“You know why this step-up in security has happened,” she said, glaring at Sax. “Those big sabotages were what did it.”

Sax showed no sign of hearing her.

Vlad said, “It’s too bad we couldn’t have fixed on some sort of plan of action at Dorsa Brevia.”

“Dorsa Brevia,” Maya said scornfully.

“It was a good idea,” Marina said.

“Maybe it was. But without a plan of action, agreed on by all, the constitutional stuff was just—” Maya waved a hand. “Building sandcastles. A game.”

“The notion was that each group would do what it thought best,” Vlad said.

“That was the notion in sixty-one,” Maya pointed out. “And now, if Coyote and the radicals start a guerrilla war and it touches things off, then we’re right back in sixty-one all over again.”

“What do you think we should do?” Ursula asked her curiously.

“We should take over ourselves! We make the plan, we decide what to do. We disseminate it through the underground. If we don’t take responsibility for this, then whatever happens will be our fault.”

“That’s what Arkady tried to do,” Vlad pointed out.

“At least Arkady tried! We should build on what was good in his work!” She laughed shortly. “I never thought I would hear myself say that. But we should work with the Bogdanovists, and then everyone else who will join. We have to take charge! We are the First Hundred, we are the only ones with the authority to pull it off. The Sabishiians will help us, and the Bogdanovists will come along.”

“We need Praxis too,” Vlad said. “Praxis, and the Swiss. It has to be a coup rather than a general war.”

“Praxis wants to help,” Marina said. “But what about the radicals?”

“We have to coerce them,” Maya said. “Cut off their supplies, take away their members—”

“That way leads to civil war,” Ursula objected.

“Well, they must be stopped! If they start a revolt too soon and the metanationals come down on us before we’re ready, then we’re doomed. All these uncoordinated strikes at them ought to stop. They accomplish nothing, they only increase the levels of security and make things more difficult for us. Things like knocking Deimos out of its orbit only make them more aware of our presence, without doing anything else.”

Sax, still observing the ducks, spoke in his odd lilting way: “There are a hundred and fourteen Earth-to-Mars transit ships. Forty-seven objects in Mars obit — Mars orbit. The new Clarke is a fully defended space station. Deimos was available to become the same. A military base. A weapons platform.”

“It was an empty moon,” Maya said. “As for the vehicles in orbit, we will have to deal with those at the appropriate time.”

Again Sax did not appear to notice she had spoken. He stared at the damned ducks, blinking mildly, glancing from time to time at Marina.

Marina said, “It has to be a matter of decapitation, like Nadia and Nirgal and Art said in Dorsa Brevia.”

“We’ll see if we can find the neck,” Vlad said drily.

Maya, getting angrier and angrier at Sax, said, “We should each take one of the major cities, and organize people there into a unified resistance. I want to return to Hellas.”

“Nadia and Art are in South Fossa,” Marina said. “But we’ll need all the First Hundred to join us, for this to work.”

“The first thirty-nine,” Sax said.

“We need Hiroko,” Vlad said, “and we need Hiroko to talk some sense into Coyote.”

“No one can do that,” Marina said. “But we do need Hiroko. I’ll go to Dorsa Brevia and talk to her, and we’ll try to hold the south in check.”

“ ‘Coyote’s not the problem,’ Maya said.

Sax jerked out of his reverie, blinked at Vlad. Still not a glance for Maya, even though they were discussing her plan. “Integrated pest management,” he said. “You grow tougher plants among the weeds. And then the tougher plants push them out. I’ll take Burroughs.”

Furious at Sax’s snubbing of her, Maya got up and walked around the little pond. She stopped on the opposite bank, gripped the railing by the path in both hands. She glared at the group across the water, sitting on their benches like retired pensioners chatting about food and the weather and ducks and the last chess match. Damn Sax, damn him! Would he hold Phyllis against her forever, that vile woman —

Suddenly she heard their voices, tiny but clear. There was a curving ceramic wall behind the path, running almost all the way around the pond, and she was almost precisely across the pond from them; apparently the wall functioned as a sort of whispering gallery, she could hear them in perfect miniature, the airy voices a fraction of a second behind their mouths’ little movements.

“Too bad Arkady didn’t survive,” Vlad said. “The Bogdanovists would come around a lot easier.”

“Yes,” said Ursula. “Him and John. And Frank.”

“Frank,” Marina said scornfully. “If he hadn’t killed John none of this would have happened.”

Maya blinked. The railing was holding her up.

“What?” she shouted, without thinking. Across the pond .the little figures jerked and looked at her. She detached herself from the railing one hand at a time, and half ran around the pond, stumbling twice.

“What do you mean?” she shouted at Marina as she neared them, the words bursting from her without volition.

Vlad and Ursula met her a few steps from the benches. Marina remained seated, looking away sullenly. Vlad had his hands out and Maya tore right through them to get at Marina. “What do you mean saying such foul things?” she shouted, her voice painful in her own throat. “Why? Why? It was Arabs who killed John, everyone knows that!”

Marina grimaced and shook her head, looking down.

“Well?” Maya cried.

“It was a manner of speaking,” Vlad said from behind. “Frank did a lot to undermine John in those years, you know that’s true. Some say he inflamed the Moslem Brotherhood against John, that’s all.”

“Pah!” Maya said, “We have all argued with each other, it means nothing!”

Then she noticed that Sax was looking right at her — finally, now

that she was furious — staring at her with a peculiar expression,

cold and impossible to read — a glare of accusation, of revenge, of

_ what? She had shouted in Russian and the others had replied in

kind, and she didn’t think Sax spoke it. Perhaps he was just curious about what had upset them so. But the antipathy in that steady stare — as if he were confirming what Marina had said — hammering it into her like a nail! Maya turned and fled.

She found herself in front of the door to her room with no memory of crossing Sabishii, and threw herself inside as if into her mother’s arms; but in the beautiful spare wooden chamber she drew up short of the bed, shocked by the memory of some other room that had turned from womb to trap on her, in some other moment of shock and fear … no answers, no distraction, no escape… Over the little sink she caught sight of her face as if in a framed portrait — haggard, ancient, eyes bright red around the rims, like the eyes of a lizard. A nauseating image. That was it — the time she had caught sight of her stowaway on the Ares, the face seen through an algae jar. Coyote: a shock which had proved not hallucination, but reality.

And so it might be with this news of Frank and John.

She tried to remember. She tried with all her might to remember Frank Chalmers, to really remember him. She had spoken with him that night in Nicosia, in an encounter unremarkable for its awkwardness and tension, Frank as always acting aggrieved and rejected… They had been together at the very moment John was being knocked unconscious, and dragged into the farm and left to die. Frank couldn’t have …

But of course there were surrogates. You could always pay people to act for you. Not that the Arabs would have been interested in money per se. But pride, honor — paid in honor, or in some political quid pro quo, the kind of currency Frank had been so expert at printing…