No response from Maya or Michel. And later, when Randolph had gone into the rover’s little toilet chamber, Maya hissed, “He’s obviously a spy. He was out there deliberately so we would pick him up.”

That was Maya. Michel did not try to argue with her, but only shrugged. “We’re certainly treating him like one.”

And then he was back out among them, and asking more questions. Where did they live? What was it like hiding all the time? Michel began to be amused at what seemed more and more like a performance, or even a test; Randolph appeared perfectly open, ingenuous, friendly, his swarthy face almost that of a moon-calf simpleton — and yet his eyes watched them very carefully, and with every unanswered question he looked more interested and more pleased, as if their answers were coming to him by telepathy. Every human was a great power, every human on Mars an alchemist; and though Michel had given up psychiatry a long time ago, he could still recognize the touch of a master at work. He almost laughed at the growing urge he felt in himself, to confess everything to this hulking quizzical man, still clumsy in the Martian g.

Then their radio beeped, and a compresed message lasting no more than two seconds buzzed over the speakers. “See,” Randolph said helpfully, “you could get a message out to Praxis just like that.”

But when the AI finished running the message through the decryption sequence, there was no more joking. Sax had been arrested in Burroughs.

At dawn they drew up with Coyote’s car, and spent the day conferring about what to do. They sat in a cramped circle in the living compartment, their faces all lined and etched with worry — all except their prisoner, who sat between Nirgal and Maya. Nirgal had shaken hands with him and nodded as if they were old friends, although neither had said a word. But the language of friendship was not in words.

The news about Sax had come from Spencer, by way of Nadia. Spencer was working in Kasei Vallis, which was a kind of new Korolyov, a security town, very sophisticated and at the same time very low-profile. Sax had been taken to one of the compounds

there, and Spencer had found out about it and made the call out to Nadia.

“We have to get him out,” Maya said, “and fast. They’ve only had him a couple days.”

“The Sax Russell?” Randolph was saying. “Wow. I can’t believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?”

Maya cursed him in livid Russian. Coyote ignored them all; he hadn’t said anything since the message had arrived, and was busy at his AI screen, looking at what appeared to be weather satellite photos.

“You might as well let me go,” Randolph said into the silence. “I couldn’t tell them anything they won’t get out of Russell.”

“He won’t tell them anything!” Kasei said hotly.

Randolph waggled a hand. “Scare him, maybe hurt him a little, put him under, plug him in, dope him up and zap his brain in the right places — they’ll get answers to whatever they ask. They’ve got it down to a science, as I understand it.” He was staring at Kasei. “You look familiar too. Never mind! Anyway, if they can’t tweak it out, they can usually do it more crudely.”

“How do you know all this?” Maya demanded.

“Common knowledge,” Randolph said. “So maybe it’s all wrong, but…”

“I want to go get him,” Coyote said.

“But they’ll know we’re out here,” Kasei said.

“They know that anyway. What they don’t know is where we are.”

“Besides,” Michel said, “it’s our Sax.”

Coyote said, “Hiroko won’t object.”

“If she does, tell her to fuck off!” Maya exclaimed. “Tell her shikata ga nai!”

“It would be my pleasure,” Coyote said.

The western and northern slopes of the Tharsis bulge were unpopulated relative to the eastern drop to Noctis Labyrinthus; there were a few areothermal stations and aquifer wells, but much of the region was covered in a year-round blanket of snow and fim and young glaciers. Winds out of the south collided with the strong northwest winds coming around Olympus Mons, and the blizzards could be fierce. The protoglacial zone extended up from the six-or seven-kilometer contour nearly to the base of the great volcanoes; it was not a good place to build, nor was it a good place for stealth cars to hide. They drove hard over the sastrugi and along ropy lava mounds that served as roads, north past the bulk of Tharsis Tholus, a volcano that was about the size of Mauna Loa, though under the rise of Ascraeus it looked like a cinder cone. The next night they made it off the snow and northeast across Echus Chasma, and hid for the day under the stupendous eastern wall of Echus, just a few kilometers north of Sax’s old headquarters at the top of the cliff.

The east wall of Echus Chasma was the Great Escarpment at its absolute greatest — a cliff three kilometers tall, running in a straight line north and south for a thousand kilometers. The areologists were still arguing over its origin, as no ordinary force of landscape formation seemed adequate to have created it. It was simply a break in the fabric of things, separating the floor of Echus Chasma from the high plateau of Lunae Planum. Michel had visited Yosemite Valley in his youth, and he still recalled those towering granite cliffs; but this wall standing before them was as long as the whole state of California, and three kilometers high for most of that length: a vertical world, its massive planes of redrock staring out blankly to the west, glowing in each empty sunset like the side of a continent.

At its northern end this incredible cliff finally became less tall, and less steep, and just above 20° North it was cut by a deep broad channel, which ran east through Lunae plateau, down onto the Chryse basin. This big canyon was Kasei Vallis, one of the clearest manifestations of ancient flooding anywhere on Mars. A single glance at a satellite photo and it was obvious that a very large flood had run down Echus Chasma once upon a time, until it reached a break in its great eastern wall, perhaps a graben. The water had turned right down this valley and smashed through it with fantastic force, eroding the entrance until it was a smooth curve, slopping over the outside bank of the turn and ripping at joints in the rock until they were a complex gridwork of narrow canyons. A central ridge in the main valley had been shaped into a long lemniscate or tear-shaped island, the shape as hydrodynamic as a fishback. The inner bank of the fossil watercourse was incised by two canyons that had been mostly untouched by water, ordinary fossae that showed what the main channel had probably looked like before the flood. Two late meteor strikes on the highest part of the inner bank had completed the shaping of the terrain, leaving fresh steep craters.

From the ground, driving slowly onto the rise of the outer bank, it was a rounded elbow of a valley, with the lemniscate ridge, and the round ramparts of the craters on the rise of the inner bank, the most prominent features. It was an attractive landscape, reminiscent of the Burroughs region in its spatial majesty, the great sweep of the main channel just begging to be filled with running water, which no doubt would be a shallow braided stream, coursing over pebbles and cutting new beds and islands every week…

But now it was the site for the transnationals’ security compound. The two craters on the inner bank had been tented, as had big sections of the gridwork terrain on the outer bank, and part of the main channel on both sides of the lemniscate island; but none of this work was ever shown on the video, or mentioned in the news. It was not even on the maps.

Spencer had been there since the beginning of construction, however, and his infrequent reports out had told them what the new town was for. These days almost all the people found guilty of crimes on Mars were sent out to the asteroid belt, to work off their sentences in mining ships. But there were people in the Transitional Authority who wanted a jail on Mars itself, and Kasei Vallis was it.