His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of Rhodos. Sansei, from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had helped to found this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its surge was the only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial tail-wagging-the-dog approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now he was running for representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to coordinate the Green campaigns more generally.
“We’ll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?” Maya asked Vendana later.
“Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale.”
• • •
Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the young ones turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to continue partying; Maya was forgotten, she wasn’t part of that. She stared after them, then joined Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething. She couldn’t help it, even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes she hated the young. “I hate them,” she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their youth— not just their physical perfection, but simply their age— sheer chronology— the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in anticipation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she had been looking down on Mars from the Ares, after they had aerobraked, and were stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent; and shocked at the abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her that had been the best moment of all, that rush of anticipation as it all lay there below them, anything possible. That was youth.
“Think of them as fellow travelers,” Michel advised now, as he had several times before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. “They’re only going to be young for as long as we were— a snap of the fingers, right? And then they’re old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference doesn’t matter a damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only ones who are ever going to really understand you.”
“Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”
• • •
The aerial lens’s burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so when it had blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim on the northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the canal bed elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the canal’s endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a little divided town called Birch’s Trenches, while the southwestern locks’ larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn, and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the unmelted rim of Gale, overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and passengers of passing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars campaign. A big grassy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches of the town.
Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the stage, which gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest of the Free Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they waited for their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others Maya half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could be so revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that Frank used to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and, in a different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on the global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party. MarsFirst was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest terms of the renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she seemed to recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat resembling European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small parties bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds, and the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps, or running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in temporary alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst had become something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the outback, a nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of deal going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie, the way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet on it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.
Their speeches were all about beautiful wonderful Mars and how it was going to be ruined by overpopulation, unless they closed it to further Terran immigration. There was a strong case to be made for that point of view, actually, as could be told by the cheers and applause from the crowd. Their attitude was deeply hypocritical, as most of those applauding made their living from Terran tourists, and all of them were immigrants or the children of immigrants; but they cheered anyway. It was a good election issue. Especially if you ignored the risk of war, if you ignored the sheer immensity of Earth, and its primacy in human civilization. Defying it in this way. . . . Well, it didn’t matter; these people didn’t give a damn about Earth, and they didn’t understand it either. So defiance only made Jackie look more brave and beautiful, standing up for a free Mars. The ovation for her was loud and sustained; she had learned a lot since her maladroit speeches during the second revolution, she had gotten quite good. Very good.
When the Green speakers got up to take their turn, and argue for an open Mars, they tried to talk about the danger of a closed-Mars policy, but the response was of course much less enthusiastic than it had been for Jackie— their position sounded like cowardice, to tell the truth, and the desirability of an open Mars, naive. Before arriving in Banks Vendana had offered Maya a chance to speak, but she had declined, and now she was confirmed in her judgment; she did not envy these speakers their unpopular stance before a dwindling crowd.
Afterward the Greens held a small party/postmortem, and Maya critiqued their performance with some severity. “I’ve never seen such incompetence. You’re trying to scare them, but you only sound fearful. The stick is necessary, but you need a carrot as well. The possibility of war is the stick, but you have to tell them why it would be good to keep Terrans coming up, without sounding like idiots. You have to remind them that we all have Terran origins, we are always immigrants here. For you can never leave Earth.”
They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After that Maya got Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie’s recent liaisons. Mikka was indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst was if anything more anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she had begun to see the outlines of a plan.
When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana and Athos and the rest, until they passed a large band playing what they called Sheffield sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum rhythms at once, on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical use. But it suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able to guide the young Greens unobtrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted across the dance floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, “Oh, there’s Antar— hello,
An-tar! These are the people I’m sailing with. We’re right behind you, apparently, headed to Hell’s Gate and then Odessa. How’s the campaign going?”
And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to object to even when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in the pocket of Earth’s Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies, another dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way the Free Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same time to try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system. Hubris. Or perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the young natives’ party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its supermajority but its simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their old fanaticisms intact— churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open feuds— there was definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for during the intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had clearly begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John would have gone crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told you so, and suggested yet another revolution.
But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it could not be banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being gracious, extra gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something. And as he always followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when suddenly Jackie and some others were at his side, and everyone saying hello. Maya nodded to Jackie, who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new companions, carefully introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she saw Jackie watching him, and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly glance to her. Swiftly but very casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk and Nazik, who were living on the coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two groups were moving slowly toward the music, and soon, if they kept going, they would be thoroughly mingled, and it would be too loud to hear any conversation but one’s own. “I like this Sheffield sound,” Maya said to Antar. “Help me get through to the dance floor?”
An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But Antar took her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos— or pretended not to. It was an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful up close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.
So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years. Indeed if you concentrated on the bass drums only, and held to their rhythms, then it was somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that fundamental ground bass the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen implements and round stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling or rapid thought. It made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood it, but rhythmic sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle gracefully about. He must be a fool but it didn’t show. Jackie and Athos had disappeared. And so had Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all. Maya grinned and spun in the dance.
Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He liked sweaty hugs, and looked pleased but curious: “I thought you didn’t like this kind of music?”
“Sometimes I do.”
• • •
Southwest of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena massif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the power of the ship’s line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, passing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus— they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sulfuric yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both sides of the canal, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and hedges. The Glass Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a canal cliché from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage through this region were warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the banks, and as clear: a glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.
• • •
As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.
The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko . . . on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over the water, one’s view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.
Or so it felt, strolling in the nip of an evening under the pastel neons of a canalside town. In one, called Anteus, Maya was strolling the canalside promenade, looking down into boats large and small, onto beautiful big young people drinking and chatting lazily, sometimes cooking meat on braziers clamped to the railings and hung out over the water. On a wide dock extending into the canal, there was an open-air café, from which came the plaintive singing of a gypsy violin; she turned into the café instinctively, and only at the
last minute saw Jackie and Athos, sitting at a canalside table alone, leaning over until their foreheads almost touched. Maya certainly did not want to interrupt such a promising scene, but the very abruptness of her halt caught Jackie’s eye, so that she looked up, then started. Maya turned to leave, but saw Jackie was getting up to come over.
Another scene, Maya thought, only partly unhappy at the prospect. But Jackie was smiling, and Athos was coming with her, at her side, watching it all with wide-eyed innocence; either he had no idea of their history, or else he had a good control of his expressions. Maya guessed the latter, simply because of the look in his eye, just that bit too innocent to be real. An actor.
“It’s beautiful this canal, don’t you think?” Jackie was saying.
“A tourist trap,” Maya said. “But a pretty one. And it keeps the tourists nicely bunched.”
“Oh come now,” Jackie said, laughing. She took Athos’s arm. “Where’s your sense of romance?”
“What sense of romance,” Maya said, pleased at this public display of affection. The old Jackie would not have done it. Indeed it was a shock to see that she was no longer young; stupid of Maya not to have thought of that, but her sense of time was such a mishmash that her own face in the mirror was a perpetual shock to her— every morning she woke up in the wrong century, so seeing Jackie looking matronly with Athos on her arm was only more of the same— an impossibility— this was the fresh dangerous girl of Zygote, the young goddess of Dorsa Brevia!