Finally Michel took his hand from Maya’s mouth and she hissed “Stupid little slut” one last time, then sat back in a chair and looked at them all with a glare that caught and stilled at least half of them. Jackie was released and she started to curse in a low voice and Maya snapped, “Shut up!” so viciously that Michel stepped between them again. “Towing all your boys around by the cock and thinking you’re a leader,” Maya snarled in a whisper, “and all without a single thought in your empty head—”
“I won’t listen to this!” Jackie cried, and everyone said “Ssssh!” and she was off, out into the hall. That was a mistake, a retreat, and Maya stood back up and used the time to castigate the rest of them in a tearing whisper for their stupidity — and then, when she had controlled her temper a little, to argue the case for biding their time, the excoriating edge of her anger just under the surface of a rational plea for patience and intention and control, an argument that was essentially unanswerable. All through this peroration everyone in the room was of course staring at her as if she were some bloodied gladiator, the Black Widow indeed, and as her teeth still hurt from sinking them into Jackie’s arm she could scarcely pretend to be the perfect model of intelligent debate; she felt like her mouth must be puffed up, it throbbed so, and she fought a rising sense of humiliation and carried on, cold and passionate and overbearing. The meeting ended in a sullen and mostly unspoken agreement to delay any mass insurrection and continue lying low, and the next thing she knew she was slumped on a tram seat between Michel and Spencer, trying not to cry. They would have to put up Jackie and the rest of her group while they were in Odessa — theirs was the safe house, after all. So it was a situation she wasn’t going to be able to escape. And meanwhile there were police officers standing in front of the town’s physical plant and offices, checking wrists before they let people inside. If she didn’t go to work again they very well might try to track her down to ask why, and if she went to work and got checked, it wasn’t certain that her wrist ID and Swiss passport would pass her. There were rumors that the post-’61 balkanization of information was beginning to collapse back into some larger integrated systems, which had recovered some prewar data; thus the requirement of new passports. And if she ran into one of those systems, that would be that. Shipped off to the asteroids or to Kasei Vallis, to be tortured and have her mind wrecked like Sax. “Maybe it is time,” she said to Michel and Spencer. “If they lock up all the cities and the pistes, what other choice do we have?”
They didn’t answer. They didn’t know what to do any more than, she did. Suddenly the whole independence project again seemed a fantasy, a dream that was just as impossible now as it had been when Arkady had espoused it, Arkady who had been so cheerful and so wrong. They would never be free of Earth, never. They were helpless before it.
“I want to talk to Sax first,” Spencer said.
“And Coyote,” Michel said. “I want to ask him more about what happened in Sabishii.”
“And Nadia,” Maya said, and her throat tightened; Nadia would have been ashamed of her if she had seen her at that meeting, and that hurt. She needed Nadia, the only person on Mars whose judgment she still trusted.
“There’s something odd going on with the atmosphere,” Spencer complained to Michel as they changed trams. “I really want to hear what Sax has to say about it. Oxygen levels are rising faster than I would have expected, especially on north Tharsis. It’s like some really successful bacteria has been distributed without any suicide genes in it. Sax has basically reassembled his old Echus Overlook team, everyone still alive, and they’ve been working at Acheron and Da Vinci on projects they’re not telling us about. It’s like those damn windmill heaters. So I want to talk to him. We have to get together on this, or else—”
“Or else sixty-one!” Maya insisted.
“I know, I know. You’re right about that, Maya, I mean I agree. I hope enough of the rest of us do.”
“We’re going to have to do more than hope.”
Which meant she was going to have to get out there and do it herself. Go fully underground, move from city to city, from safe house to safe house as Nirgal had been doing for years, without a job or a home, meeting with as many of the revolutionary cells as she could, trying to hold them on board. Or at least keep them from popping off too soon. Working on the Hellas Sea project wasn’t going to be possible anymore.
So this life was over. She got off the tram and glanced briefly through the park down the corniche, then turned and walked up to their gate and through the garden, up the stairwell, down the familiar hall, feeling heavy and old and very, very tired. She stuck the right key into the lock without thinking about it, and walked into the apartment and looked at her things, at Michel’s stacks of books, the Kandinsky print over the couch, Spencer’s sketches, the battered coffee table, the battered dining table and chairs, the kitchen nook with everything in its place, including the little face on the cabinet by the sink. How many lifetimes ago had she known that face? All these pieces of furniture would go their ways. She stood in the middle of the room, drained and desolate, grieving for these years that had slipped by almost without noticing; almost a decade of productive work, of real life, now blowing away in this latest gale of history, a paroxysm that she was going to have to try to direct or at least ride out, trying her best to nudge it in ways that would allow them to survive. Damn the world, damn its in-trusiveness, its mindless charge, its inexorable roll through the present, wrecking lives as it went… She had liked this apartment and this town and this life, with Michel and Spencer and Diana and all her colleagues at work, all her habits and her music and her small daily pleasures.
She looked glumly at Michel, who stood behind her in the doorway, staring around as if trying to commit the place to memory. A Gallic shrug: “Nostalgia in advance,” he said, trying to smile. He felt it too — he understood — it wasn’t just her mood, this time, but reality itself.
She made an effort and smiled back, walked over and held his hand. Downstairs there was a clatter as the Zygote gang came up the stairs. They could stay in Spencer’s apartment, the bastards. “If it works out,” she said, “we’ll come back someday.”
They walked down to the station in the fresh morning light, past all the cafes, still chairs-on-tables wet. At the station they risked their old IDs and got tickets without trouble, and took a counterclockwise train down to Montepulciano, and got into rented walkers and helmets, and walked out of the tent and down the hill and off the map of the surface world, into one of the steep ravines of the foothills. There Coyote was waiting for them in a boulder car, and he drove them through the heart of the Helles-pontus, up a forking network of valleys, over pass after pass in this mountain range that was just as chaotic as rock falling from the sky implied, a nightmare maze of a wilderness — until they were down the western slope, past Rabe Crater and onto the crater-ringed hills of the Noachis highlands. And so they were off the net again, wandering as Maya never had before.
Coyote helped a lot in the early part of this period. He was not the same, Maya thought — subdued by the takeover of Sabishii, even worried. He wouldn’t answer their questions about Hiroko and the hidden colonists; he said “I don’t know” so often that she began to believe him, especially when his face finally twisted up into a recognizably human expression of distress, the famous invulnerable insouciance finally shattered. “I truly don’t know whether they got out or not. I was already out in the mound maze when the takeover started, and I got out in a car as fast as I could, thinking I could help the most from outside. But no one else came out from that exit. But I was on the north side, and they could have gotten out to the south. They were staying in the mound maze too, and Hiroko has emergency shelters just like I do. But I just don’t know.”