“They can see who is who,” Berkina said. And indeed, uniformed transnational security police were to be seen frequently in Burroughs. They wore rust-colored construction jumpers, with armbands of different colors. Nothing very ominous, but there they were.

“But why?” Sax asked. “Who are they afraid of?”

“They’re worried about Bogdanovists coming out of the hills,” Claire said, and laughed. “It’s ridiculous.”

Sax raised his eyebrows, let it pass. He was curious, but it was a dangerous topic. Better just to listen when it came up on its own. Still, after that when he walked around Burroughs he watched the crowds more, checking the security police wandering around for their armband identification. Consolidated, Amexx, Oroco … he found it curious that they had not formed a single force. Possibly the transnationals were still rivals as well as partners, and competing security systems would naturally result. This perhaps would also explain the proliferation of identification systems, which created the gaps that made it possible for Desmond to insert his per-sonas into one system, and have them creep elsewhere. Switzerland was obviously willing to cover for some people coming into its system from nowhere, as Sax’s own experience showed; and no doubt other countries and transnationals were doing the same kind of thing.

So in the current political situation, information technology was creating not totalization but balkanization. Arkady had predicted such a development, but Sax had considered it too irrational to be a likely eventuality. Now he had to admit that it had come to pass. The computer nets could not keep track of things because they were in competition with each other; and so there were police in the streets, keeping an eye out for people like Sax.

But he was Stephen Lindholm. He had Lindholm’s rooms in the Hunt Mesa, he had Lindholm’s work, and his routines, and his habits, and his past. His little studio apartment looked very unlike what Sax himself would have lived in: the clothes were in the closet, there were no experiments in the refrigerator or on the bed, there were even prints on the walls, Eschers and Hundertwassers and some unsigned sketches by Spencer, an indiscretion that was certainly undetectable. He was secure in his new identity. And really, even if he was found out, he doubted the results would be all that traumatic. He might even be able to return to something like his previous power. He had always been apolitical, interested only in terraforming, and he had disappeared during the madness of ‘61 because it looked as if it might be fatal not to do so. No doubt several of the current transnationals would see it that way and try to hire him.

But all that was hypothetical. In reality he could settle into the life of Lindholm. ‘

As he did, he discovered that he enjoyed his new work very much. In the old days, as head of the entire terraforming project, it had been impossible not to get bogged down in administration^ or diffused across the whole range of topics, trying to do enough of everything to be able to make informed policy decisions. Naturally this had led to a lack of depth in any one discipline, with a resulting loss of understanding. Now, however, his whole attention was focused on creating new plants to add to the simple ecosystem that had been propagated in the glacial regions. For several weeks he worked on a new lichen, designed to extend the borders of the new bioregions, based on a chasmdendolith from the Wright Valleys in Antarctica. The base lichen had lived in the cracks in the Antarctic rock, and here Sax wanted it to do the same, but he was trying to replace the algal part of the lichen with a faster algae, so that the resulting new symbiote would grow more quickly than its template organism, which was notoriously slow. At the same time he was trying to introduce into the lichen’s fungus some phreato-phytic genes from salt-tolerant plants like tamarisk and pickleweed. These could live in salt levels three times as salty as sea water, and the mechanisms, which had to do with the permeability of cell walls, were somewhat transferable. If he managed it, then the result would be a very hardy and fast-growing new salt lichen. Very encouraging, to see the progress that had been made in this area since their first crude attempts to make an organism that would survive on the surface, back in Underbill. Of course the surface had been more difficult then. But their knowledge of genetics and their range of methods were also greatly advanced.

One problem that was proving very obdurate was adjusting the plants to the paucity of nitrogen on Mars. Most large concentrations of nitrites were being mined upon discovery and released as nitrogen into the atmosphere, a process Sax had initiated in the 2040s and thoroughly approved of, as the atmosphere was desperately in need of nitrogen. But so was the soil, and with so much of it being put into the air, the plant life was coming up short. This was a problem that no Terran plant had ever faced, at least not to this degree, so there were no obvious adaptive traits to clip into the genes of their areoflora.

The nitrogen problem was a recurrent topic of conversation in their after-work sessions at the Cafe Lowen, up on the mesa plateau’s edge. “Nitrogen is so valuable that it’s the medium of exchange among the members of the underground,” Berkina told Sax, who nodded uncomfortably at this misinformation.

Their cafe group made its own homage to the importance of nitrogen by inhaling N2O from little canisters, passed from person to person around the table. It was claimed, with marginal accuracy but very high spirits, that their exhalation of this gas would help the terraforming effort. When the canister came around to Sax for the first time, he regarded it dubiously. He had noticed that one could purchase the canisters in restrooms — there was an entire pharmacology inside every men’s room now, wall units that dispensed canisters of nitrous oxide, omegendorph, pandorph, and other drug-laced gases. Apparently respiration was the current method of choice for drug ingestion. It was not something that interested him, but now he took the canister from Jessica, who was leaning against his shoulder. This was an area in which Stephen’s and Sax’s behaviors diverged, apparently. So he breathed out and then put the little facemask over his mouth and nose, feeling Stephen’s slim face under the plastic.

He breathed in a cold rush of the gas, held it briefly, exhaled, and felt all the weight go out of him — that was the subjective impression. It was fairly humorous to see how responsive mood was to chemical manipulation, despite what it implied about the precarious balance of one’s emotional equanimity, even sanity itself. Not on the face of it a pleasant realization. But at the moment, not a problem. In fact it made him grin. He looked over the rail at the rooftops of Burroughs, and noticed for the first time that the new neighborhoods to the west and north we’re shifting to blue tile roofs and white walls, so that they were taking on a Greek look, while the old parts of town were more Spanish. Jessica was definitely making an effort to keep their upper arms in contact. It was possible her balance was impaired by mirth.

“But it’s time to get beyond the alpine zone!” Claire was saying. “I’m sick of lichen, and I’m sick of mosses and grasses. Our equatorial fellfields are becoming meadows, we’ve even got krummholz, and they’re all getting lots of sunlight year-round, and the atmospheric pressure at the foot of the escarpment is as high as in the Himalayas.”

“Top of the Himalayas,” Sax pointed out, then checked himself mentally; that had been a Saxlike qualification, he could feel it. As Lindholm he said, “But there are high Himalayan forests.”

“Exactly. Stephen, you’ve done wonders since you arrived on that lichen, why don’t you and Berkina and Jessica and C.J. start working on subalpine plants. See if we can’t make some little forests.”