After a Martian year away from home, I returned to deep disappointment, the suspension of my apprenticeship, a furor at Majumdar, and Bithras’s resignation. The Majumdar suit against Mind Design Incorporated did indeed turn into a scandal, but it wasn’t enough to save my third uncle from disgrace. Mind Design passed blame to the Intra-Earth Computer Safety Bureau, which they said was responsible for injecting certain obscure safeguards into neural net designs. The suit dragged on for years and satisfied nobody, but it spurred fresh interest in Martian-grown thinkers.

Martian thinker designers — the best Mars had to offer at the time — claimed they could deactivate the evolvons. Mars would be safe from Terrie “eavesdropping.” Alice was soon cleansed and redeemed, and that pleased me. The concern faded. It shouldn’t have.

One benefit of the scandal was that we heard no more about Mars’s threat to Earth’s security. Indeed, a good many Terrie pressures on Mars subsided. But the scandal was not the sole reason. Earth for a time seemed content with a few stopgaps.

Cailetet broke from the Council and negotiated directly with Earth. We could draw our own conclusions. Stan, lawbonded and transferred to Jane’s BM, did not know what Cailetet had done, or what agreements had been reached — and I would not ask Charles, who ostensibly still worked for Cailetet. My letter to him requesting information still embarrassed me.

Father told me that Triple dollars smelling of Earth were flooding steadily into Cailetet, but not to the Olympians. Funding for the requested QL thinkers had never gone through.

Cailetet continued to refuse Majumdar BM’s offer to join the project. Cailetet revealed little, except to say that the Olympians had been working on improved communications; nothing terribly strategic. And they had failed, losing their funding.

My mother died in a pressure failure at Jiddah. Even now, writing that, I shrink; losing a parent is perhaps the most final declaration of lone responsibility. Losing my mother, however, was an uprooting, a tearing of all my connections.

My father’s grief, silent and private, consumed him like an inner flame. I could not have predicted this new man who inhabited my father’s body. I thought perhaps we would become closer, but that did not happen.

Visiting him was not easy. He saw my mother in me. My visits, those first few months, hurt too much for him to bear.

Like most Martians, he refused grief therapy and so did Stan and I. Our pain was tribute to the dead.

I had to make my own plans, find my own life, rebuild in the time left to my youth. I was thirteen Martian years old and could find only the most mundane employment at Majumdar, or work for my father at Ylla, which I did not want to do.

It was time to seek alliances elsewhere.

My vegetable love grew and blossomed in the Martian spring.

The best fossil finds on Mars had been discovered while I traveled to and from Earth. In the Lycus and Cyane Sulci, spread across a broad band north of the old shield volcano Olympus Mons, canyons twist and shove across a thousand kilometers like the imprint of a nest of huge and restless worms. The Mother Ecos once flourished here, surviving for tens of millions of years while the rest of Mars died.

One of the chief diggers was Kiqui Jordan-Erzul. He had an assistant named Ilya Rabinovitch.

I met Ilya at a BM Grange in Rubicon City , below Alba Patera. He had just finished excavating his twelfth mother cyst. I had heard of his work.

The Grange was uniquely Martian. Held at a different station in each district every quarter, Granges combined courting, dancing, lectures and presentations, and BM business in a holiday atmosphere. BMs could swap informal clues about Triple business, negotiate and strike deals without pressure, and prospect for new family members.

Ilya delivered a vivid report on his fossil finds at Cyane Sulci. Memories of my visit with Charles to the sites near Trés Haut Médoc drew me into conversation with Ilya after his talk.

He was small — a centimeter shorter than me — beautifully made, with dark and lively eyes and a quick refreshing smile. Physically, he reminded me of Sean Dickinson, but his personality could not have been more opposite. He loved dancing, and he loved talking publicly and privately about ancient Mars. During a lull between an exhausting series of Patera reels, he sat with me in a tea lounge under a projected night sky and described the Mother Ecos in loving detail, pouring intimate descriptions of the ancient landscape into my sympathetic ear, as if he had lived in those times.

“To dig is to marry Mars,” he said, expecting either a blank stare or a move to another part of the lounge. Instead, I asked him to tell me more.

After the dances, we spent a few hours walking alone around a well-head reservoir. With little warning other than a slow approach and a warning smile, he kissed me and told me he had an irrational attraction. I had heard similar lines before, but coming from Ilya, the technique seemed fresh.

“Oh,” I said, noncommittal, but smiling encouragement.

“I’ve known you for a long time,” he said. Then he winced and glanced at me with his head turned half aside. “Does that sound stupid?”

“Maybe we were Martians once,” I suggested lightly. I’ve always been intrigued by the beginning of a courtship, curiously detached and relaxed, wondering how far the mating dance could possibly go. I had given my signals; I was receptive, and the work was now up to him. “Maybe we knew each other a billion years ago.”

He laughed, drew back, and stretched, and we listened to the liquid tones of falling and circulating waters. Arbeiters ignored us, rolling along their ramps checking flow and purity. Ilya seemed as relaxed as I was, immensely self-assured without appearing arrogant.

“You went to Earth a couple of years ago, didn’t you?”

“Just over a year ago,” I said.

“Earth years, I meant.”

He was involved with fossils; he used Earth years instead of Martian. I wryly considered that history might be repeating itself. “Yes.”

“What was it like?”

“Intense,” I said.

“I’d love to be involved in an Earth dig. They’re still finding major fossils in China and Australia .”

“I don’t think I’ll go back for a while,” I said.

“You didn’t enjoy yourself, did you?”

“Parts of it were lovely,” I said.

“Disappointed in love?” he asked. I laughed. His smile thinned; like most men, he didn’t enjoy being laughed at.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “Disappointed by politics.”

His smile returned. “Babe in the woods?”

“Embryo in the savage jungle,” I said ruefully.

The next day, the third day of the Grange, we met again, gravitating with delicious half-conscious intent. He bought me lunch and we walked through glass tubes on the Up, looking across Rubicon Valley . He prodded gently, asking more questions.

For the first time, with a persistent ache that had me close to tears — tears of old pain and relief at finally speaking — I told someone in detail how I personally felt about Earth and what had happened there. I told about feeling betrayed and ignorant and powerless, about Earth’s overwhelming culture.