“Do you know what’s happening, Charles?” I asked him.

“Settled down,” he whispered, eyes straying again.

“You brought us here,” I said. “For better or for worse, but it feels safe. That must be better.”

“Mm hmmm,” he murmured.

“We’re looking at the New System. It’s nighttime. We can see the stars, and they’re beautiful.”

“Good,” he said.

“Do you understand?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding. “Too much.”

The quiet that followed our move — stunned realization, adjustment, and recovery — applied, it seemed, as much to Mars as the Martians.

No moons rose over Mars.

The threat of the locusts faded day by day as more machines wandered into our defenses and were shredded, or their energy and purpose died on the cold dry sands.

With Many Hills gone, and Ti Sandra and much of the legislature dead, there was no government, no Republic. Large stations naturally became the centers of Martian social and political life. Martians talked vaguely of returning to normal, but the instinctive pattern of society was the family, the station, the Binding Multiple; nothing else had yet had chance to take root.

At first, millions of Martians had difficulty even understanding what had happened to them. They could not conceive of a force so massive, a conspiracy so powerful, as to tear the planet away from the Old Sun. As the reality seeped in — echoed across the ex net, reaffirmed by scientists and pundits trusted within the smaller communities — shock replaced disbelief, and then indignation.

The evidence of Earth’s assaults on Mars seemed far away from everyday life. Destroyed stations had no voice, of course, and scarred territories, hundreds of millions of hectares of scorched sand, did not seem reason enough for so drastic a move.

Shock ruled. Families made alarmed and angry judgments, and those judgments were passed along the ex net. Committees formed to investigate, argued with each other, and eventually the committees became a kind of ad hoc judicial system, and that system made inquiries.

What at first was called the Escape began to be called the Retreat, then the Rout, and finally the Shame. We could have stayed, some said, and used our new power to fight Earth on its own terms. Surely a few billion Earth citizens would have been fair exchange for keeping Mars independent within the Solar System…

Homesickness of the most extreme kind added to the miseries.

The Republic, despite the best efforts of the surviving government, was quickly being replaced by something worse than anarchy — passionate mob rule, directed by untutored but skilled opportunists.

The mob was spurred on by Mars itself. Mars found its voice, and screamed its own pain.

The first great quake rumbled south of Ascraeus. Three stations tumbled to ruin, and one split asunder as a crevice formed between Pavonis and Ascraeus. The crevice — in later years to be called the New Tharsis Rift — grew in four weeks from a few meters to over a thousand kilometers. The echoes of this new stretching of the crust rebounded. Mars rang like a struck gong.

Within Preamble, the areologists — led by a frantic and inspired Faoud Abdi — tried to track the course of the new Martian tectonic order without satellites, relying entirely upon reports sent across the ex net. But the ex net itself was fragmented as links were broken, repaired, and broken again. Our nano resources were stretched past their limits.

From Kaibab, volunteer crews flew shuttles along Marineris, charting the changes, taking on fuel and supplies at those intact stations willing to cooperate, and proceeding across the Tharsis Bulge. Elevation changes of a few dozen meters were common. In some places, changes of a hundred meters were noted.

The Tharsis Bulge, some predicted, would subside within a hundred years — old years.

Mars orbited the New Sun with a period of three hundred and two days.

On the opposite side of Mars, narrow, linear ridges appeared, thousands of kilometers long, aligned in great arcs like waves frozen in stone. More stations found their tunnels in jeopardy and had to be evacuated.

Wachsler’s contingency plans were enacted, but often too late. For this of course I was blamed. To have pushed Mars into such an extremity, without adequate planning, seemed a horrible blunder; the word “crime” was not too strong.

On my orders, the remaining Olympians disassembled the tweakers and carried them away from Kaibab to secure storage elsewhere. Some of the shipments were seized by factions who laid claim to them. No single faction, thankfully, could do anything with what they had. No one understood. The Olympians fell silent, even under threat.

Some were imprisoned.

I spent much of my time flying from station to station, touring quake sites and trying to provide solace, meeting with the new unsympathetic committees. Each and every Martian had become a refugee, even if they still had their lifelong familiar four walls around them.

And Martians were afraid. In station after station, they asked when we would go Home — to the Solar System — and when I told them, probably never, many wept in anger and despair.

Some supported me, but not many.

Mars, on its surface and below, suffered madness.

When water poured from the northern scarps of Olympus and flooded Cyane Sulci, damaging the labs where my husband had worked to make the mother cysts bloom, I flew in the last Presidential shuttle, on my last official tour of a disaster area. Dandy accompanied me, and Stephen Leander. We traveled first to UMS, spending the night and refueling there; then we proceeded to the sulci.

Something had come awake within the huge volcano, liberating a vast subarean mineral aquifer. The water boiled from the northern rapes, some of it coursing into the sulci, flooding the hundreds of kilometers in between to a depth of several meters. The water, meeting age-old flopsand and sizzle, liberated huge quantities of bound carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Lakes of fizzing mud bubbled, churned, and then froze. We flew across this dark, thickly clouded terrain, observing new islands in the new mud oceans.

Only the southern lowlands and valleys of the Cyane Sulci had been flooded, of course. But the lab had been positioned in one such valley, and the containment domes had been destroyed, leaving four mother cysts open to the new skies of Mars.

My husband’s colleagues met us. Dr. Schovinski, Ilya’s assistant, extended cordial greetings in the makeshift airlock.

“It is proverbial,” Schovinski said, leading Dandy and Leander and me to a small room where tea and a crude lunch was being served. “We lose most of our buildings and tunnels, nearly all of the domes, and yet… The experiment is a success. What you have done is controversial, dear Madam President, but from this scientist, all I can say is… thank you!”

We ate quickly and Schovinski showed us through a shored-up and still-damp tunnel to the lab where fossil mother cysts had once been prepared for experiments in the domes. The cyst cradles here were empty. “We’ve moved them all outside,” Schovinski explained. “If only Ilya could have seen this!”

We put on pressure suits and walked into the open. Beneath the brighter skies, filled with high, swirling clouds of ice crystals, the floods had pushed the containment domes into mounds of glittering scrap. The carefully prepared soil beds had been scoured, leaving deep ruts and gullies, and in these gullies, beneath a thin layer of ice rime that gathered every evening and dissipated by noon , thick brown shoots rose two and three meters, forming fan-shaped leaves at their tips.

Schovinski urged me into a gully about a meter deep. He took my gloved hand and slapped it against the trunk of a shoot; rising from congealed and vitrified slime. The slime poured from a cracked mother cyst six meters away.