There was a commotion, as an ice shot had hit the other bank and rolled up the grass and bowled over an old man. People were cheering and lifting the woman who had made the throw onto their shoulders, but the group with the old man was charging down to the nearest bridge. “This place is getting too noisy,” Desmond said. “Come on, drink that and let’s go.”

Sax knocked back the liquor while Desmond popped the last of the inhaler. Then they left quickly to avoid the developing brouhaha, walking up the canalside path. A half hour’s walk took them past the rows of Bareiss columns and up into Princess Park, where they turned right and walked up the steep wide grassy incline of Thoth Boulevard. Beyond Table Mountain they turned left down a narrower swath of streetgrass, and came to the westernmost part of the tent wall, extending in a big arc around Black Syrtis Mesa. “Look, they’re getting back to the old coffin quarters for workers again,” Desmond pointed out. “That’s Subarashii’s standard housing now, but see how these units are set into the mesa. Black Syrtis contained a plutonium processing plant in the early days of Burroughs, when it was well out of town. But now Subarashii has built workers’ quarters right next to it, and their jobs are to oversee the processing and the removal of the waste, north to Nili Fossae, where some integral fast reactors will use it. The cleanup operation used to be almost completely robotic, but the robots are hard to keep on-line. They’ve found it’s cheaper to use people for a lot of the jobs.”

“But the radiation,” Sax said, blinking.

“Yes,” Desmond said with his savage grin. “They take on forty rem a year.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I am not kidding. They tell the workers this, and give them hardship pay, and after three years they get a bonus, which is the treatment.”

“Is it withheld from them otherwise?”

“It’s expensive, Sax. And there are waiting lists. This is a way to skip up the list, and cover the costs.”

“But forty rems! There’s no way to be sure the treatment will repair the damage that could do!”

“We know that,” Desmond said with a scowl. There was no need to refer to Simon. “But they don’t.”

“And Subarashii is doing this just to cut costs?”

“That’s important in such a large capital investment, Sax. All kinds of cost-cutting measures are showing up. The sewage systems in Black Syrtis are all the same system, for instance-the med clinic and the coffins and the plants in the mesa.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I am not kidding. My jokes are funnier than that.”

Sax waved him off.

“Look,” Desmond said, “there are no regulatory agencies anymore. No building codes or whatever. That is what the transnational success in sixty-one really means-they make their own rules now. And you know what their one rule is.”

“But this is simply stupid.”

“Well, you know, this particular division of Subarashii is run by Georgians, and they’re in the grip of a big Stalin revival there. It’s a patriotic gesture to run their country as stupidly as possible. That means business too. And of course the top managers of Subarashii are still Japanese, and they believe Japan became great by being tough. They say they won in sixty-one what they lost in World War Two. They’re the most brutal transnat up here, but all the rest are imitating them to compete successfully. Praxis is an anomaly in that sense, you must remember that.”

“So we reward them by stealing from them.”

“You’re the one who went to work for Biotique. Maybe you should change jobs.”

“No.”

“Do you think you can get these materials from one of Subarashii’s firms?”

“No.”

“But you could from Biotique.”

“Probably. Security is pretty tight.”

“But you could do it.”

“Probably.” Sax thought about it. “I want something in return.”

“Yes?”

“Will you fly me out to have a look at this soletta burn zone?”

“Certainly! I would like to see it again myself.”

So the next afternoon they left Burroughs and trained south up the Great Escarpment, getting off at Libya Station, some seventy kilometers from Burroughs. There they slipped into the basement and their closet door, down their tunnel and out into the rocky countryside. Down in a shallow graben they found one of Desmond’s cars, and when night came they drove east along the Escarpment to a small Red hideout in the rim of Du Martheray Crater, next to a stretch of flat bedrock the Reds used as an airstrip. Desmond did not identify Sax to their hosts. They were led into a little cliffside hangar, where they got into one of Spencer’s old stealth planes and taxied out to the bedrock, then took off in an undulant acceleration down the runway. Once in the air they flew east slowly through the night.

They flew in silence for a while. Sax saw lights on the dark surface of the planet only three times: once a station in Escalante Crater, once the tiny moving line of lights of a round-the-world train, and the last an unidentified blink in the rough land behind the Great Escarpment. “Who do you think that is?” Sax asked.

“No idea.”

After a few minutes more Sax said, “I ran into Phyllis.”

“Really! Did she recognize you?”

“No.”

Desmond laughed. “That’s Phyllis for you.”

“A lot of old acquaintances haven’t recognized me.”

“Yeah, but Phyllis … Is she still president of the Transitional Authority?”

“No. She didn’t seem to think it was a powerful post, anyway.”

Desmond laughed again. “A silly woman. But she did get that group on Clarke back to civilization, I’ll give her that. I thought they were goners, myself.”

“Do you know much about that?”

“I talked with two of the people who were on it, yeah. One night in Burroughs at the Pingo Bar, in fact. You couldn’t get them to shut up about it.”

“Did anything happen near the end of their flight?”

“The end? Well, yeah-someone died. I guess some woman got a hand crushed when they were evacuating Clarke, and Phyllis was the closest thing they had to a doctor, so Phyllis took care of her through the whole trip, and thought she was going to make it, but I guess they ran out of something, the two telling me the story weren’t too clear on it, and she took a turn for the worse. Phyllis called a prayer meeting for her and prayed for her, but she died anyway, a couple of days before they came into the Terran system.”

“Ah,” Sax said. Then: “Phyllis doesn’t seem all that … religious anymore.”

Desmond snorted. “She was never religious, if you ask me. Hers was the religion of business. You visit real Christians like the folks down in Christianopolis, or Bingen, and you don’t find them talking profits at breakfast, and lording it over you with that horrible unctuous righteousness they have. Righteousness, good Lord-it is      I a most unpleasant quality in a person. You know it has to be a house built on sand, eh? But the demimonde Christians are not      i like that. They’re gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha’i Rastafarians, whatever-the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I’ve traded with everybody. So helpful. And no airs about being best friends with Jesus. They’re tight with Hiroko, and the Sufis as well. Some kind of mystic networking going on down there.” He cackled. “But Phyllis, now, and all those business fundamentalists-using religion to cover extortion, I hate that. Actually I never heard Phyllis speak in a religious manner after we landed. “

“Did you have much opportunity to hear Phyllis speak after we landed?”

Another laugh. “More than you might think! I saw more than you did in those years, Mister Lab Man! I had my little hidey-holes everywhere.”

Sax made a skeptical noise, and Desmond shouted a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder. “Who else could tell you that you and Hiroko were an item in the Underbill years, eh?”

“Hmm.”