Spencer sat down beside her on the bench. “Nice view,” he remarked.

She nodded and continued eating. She offered him the bottle of retsina, and he said, “No thank you,” holding up a half-eaten tamale. She nodded and swallowed.

“What are you working on?” she asked when she was done.

“Parts for Sax. Bioceramics, among other things.”

“For Biotique?”

“For a sister company. She Makes Seashells.”

“What?”

“It’s the name of the company. Another Praxis division.”

“Speaking of Praxis …” She glanced at him.

“Yes. Sax wants these parts pretty bad.”

“For weapons?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “Can you keep him on a leash for a while?”

“I can try.”

They watched the sunlight drain out of the sky, flowing westward like a liquid. Behind them lights flicked on in the trees over the market, and the air began to chill. Maya felt grateful that there was an old friend sitting beside her, in comfortable silence. Spencer’s behavior toward her made a telling contrast to Sax; in his friendliness was his apology for his recriminations in the car after Kasei Vallis, and his forgiveness for what she had done to Phyllis. She appreciated it. And in any case he was one of the primal family, and it was nice to have that during yet another move. A new start, a new city, a new life — how many was it now?

“Did you know Frank very well?” she said.

“Not really. Not like you and John knew him.”

“Do you think … do you think he could have been involved in John’s murder?”

Spencer continued to look out at the blue ice on the black horizon. Finally he took the retsina bottle from the bench beside her, drank. He looked at her. “Does it matter anymore?”

She had spent many of the early years working in the Hellas Basin, convinced as she had been that its low elevation was going to make it an obvious site for settlement. Now the land just above the  — 1-kilometer contour was being settled in places all around the basin, places she had been among the first to explore. She had her old notes on them in her AI, and now, as Ludmilla Novosibir-skaya, she got to put them to use.

Her job was in the administration of the hydrological company that was flooding the basin. The team was part of a conglomerate of organizations developing the basin, among them the Black Sea Economic Group’s oil companies, the Russian company that had tried to resuscitate the Caspian and Aral seas, and her company, Deep Waters, which was Praxis-owned. Maya’s job involved coordinating the many hydrological operations in the region, so again she got to see the heart of the Hellas project, just as in the old days when she had been the driving force behind the entire thing. This was satisfying in various ways, some of them strange — for instance her town Low Point (a mistaken siting, she had to admit) was out there getting drowned deeper every day. That was fine: drown the past, drown the past, drown the past…

So she had her work, and her apartment, which she filled with used furniture and hanging kitchen implements and potted plants. And Odessa proved to be a pleasant town. It was built principally of yellow stone and brown tile, and placed on a part of the slope of the basin rim that curved inward more than usual, so that every part of town looked down on the center of the dry waterfront, and every part had a great view over the basin to the south. The lower districts were devoted to shops and business and parks, the higher ones to residential neighborhoods and garden strips. The town lay just above 30° latitude in the south, and so she had gone from autumn to spring, with the big hot sun shining down the stepped streets of the upper town, and melting away the winter’s snow from the ice mass’s edge, and the peaks of the Hellespontus Mountains on their western horizon. A handsome little town.

And about a month after her arrival, Michel came down from Sabishii, and took over the apartment right next door to hers. At her suggestion he installed a connecting door between their two living rooms, and after that they wandered between the two apartments as if in one, living their lives in a conjugal domesticity which Maya had never experienced before, a normality that she found very restful. She did not love Michel passionately, but he was a good friend, a good lover, and a good therapist, and having him around was like having an anchor inside her, keeping her from flying away into exhilarations of hydrology or revolutionary fervor, also from sinking too deep into terrible abysses of political despair or personal repugnance. Cycling up and down the sine wave of her moods was a helpless oscillation that she hated, and anything Michel did in the way of amplitude modulation she appreciated. They kept no mirrors in the apartments, which along with clomi-pramine helped to dampen the cycle. But the bottoms of pots, and the windows at night, gave her the bad news if she cared to have it. As often enough she did.

With Spencer down the hall, the building had just the slightest feeling of Underhill to it, reinforced occasionally by visitors from out of town, using their apartment in its capacity as safe house. When others of the First Hundred came through, they would go out and walk the waterless waterfront, looking at the ice horizon and exchanging the news like old folks anywhere. Marsfirst, led by Kasei and Dao, was becoming more and more radical. Peter was working on the elevator, drawn like a moth back to its moon. Sax had stopped his mad ecotage .campaign for the time being, thank God, and was concentrating on his industrial effort in Vishniac mohole, building surface-to-space missiles and the like. Maya shook her head at this news. It was not military might that would do it for them; on that issue she sided with Nadia and Nirgal and Art. They would need something else, something she could not yet visualize. And this gap in her thinking was one of the things that would start her downward in the sine wave of her moods, one of the things that made her mad.

Her work coordinating the various aspects of the flooding project began to get interesting. She trammed or walked down to the offices in the center of town, and there worked hard to process all the reports sent in by the many dowsing crews and drilling operations — all full of glowing estimates of the amounts of water they might put into the basin, and all accompanied by requests for more equipment and personnel, until altogether they added up to much more than Deep Waters could supply. Judging the competing claims was difficult from the office, and her technical staff usually just rolled their eyes and shrugged. “It’s like judging a liars’ contest,” one said.

And then also reports were coming in from all around the basin of the new settlements under construction, and by no means all of the people building these settlements came from the Black Sea Group, or the metanats involved with them. A lot of them were simply unidentified — one of her dowsing crews would note the presence of a tent town which had no official existence, and leave it at that. And the two big canyon projects, in Dao Vallis and the Dao-Reull system, were clearly populated by many more people than could be accounted for in the official documentation — people who must therefore be living under assumed identities, like her, or else living out of the net entirely. Which was very interesting indeed.

A circumHellas piste had just been completed the year before, a difficult piece of engineering as the rim of the basin was riven by cracks and ridges, and cratered by a heavy dose of ejecta reentry. But now the piste was in place, and Maya decided to satisfy her curiosity by taking a trip out to inspect all the Deep Waters projects in person, and look into some of the new settlements.

To accompany her on this trip she requested the company of one of their areologists, a young woman named Diana, whose reports had been coming in from the east basin. Her reports were terse and unremarkable, but Maya had learned from Michel that she was the child of Esther’s son, Paul. Esther had had Paul very soon after leaving Zygote, and as far as Maya knew, she had never told anyone who Paul’s father was. So it could have been Esther’s husband Kasei, in which case Diana was Jackie’s niece, and John and Hiroko’s great-granddaughter — or else it could have been Peter, as many supposed, in which case she was Jackie’s half-niece, and Ann and Simon’s great-granddaughter. Either way Maya found it intriguing, and in any case the young woman was one of the yonsei, a fourth-generation Martian, and as such interesting to Maya no matter what her ancestry.