As they talked, night after night, they dropped in briefly on some of the big sanctuaries of the south, introducing Art to the people there, and broaching the idea of a meeting or congress. They took him to Bogdanov Vishniac, and amazed him with the giant complex built deep into the mohole, so much bigger than any other sanctuary. Art’s pop-eyed face was as eloquent as a speech, and brought back to Nirgal most acutely the feeling he had had as a child when he first visited it with Coyote.

The Bogdanovists were clearly interested in a meeting, but Mik-hail Yangel, one of the only one of Arkady’s associates to survive ‘61, asked Art what the long-range purpose of such a meeting would be.

“To retake the surface.”

“I see!” Mikhail’s eyes were wide. “Well, I’m sure you would have our support for that! People have been afraid to even bring that subject up.”

“Very good,” Nadia told Art as they drove on north. “If the Bogdanovists support a meeting, then it will probably happen. Most of the hidden sanctuaries are either Bogdanovist or else heavily influenced by them.”

From Vishniac they visited the sanctuaries around Holmes Crater, known as the “industrial heartland” of the underground. These colonies were also mostly Bogdanovist, with any number of small social variations among them, influenced by early Martian social philosophers such as the prisoner Schnelling, or Hiroko, or Marina, or John Boone. The Francophone Utopians in Prometheus, on the other hand, had structured their settlement on ideas taken from sources ranging from Rousseau and Fourier to Foucault and Nemy, subtleties Nirgal had not been aware of when he had first visited. Currently they were being strongly influenced by the Polynesians who had recently arrived on Mars, and their big warm chambers sported palm trees and shallow pools, so that Art said it seemed more like Tahiti than Paris.

In Prometheus they were joined by Jackie Boone herself, who had been left there by friends traveling through. She wanted to go directly on to Gamete, but she was willing to travel with Nadia rather than wait longer, and Nadia was willing to take her. So when they took off again, they had Jackie with them.

The easy camaraderie of the first part of their journey disappeared. Jackie and Nirgal had parted in Sabishii with their relationship in its usual unsettled undefined state, and Nirgal was displeased to have the growth of his new friendships interrupted. Art was obviously agog at her physical presence — she was actually taller than he was, and heavier than Nirgal, and Art watched her in a way he thought surreptitious, but which the others were all aware of, including Jackie of course. It made Nadia roll her eyes, and she and Jackie quarreled over little things like sisters. Once after they did, and Jackie and Nadia were elsewhere in one of Na-dia’s shelters, Art whispered to Nirgal, “She’s just like Maya! Doesn’t she remind you? The voice, the mannerisms—”

Nirgal laughed. “Tell her that and she’ll kill you.”

“Ah,” Art said. He regarded Nirgal with a sidelong glance, “So you two are still… ?”

Nirgal shrugged. In a way it was interesting; he had told Art enough about his relationship with Jackie that the older man knew there was something fundamental between the two. Now Jackie was almost certain to come on to Art, to add him to her minions as she routinely did with men she liked or thought important. At this point she had not figured out how important Art was, but when she did she would act in her usual way, and then what would Art do?

So their voyage was no longer the same, Jackie imparting her usual spin to things. She argued with Nirgal and Nadia; she casually rubbed up to Art, charming him at the same time she judged him, just as an automatic part of acquaintanceship. She would pull off her shirt to sponge down in Nadia’s shelters, or put a hand to his arm when asking questions about Terra — then at other times ignore him completely, veering off into worlds of her own. It was like living with a big cat in the rover, a panther that might purr in your lap or bat you across the compartment, but either way stalk about in a perfect nervous grace.

Ah, but that was Jackie. And there was her laugh, ringing through the car at things Art or Nadia said; and her beauty; and her intense enthusiasm for discussing the Martian situation, so that when she discovered what they were doing on this trip, she immediately fell into it. Life was heightened with her around, no doubt about it. And Art, though he goggled at her when she bathed, had what Nirgal suspected was a sly edge to his smile as he enjoyed her mesmerizing attentions; and once Nirgal caught him giving a look to Nadia that was positively amused. So though he liked her well enough, and liked looking at her, he did not seem hopelessly smitten. This was possibly a matter of his friendship with Nirgal; Nirgal couldn’t be sure, but he liked the idea, which had not been a common one in either Zygote or Sabishii.

For her part, Jackie seemed inclined to dismiss Art as a factor in the organizing of a general meeting, as if she would take it over herself. But then they visited a small neomarxist sanctuary in the Mountains of Mitchel (which were no more mountainous than the rest of the southern highlands, the name being an artifact of the telescope era) and these neomarxists proved to be in communication with the city of Bologna in Italy, and with the Indian province of Kerala — and with Praxis offices in both these places. So they had a lot to talk about with Art, and they obviously enjoyed it and at the end of the visit one of them said to him, “It’s wonderful what you’re doing, you’re just like John Boone.”

Jackie jerked her head around to stare at Art, who was sheepishly shaking his head. “No he’s not,” she said automatically.

But after that she treated him more seriously. Nirgal could only laugh. Any mention of the name John Boone was like a magic spell to Jackie. When she and Nadia discussed John’s theories, he could understand a little why she felt that way; much of what Boone had wanted for Mars made excellent sense, and it seemed to him that Sabishii in particular was a kind of Boonean space. For Jackie, however, it went beyond a rational response — it had to do with Kasei and Esther, and Hiroko, even Peter — with some complex of feelings that touched her on a level that nothing else did.

They continued north, into lands even more violently disarranged than those they had left behind. This was volcanic country, where the harsh sublimity of the southern highland was augmented by the ancient craggy peaks of Australis Tholus and Amphitrites Patera. The two volcanoes bracketed a region of lava flows, where the blackish rock of the land was frozen in weird lumps, waves, and rivers. Once these flows had poured over the surface in streams of white-hot fluid, and even now, hard and black and shattered by the ages, and covered with dust and ice flowers, the liquid origins were completely evident.

The most prominent of these lava remnants were long low ridges, like dragon tails now fossilized to solid black rock. These ridges snaked across the land for many kilometers, often disappearing over the horizon in both directions, forcing the travelers to make long detours. These dorsa were ancient lava channels; the rock they were made of had proved harder than the countryside they had originally flowed over, and in the eons since, the countryside had been worn away, leaving the black mounds lying on the surface somewhat like the fallen elevator cable only very much larger.

One of the dorsa, in the Dorsa Brevia region, had recently been turned into a hidden sanctuary. So Nadia drove their rover on a tortuous path through outlying lava ridges, and then into a capacious garage in the side of the largest black mound they had seen. They got out of their car, and were greeted by a small group of friendly strangers, several of whom Jackie had met before. There was no indication in the garage that the chamber beyond it was going to be any different from any other they had visited, and so when they walked into a big cylindrical lock and out the other door, it was a great shock to find before them an open space that clearly occupied the whole interior of the ridge. The ridge was hollow; the empty space inside it was roughly cylindrical, a tube perhaps two hundred meters floor to ceiling, three hundred meters wall to wall, and extending for as far as they could see in both directions. Art’s mouth was like a cross-section model of the tunnel: “Wow!” he kept exclaiming. “Wow, look at this! Wow!”