She turned the interrogation on him, and asked him scores of questions about Earth. What did they use for housing materials now? Were they going to use fusion power commercially? Was the UN irrevocably damaged by the war of ‘61? Were they trying to build a space elevator for Earth? How much of the population had gotten the aging treatments? Which of the big transnational were the most powerful? Were they fighting among themselves for preeminence?

Art answered these questions as fully as he could, and though he shook his head at the inadequacy of his answers, Nirgal for one learned a lot from them, and Nadia seemed to feel the same. And they both found themselves laughing fairly often.

When Art asked Nadia questions in turn, her answers were friendly, but varied greatly in length. Talking about her current projects she went on in detail, happy to describe the scores of construction sites she was working on in the southern hemisphere. But when he asked her questions about the early years in Underbill, in that bold direct way of his, she usually just shrugged, even if he asked about building details. “I don’t really remember it very well,” she would say.

“Oh come on.”

“No, I’m telling the truth. It’s a problem, actually. How old are you?”

“Fifty. Or fifty-one, I guess. I’ve lost track of the date.”

“Well, I am one hundred and twenty. Don’t look so shocked! With the treatments it’s not so old — you’ll see! I just had the treatment again two years ago, and I’m not exactly like a teenager, but I feel pretty good. Very good in fact. But I think memory may be the weak link. It may be the brain just won’t hold that much. Or maybe I just don’t try. But I’m not the only one having the problem. Maya is even worse than me. And everyone my age complains about it. Vlad and Ursula are getting concerned. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this back when they developed the treatments.”

“Maybe they did and then forgot.”

Her laugh seemed to take her by surprise.

Later at dinner, after talking about her construction projects again, Art said to her, “You really ought to try to convene a meeting of all these underground groups.”

Maya was at their table, and she looked at Art as suspiciously as she had in Echus Chasma. “It isn’t possible,” she declared. She looked much better than she had when they had parted, Nirgal thought — rested, tall, rangy, graceful, glamorous. She seemed to have shrugged off the guilt of murder as if it were a coat she didn’t like.

“Why not?” Art asked her. “You’d be a lot better off if you could live on the surface.”

“This is obvious: And we could move into the demimonde, if it were just that simple. But there is a large police force on the surface and in orbit, and the last time they saw us they were trying to kill us as quickly as possible. And the way they treated Sax does not give me any confidence that things have changed.”

“I’m not saying they have. But I think there are things you could do to oppose them more effectively. Getting together, for instance, and making a plan. Making contact with surface organizations that would help you. That kind of thing.”

“We have such contacts,” Maya said coldly. But Nadia was nodding. And Nirgal’s mind was racing with images of his years in Sabishii. A meeting of the underground…

“The Sabishiians would come for sure,” he said. “They’re already doing stuff like this all the time. That’s what the demimonde is, in effect.”

Art said, “You should think about contacting Praxis as well. My ex-boss William Fort would be very interested in such a meeting. And the whole membership of Praxis is involved in innovations you would like.”

“Your ex-boss?” Maya said.

“Sure,” Art said with an easy smile. “I’m my own boss now.”

“You could say you are our prisoner,” Maya pointed out sharply.

“When you’re the prisoner of anarchists it’s the same thing, right?”

Nadia and Nirgal laughed, but Maya scowled and turned away.

Nadia said, “I think a meeting would be a good idea. We’ve let Coyote run the network for too long.”

“I heard that!” Coyote called from the next table.

“Don’t you like the idea?” Nadia asked him.

Coyote shrugged. “We have to do something, no doubt of that. They know we’re down here now.”

This caused a thoughtful silence.

“I’m going north next week,” Nadia said to Art. “You can come with me if you like — Nirgal, you too if you want. I’m going to drop in on a lot of sanctuaries, and we can talk to them about a meeting.”

“Sure,” Art said, looking pleased. And Nirgal’s mind was still racing as he thought of the possibilities. Being in Gamete again brought dormant parts of his mind back alive, and he saw clearly the two worlds in one, the white and the green, split into different dimensions, folded through each other — like the underground and the surface world, joined clumsily in the demimonde. A world out of focus…

So the next week Art and Nirgal joined Nadia, and drove north. Because of Sax’s arrest Nadia did not want to risk staying in any of the open towns along their way, and she did not even seem to trust the other hidden sanctuaries; she was one of the most conservative of the old ones in terms of secrecy. Over the years of hiding she, like Coyote, had built a whole system of small shelters of her own, and now they drove from one to the next, spending the short days sleeping and waiting in relative comfort. They could not drive during the winter days because the fog hood had been lessening in thickness and area for several years now, and this year was often no more than a light mist, or patchy low clouds, swirling over the rough lumpy land. Once they were descending a rough drop in a foggy morning, after a 10 A.M. dawn, and Nadia was explaining that Ann had identified it as the remnant of an earlier Chasma Australe — “She says there are literally scores of fossil Chasma Australes down here, cut at different angles during earlier points in the cycle of precession” — and the fog swept away, and they could suddenly see for many kilometers, all the way to the shaggy ice walls at the mouth of the present Chasma Australe, gleaming in the distance. They were exposed — then the clouds closed over them again, very swiftly, enveloping them in murky flowing white, as if they were traveling in a snowstorm in which the snowflakes were so fine that they defied gravity, and blew about in suspension forever.

Nadia hated that kind of exposure, no matter how brief, and so she continued to hide through the days. They looked out the little windows of her shelters onto swirling clouds, which sometimes caught the light in sparkling arrays, so bright it hurt to look at them. Sunbeams cut through gaps between clouds, striking the long ridges and scarps of the blindingly white land. Once they even experienced a full whiteout, when all shadows disappeared, and everything else: a pure white world, in which it was impossible to make out even the horizon.

On other days icebows threw curves of pale pastel color against the intense whites, and once when the sun broke through, low over the land, it was surrounded by a ring of light as bright as it was. The landscape blazed white under this display, not uniformly but in patches, all shifting rapidly in the ceaseless winds. Art laughed to see it, and he never stopped exclaiming over the ice flowers, now as large as shrubs, and studded with spikes and lacy fans, and growing into each other at their edges, scr that in many areas the ground itself completely disappeared, and they drove across a crackling surface of shard blooms, crushing hundreds of them under their wheels. The long dark nights were almost a comfort after days like that.

Days passed, one like the next. Nirgal found it very comfortable to travel with Art and Nadia; they were both even-tempered, calm, funny; Art was 51 and Nadia 120, and Nirgal only 12, which was around 25 Terran years; but despite the discrepancies in age they interacted as equals. Nirgal could test his ideas on them freely, and they never laughed or scoffed, even when they saw problems and pointed them out. And in fact their ideas meshed fairly well, for the most part. They were, in Martian political terms, moderate green assimilationists — Booneans, Nadia called it. And they had similar temperaments, which was something that Nirgal had never felt before about anyone, not for the rest of his family in Gamete or his friends in Sabishii.