“Or,” the med tech said, looking at him curiously, “in the womb.”

“Yes. Being reborn. He doesn’t even look the same.”

“Keep that hand on him,” the tech advised, and went away. Nirgal sat and tried to feel how Sax was doing, tried to feel that vitality struggling in its own processes, swimming back up into the world. Sax’s temperature fluctuated in alarming little swoops and dives. Other medical people came in and held instruments against Sax’s head and face, talking among themselves in low voices. “Some damage. Anterior, left side. We’ll see.”

The same tech came in a few nights later when Nirgal was there, and said, “Hold his head, Nirgal. Left side, around the ear. Just above it, yeah. Hold it there and … yeah, like that. Now do what you do.”

“What?”

“You know. Send heat into him.” And she left hastily, as if embarrassed to have made such a suggestion, or frightened.

Nirgal sat and collected himself. He located the fire within, and tried running some of it into his hand, and across into Sax. Heat, heat, a tentative jolt of whiteness, sent into the injured green … then feeling again, trying to read the heat of Sax’s head.

Days passed, and Nirgal spent most of them at the clinic. One night he was coming back from the kitchens when the young tech came running down the hall to him, grabbing him by the arm and saying, “Come on, come on,” and the next thing he knew he was down in the room, holding Sax’s head, his breath short and all his muscles like wires. There were three doctors in there and some more techs. One doctor put out an arm toward Nirgal, and the young tech stepped in between them.

He felt something inside Sax stir, as if going away, or coming back — some passage. He poured into Sax every bit of viriditas he could muster, suddenly terrified, stricken with memories of the clinic in Zygote, of sitting with Simon. That look on Simon’s face, the night he died. The perfluorocarbon liquid swirled in and out of Sax, a quick shallow tide. Nirgal watched it, thinking about Simon. His hand lost its heat, and he couldn’t bring it back. Sax would know who it was with hands so warm. If it mattered. But as it was all he could do … he exerted himself, pushed as if the world were freezing, as if he could pull back not only Sax but also Simon, if he pushed hard enough. “Why, Sax?” he said softly into the ear by his hand. “But why? Why, Sax? But why? Why, Sax? But why? Why, Sax? But why?”

The perfluorocarbon swirled. The overlit room hummed. The doctors worked at the machines and over Sax’s body, glancing at each other, at Nirgal. The word why became nothing but a sound, a kind of prayer. An hour passed and then more hours, slow and anxious, until they fell into a kind of timeless state, and Nirgal couldn’t have said whether it was day or night. Payment for our bodies, he thought. We pay.

*     *       *

One evening, about a week after their arrival, they pumped Sax’s lungs clear, and took the ventilator off. Sax gasped loudly, then breathed. He was an air-breather again, a mammal. They had repaired his nose, although it was now a different shape, almost as flat as it had been before his cosmetic surgery. His bruises were still spectacular.

About an hour after they took the ventilator off, he regained consciousness. He blinked and blinked. He looked around the room, then looked very closely at Nirgal, clutching his hand hard. But he did not speak. And soon he was asleep.

Nirgal went out into the green streets of the small town, dominated by the cone of Tharsis Tholus, rising in black and rust majesty to the north, like a squat Fuji. He ran in his rhythmic way, around and around the tent wall as he burned off some of his excess energy. Sax and his great unexplainable …

In rooms over the cafe across the street, he found Coyote hobbling restlessly from window to window, muttering and singing wordless calypso tunes. “What’s wrong?” Nirgal said.

Coyote waggled both hands. “Now that Sax is stabilized, we should get out of here. You and Spencer can tend to Sax in the car, while we drive west around Olympus.”

“Okay,” Nirgal said. “When they say Sax is ready.”

Coyote stared at him. “They say you saved him. That you brought him back from the dead.”

Nirgal shook his head, frightened at the very thought. “He never died.”

“I figured. But that’s what they’re saying.” Coyote regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll have to be careful.

They drove all night, contouring around the slope of north Tharsis, Sax propped on the couch in the compartment behind the drivers. Within hours of their departure Coyote said, “I want to hit one of the mining camps run by Subarashii in Ceraunius.” He looked at Sax. “It’s okay with you?”

Sax nodded. His raccoon bruises were now green and purple.

“Why can’t you talk?” Art asked him.

Sax shrugged, croaked once or twice.

They rolled on.

From the bottom of the northern side of the Tharsis bulge there extends an array of parallel canyons called the Ceraunius Fossae. There are as many as forty of these fractures, depending on how you count them, as some of the indentations are canyons, while others are only isolated ridges, or deep cracks, or simply corrugations in the plain — all running north and south, and all cutting into a metallogenic province of great richness, a basalt mass rifted with all kinds of ore intrusions’ from below. So there were a lot of mining settlements and mobile rigs in these canyons, and now, as he contemplated them on his maps, Coyote rubbed his hands together. “Your capture set me free, Sax. Since they know we’re out here anyway, there’s no reason we shouldn’t put some of them out of business, and grab some uranium while we’re at it.”

So he stopped one night at the southern end of Tractus Catena, the longest and deepest of the canyons. Its beginning was a strange sight — the relatively smooth plain was disrupted by what looked like a ramp that cut into the ground, making a trench about three kilometers wide, and eventually about three hundred meters deep, running right over the horizon to the north in a perfectly straight line.

They slept through the morning, and then spent the afternoon sitting in the living compartment nervously, looking at satellite photos and listening to Coyote’s instructions.

“Is there a chance we’ll kill these miners?” Art asked, pulling at his big whiskery jaw.

Coyote shrugged. “It might happen.”

Sax shook his head back and forth vehemently.

“Not so rough with your head,” Nirgal said to him.

“I agree with Sax,” Art said quickly. “I mean, even setting aside moral considerations, which I don’t, it’s still stupid just as a practical matter. It’s stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren’t like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They’ll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they’ll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up. And that’s all you will have accomplished, because they’ll replace those miners quick as that.”

Art glanced at Sax, who was sitting up on the couch, watching him closely. “On the other hand, say you go down there and do something that causes those miners to run into their emergency shelter and then you lock them in the shelter and wreck their machines. They call for help, they hang out there, and in a day or two somebody comes to rescue them. They’re mad but also they’re thinking we could be dead, those Reds wrecked our stuff and were gone in a flash, we never even saw them. They could have killed us but they didn’t. And the people who rescued them will be thinking the same. And then later on, when you’ve taken over Mars or when you’re trying to, they remember and they all dive off into hostage syndrome and start rooting for you. Or working with you.”