Still, there were encouraging signs. Nadia was in South Fossa, building a strong movement there which seemed under her influence, and closely aligned with Nirgal and his crowd. Vlad and Ursula and Marina had reoccupied their old labs at Acheron, under the aegis of the Praxis bioengineering company nominally in charge. They were in constant communication with Sax, who was in a refuge in Da Vinci Crater with his old terraforming team, being supported by the Dorsa Brevia Minoans. The inhabitation of that great lava tube had extended north much farther than it had been during the time of the congress, and most of the new segments apparently were devoted to shelter for the refugees from the wrecked or abandoned sanctuaries farther south, and a whole string of manufactories. Maya watched videos of people driving about in little cars from segment to tented segment, working under the clear brown light pouring down from the filtered skylights, engaged in what could only be called military production; they were building stealth fliers, stealth cars, surface-to-space missiles, reinforced block shelters (some of which were already installed in the lava tube itself, in case it was ever broached) — also air-to-ground missiles, antivehicle weapons, handguns, and, the Minoans told Maya, a variety of ecological weapons Sax was designing himself.

This kind of work, and the destruction of the southern sanctuaries, had created what looked from a distance like a sort of war fever in Dorsa Brevia, and Maya was worried by that too. Sax, at the heart of it, was a stubborn secretive brilliant brain-damaged loose cannon, a bona fide mad scientist. He had still never spoken to her directly; and his strikes against the aerial lens and Deimos, while very effective, had in her opinion caused UNTA’s intensification of the assault on the south. She kept sending down messages advising restraint and patience, until Ariadne replied irritably, “Maya, we know. We’re working with Sax here, we’ve got an idea of what we’re up to, and what you’re saying is either obvious or wrong. Talk to the Reds if you want to help, but we don’t need it.”

Maya cursed the video and talked to Spencer about it. Spencer said, “Sax thinks if we’re going to pull this off we might need some weapons, if only in reserve. It seems sensible to me.”

“What happened to the idea of a decapitation?”

“Maybe he thinks he’s building the guillotine. Look, talk to Nirgal and Art about that. Or even Jackie.”

“Right. Look, I want to talk to Sax. He’s got to talk to me sometime, goddammit. Get him to talk to me, will you?”

Spencer agreed to try, and one morning he arranged a call over his private line to Sax. It was Art who answered the call, but he promised to try to get Sax to come to the line. “He’s busy these days, Maya. I like to see it. People are calling him General Sax.”

“God forbid.”

“Thai’s all right. They talk about General Nadia too, and General Maya.”

“That’s not what they call me.” The Black Widow, more like, or the Bitch. The Killer. She knew.

And Art’s squint told her she was right. “Well,” he said, “whatever. With Sax it’s kind of a joke. People talk about the revenge of the lab rats, that kind of thing.”

“I don’t like it.” The idea of another revolution seemed to be gaining a life of its own now, a momentum independent of any real logic; it was just something they were doing, were always going to have done. Out of her control, and out of anyone else’s control. Even their collective efforts, scattered and hidden as they were, seemed not to be coordinated or conceived with any clear idea of what they were going to try to do, or why. It was just happening.

She tried to express some of this to Art, and he nodded. “That’s history, I guess. It’s messy. You just have to ride the tiger and hold on. You’ve got a lot of different people in this movement, and they all have their own ideas. But look, I think we’re doing better than last time. I’m working on some initiatives back on Earth, negotiating with Switzerland and some people at the World Court and so on. And Praxis is keeping us really well informed about what’s going on among the metanationals on Earth, which means we won’t just get swept into something we don’t understand.”

“True,” Maya admitted. The news and analysis packages sent up from Praxis were more thorough by far than any commercial news shows, and as the metanationals continued to drift into what was being called the metanatricide, they on Mars, in their sanctuaries and safe houses, were able to follow it blow by blow. Subar-ashii taking over Mitsubishi, and then its old foe Armscor, and then falling out with Amexx, which was working hard on breaking the United States out of the Group of Eleven; they saw it all from the inside. Nothing could have been less like the situation in the 2050s. And that was a comfort, if a very small one.

And then there was Sax on the screen behind Art, and looking at her. He saw who it was, and said, “Maya!”

She swallowed hard. Was she forgiven, then, for Phyllis? Did he understand why she had done it? His new face gave her no clues — it was as impassive as his old one had been, and harder to read because so unfamiliar still.

She collected herself, asked him what his plans were.

He said, “No plan. We’re still making preparations. We need to wait for a trigger. A trigger event. Very important. There are a couple of possibilities I’m keeping an eye against. But nothing yet.”

“Fine,” she said. “But listen, Sax.” And then she told him everything she had been worrying about — the strength of the Transitional Authority troops, bolstered as they were by the big centrist metanats; the constant edging toward violence in the more radical wings of the underground; the feeling that they were falling into the same old pattern. And as she spoke he blinked in his old fashion, so that she knew it was really him listening under that new face — finally listening to her again, so that she went on longer than she had intended to, pouring out everything, her distrust of Jackie, her fear at being in Burroughs, everything. It was like talking to a confessor, or pleading — begging their pure rational scientist not to let things go crazy again. Not to go crazy again himself. She heard herself babbling, and realized how frightened she was.

And he blinked in what seemed a kind of neuter, ratlike sympathy. But in the end he shrugged and said little. This was General Sax now, remote, taciturn, speaking to her from the strange world inside his new mind.

“Give me twelve months,” he said to her. “I need twelve more months.”

“Okay, Sax.” She felt reassured, somehow. “I’ll do my best.”

“Thanks, Maya.”

And he was gone. She sat there staring at the little AI screen, feeling drained, teary, relieved. Absolved, for the hour.

So she returned to the work with a will, meeting groups almost every week, and making occasional off-the-net trips to Elysium and Tharsis, to talk to cells in the high cities. Coyote took charge of her travel, flying her across the planet in night voyages that reminded her of ‘61. Michel took charge of her security, protecting her with the help of a team of natives, including several of the Zygote ectogenes, who moved her from safe house to safe house in every city they visited. And she talked and talked and talked. It was not just a matter of getting them to wait, but also coordinating them, forcing them to agree they were on the same side. Sometimes it seemed that she was having an effect, she could see it on the faces of the people who came to listen. Other times her whole effort was devoted to applying the brakes (worn, burning) to radical elements. There were a lot of these now, and more every day: Ann and the Reds, Kasei’s Marsfirsters, the Bogdanovists under Mikhail, Jackie’s “Booneans,” the Arab radicals led by Antar, who was one of Jackie’s many boyfriends — Coyote, Dao, Rachel… It was like trying to stop an avalanche that she herself was caught up in, grasping at clumps even as she rolled down with them. In such a situation the disappearance of Hiroko began to loom as more and more of a disaster.