on a different world. Combined with the airy micro-g, the sight gave Zo the distinct feeling of flying, flying however as she sometimes did in dreams, all Martian conditions suspended in favor of some sky of the spirit. Overhead Uranus floated full and green, giving all of Miranda a jade tinge. Zo danced along the rim, pushing off on her toes and floating, floating, coming down in little plies, her heart full of beauty. So strange, the diamond sparks of the gas lanterns, surfing on Uranus’s stratosphere; the eldritch jade. Lights hung across a round green paper lantern. The depths of the abyss only suggested. Everything glowing with its own internal greenness, viriditas bursting out of every thing — and yet everything still and motionless forever, except for them, the intruders, the observers. Zo danced.

Ann hiked along much more comfortably than she had in Hippolyta, with the unconscious grace of someone who has spent a lot of time walking on rock. Boulder ballet; she carried a long angular hammer in her thick glove, and her thigh pockets bulged with specimens. She didn’t respond to the exclamations of Zo or the guardian group, she was oblivious to them. Like an actor playing the part of Ann Clayborne. Zo laughed: that one could become such a cliche!

“If they domed this dark backward and abysm of time, it would make a beautiful place to live,” she said. “Lots of land for the amount of tent needed, eh? And such a view. It would be a wonder.”

No response to such a blunt provocation, of course. But it would set them thinking. Zo followed the guardian group like an albatross. They had started descending a broken staircase of rock that lined the edge of a slim buttress, extending far out from the chasm wall, like a fold of drapery in a marble statue. This feature ended in a flat swirl several kilometers out from the wall, and a kilometer or more lower than the rim. After the flat spot the buttress fell away abruptly, in a sheer drop to the chasm floor, some twenty kilometers straight down. Twenty kilometers! Twenty thousand meters, some seventy thousand feet… Even great Mars itself could boast no such wall.

There were a number of buttresses and other deformations on the wall similar to the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in a limestone cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten rock had dripped into the abyss until the chill of space had frozen it forever. Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft that had dropped them off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the staircase, from the flat spot at the end of the buttress promontory. So they could descend without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute after minute, in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin; you could almost hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was palpable. Except for Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the cracks between their rough stairs.

“This obsession with rock is so pathetic,” Zo said to her on a private band. “To be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world of inert matter, a world that will never surprise you, never do a single thing. So that you won’t be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really.”

A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.

Zo laughed.

“You’re an impertinent girl,” Ann said.

“Yes I am.”

“And stupid as well.”

“That I am not!” Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then she saw Ann’s face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice hissed in the intercom over sharp heavy breaths.‘

“Don’t ruin the walk,” Ann snapped.

“I was tired of being ignored.”

“So who’s afraid now?”

“Afraid of the boredom.”

Another disgusted hiss. “You’ve been very poorly brought up.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results.”

“Suffer on. I’m the one that got you here, remember.”

“Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart.”

“Everyone’s little to you.”

“Compared to this…” The movement of her helmet showed she had glanced down into the rift.

“This speechless immobility that you’re so safe in.”

“This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other planetessimal collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too. That’s the matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time, understand?”

“I understand, but I don’t care.”

“You don’t think it matters.”

“Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to all this. It’s just an accident of the Big Bang.”

“Oh please,” Ann said. “Nihilism is so ridiculous.”

“Look who’s talking! You’re a nihilist yourself! No meaning or value to life or to your senses — it’s weak nihilism, nihilism for cowards, if you can imagine such a thing.”

“My brave little nihilist.”

“Yes — I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed.”

“Which is?”

“Pleasure. The senses and their input. I’m a sensualist, really. It takes some courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses really roaring…”

“You think you’ve faced pain?”

Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain of broken legs and ribs. “Yes. I have.”

Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps Ann was allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was no great generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. “Do you really think it takes centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl Really, you issei are so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed from the moment you touched Mars…”

“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”

“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest dead person who ever lived.”

“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock, twisted like a pretzel.”

“Fuck the rocks.”

“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what a change.”

Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat glasslike, but otherwise utterly nondescript. “You’re obsessed,” she said.

“Yes. But I like my obsessions.”

After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence. Over the course of the day they descended to Bottom’s Landing. Now they were a kilometer below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead, Uranus fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo felt herself to be flying. “You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,” she said to all of them, over the common band. “It’s like a rainbow. Without an observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”

“That’s just saying there is no intrinsic worth,” one of the guardians replied. “It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there’s no need to include human participation. These places exist without us and before us, and that is their intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence, if we want to be in a right attitude to the universe, if we want to actually see it.”

“But I see it,” Zo said happily. “Or almost see it. You people will have to sensitize your eyes with some addition to your genetic treatments. Meanwhile it’s glorious, it truly is. But that glory is in our minds.”

They did not answer. After a while Zo went on:

“All these issues have been raised before, on Mars. The whole matter of environmental ethics was raised to a new level by the experience on Mars, raised right into the heart of our actions. Now you want to protect this place as wilderness, and I can see why. But I’m a Martian, and so I understand. A lot of you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical position, and in the end wilderness is an ethical position. Terrans won’t understand you as well as I do. They’ll come out here and build a big casino right on this promontory. They’ll cover this rift from rim to rim, and try terraforming it like they have everywhere else. The Chinese are still jammed into their country like sardines, and they don’t give a damn about the intrinsic worth of China itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the solar system. They need room and they see it’s out here, and they’ll come and build and look at you funny when you object, and what are you going to do? You can try sabotage like the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons here just as easy as you can them, and they’ve got a million replacements for every colonist they lose. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about Earth. We’re like the Lilliputians with Gulliver. We’ve got to work together, and tie him down with as many little lines as we can devise.”

No response from the others.

Zo sighed. “Well,” she said, “maybe it’s for the best. Spread people around out here, they won’t be pressuring Mars so hard. It might be possible to work out deals whereby the Chinese are free to settle out here all they want, and we on Mars are free to cut down immigration to nearly nothing. It might work rather well.”

Again no response from the others.

Finally Ann said, “Shut up. Let us concentrate on the land here.”

“Oh of course.”

Then, as they were approaching the very end of the buttress, the promontory standing out in a gap of air beyond all telling, under the bejeweled jade disk and the brilliant diamond chip beyond it, the whole solar system suddenly triangulated by these celestial objects, the true size of things revealed — they saw moving stars overhead. The rocket jets of their spacecraft.

“See?” Zo said. “It’s the Chinese, coming to have a look.”

Suddenly one of the guardians was on her in a fury, striking her directly on the faceplate. Zo laughed. But she had forgotten Miranda’s ultralight gravity, and was surprised when a ridiculous uppercut lifted her right off her feet. Then she hit the railing with the back of her knees, spun head over heels, twisting to catch herself, bang — a hard blow to the head, but the helmet protected her, she was still conscious, tumbling down the incline at the edge of the promontory — beyond it the void — fear shot through her like an electric shock, she fought for balance but was tumbling, out of control — she felt a jolt — ah yes, the end of her harness! Then the sickening sensation of a farther slide down — the harness clip must have given way. Second surge of adrenal fear — she turned inward and grabbed at the passing rock. Human power in .005 g; the same gravity that had sent her flying now allowed her to catch herself by a single fingertip, and bring the whole weight of her falling body to a halt, as in a miracle.

She was on the edge of a long drop. Sparking lights in her eyes, nausea, darkness beyond; she couldn’t see the floor of the chasm, it was like a bottomless pit, a dream image, black falling… “Don’t move,” said Ann’s voice in her ear. “Hold on. Don’t move.” Above her, a foot, then legs. Very slowly Zo turned her head up to look. A hand clutched her right wrist, hard. “Okay. There’s a hold for your left hand, above it by half a meter. Higher. There. Okay, climb. You above, pull us up.”

They were hauled up like fish on a line.

Zo sat on the ground. The little space ferry was landing soundlessly, over on a pad on the far side of the flat spot. Brief flare of light from its rockets. The concerned looks of the guardians, standing over her.

“Not such a funny joke,” Ann suggested.

“No,” Zo said, thinking hard about how she could use the incident. “Thanks for helping me.” It was impressive how quickly Ann had jumped to her help — not impressive that she had decided to, for this was the code of nobility, one had obligations to one’s peers, and enemies were just as important as friends; enemies were equals, they were necessary, they were what made it possible to be a good friend. But just as a physical maneuver it had been impressive. “Very quick of you.”

On the flight back to Oberon they were all silent, until one of the ferry’s crew turned to Ann and mentioned that Hiroko and some of her followers had been seen here in the Uranian system recently, on Puck.

“Oh what crap,” Ann said.

“How do you know?” Zo asked. “Maybe she decided to get as far away from Earth and Mars as possible. I wouldn’t blame her.”

“This isn’t her kind of place.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe she hasn’t heard this is your private rock garden.”

But Ann simply waved her away.

Back to Mars, the red planet, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The only real world.

Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days, decelerated; and in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on the elevator, going down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked out at Echus, there to the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North Sea. So good to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot. The train to Echus didn’t leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn’t as deep as Prospero’s Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan, crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar, vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the wind again.

So she went back to the station and got on the train for Echus, and felt the train fly down the piste, off the great cone of Pavonis, down the pure xeriscape of east Tharsis, to Cairo and a Swiss-precision exchange onto the train north to Echus Overlook. The train came in near midnight, and she checked in at the co-op’s hostel and walked over to the Adler, feeling the last of the pandorph buzz through her like the feather in the cap of her happiness, and the whole gang was there as if no time had passed, and they cheered to see her, they all hugged her, singly and severally, they all kissed her, they gave her drinks and asked questions about her trip, and told her about the recent wind conditions, and caressed her in her chair, until quickly it was the hour before dawn and they all trooped down to the ledge and suited up and took off, out into the darkness of the sky and the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of it coming back instantly like breathing or sex, the black mass of the Echus escarpment bulking to the east like the edge of a continent, the dim floor of Echus Chasma so far below — the landscape of her heart, with its dim lowland and high plateau, and the vertiginous cliff between them, and over it all the intense purples of the sky, lavender and mauve in the east, black indigo out to the west, the whole arch lightening and taking on color each second, the stars popping out of existence — high clouds to the west flaring pink — and as several stoops had taken her well below the level of Overlook, she was able to close on the cliff and catch a hard westerly updraft and sail on it, inches over Underlook and then up in a tight gyre, motionless herself and yet cast violently up by the wind, until she burst out of the shadow of the cliff into the raw yellows of the new day, an incredibly joyful combination of the kinetic and the visual, of sense and world, and as she soared up into the clouds she thought, To hell with you, Ann Clayborne — you and the rest of your kind can go on forever about your moral imperatives, your issei ethics, values, goals, strictures, responsibilities, virtues, grand purposes of life, you can pour out those words to the end of time in all their hypocrisy and fear, and still you will never have a feeling like this one, when the grace of mind and body and world are all in perfect consort — you can rant your Calvinist rant until you are blue in the face, what humans should do with their brief lives, as if there were any way to tell for sure, as if you didn’t turn out to be a bunch of cruel bastards in the end — but until you get out here and fly, surf, climb, jump, exert yourself somehow in the risk of space, in the pure grace of the body, you just don’t know, you have no right to speak, you are slaves to your ideas and your hierarchies and so can’t see that there is no higher goal than this, the ultimate purpose of existence, of the cosmos itself: the free play of flight.

In the northern spring the trade winds blew, pushing against the westerlies and damping the Echus updrafts. Jackie was on the Grand Canal, distracted from her interplanetary maneuverings by the tedium of local politics; indeed she seemed irritated and tense at having to deal with it, and clearly she did not want Zo around. So Zo went to work in the mines at Moreux for a while, and then joined a group of flying friends on the coast of the North Sea, south of Boone’s Neck, near Blochs Hoffnung, where the sea cliffs reared a kilometer out of the crashing surf. Late-afternoon onshore breezes hit these cliffs and sent up a small flock of fliers, wheeling through seastacks that poked out of tapestries of foam surging up and down, up and down, pure white on the wine-dark sea.

This flying group was led by a young woman Zo hadn’t met before, a girl of only nine m-years, named Melka. She was the best flier Zo had ever seen. When she was in the air leading them it was as if an angel had come into their midst, darting through them like a raptor through doves, at other times leading them through the tight maneuvers that made flocking such fun. And so Zo worked through the days at her co-op’s local partner, and flew every day after her work stint was over. And her heart was always soaring, pleased by one thing after another. Once she even called Ann Clayborne, to try to tell her about flying, about what it really meant; but the old one had nearly forgotten who she was, and did not appear interested even when Zo managed to make it clear when and how they had met.

That afternoon she flew with an ache inside. The past was a dead letter, sure; but that people could become such ghosts…’

Nothing for such a feeling but sun and salt air, the everchanging spill of sea foam, rising and falling against the cliffs. There was Melka, diving; Zo chased her, feeling a sudden rush of affection for such a beautiful spirit. But then Melka saw her and tipped away, and clipped the highest rock of a seastack with the end of one wing, and tumbled down like a shot bird. Shocked at the sight of the accident, Zo pulled her wings in and began dolphin-kicking downward next to the seastack, until she was plummeting in a powerful stoop; she caught up the tumbling girl in her arms, she flapped one wing just over the blue waves, while Melka struggled under her; then she saw that they were going to have to swim.