“Yes,” Nadia said, frowning, “but I think they were both wrong. I don’t think we can invent it from scratch, and I don’t think there will be a mix. At least not for a very long time. In the meantime, it will be a matter of a lot of different cultures coexisting, I think. But whether such a thing is possible …” She shrugged.

The problems they were going to face in any congress were made flesh during their visit to the Bedouin caravanserai. These Bedouin were mining the region of the far South between Dana Crater, Lyell Crater, the Sisyphi Cavi, and Dorsa Argentea. They were traveling about in mobile mining rigs, in the style honed on the Great Escarpment, now traditional — harvesting surface deposits, and then moving on. The caravanserai was just a small tent, left in place like an oasis, for people to use in emergencies, or when they wanted to stretch out a little.

Nobody could have made more of a contrast with the ethereal Sufis than the Bedouin; these reserved unsentimental Arabs dressed in modern jumpers, and seemed to be mostly male. When the travelers arrived there was a mining caravan about to leave, and when they heard what the travelers wanted to discuss, they frowned and left anyway. “More Booneism. We don’t want anything to do with it.”

The travelers ate a meal with a group of men in the largest rover left in the caravanserai, with women appearing from a tube from the car next door to serve the dishes. Jackie glowered at this, with a dark expression that was straight off Maya’s face. When one of the younger Arab men sitting beside her tried to strike up a conversation, he found it hard going indeed. Nirgal suppressed a smile at this, and attended to Nadia and an old Bedu named Zeyk, the leader of this group, and the one Nadia had known from before. “Ah, the Sufis,” he said genially. “No one bothers them because they are clearly harmless. Like birds.”

Later in the meal Jackie warmed to the young Arab, of course, as he was a strikingly handsome man, with long dark eyelashes framing liquid brown eyes, an aquiline nose, full red lips, a sharp jaw, and an easy confident manner that appeared unintimidated by Jackie’s own beauty, which was similar in some ways to his own. His name was Antar, and he came from an important Bedu family. Art, sitting across the low table from them, looked shocked at this developing friendship, but after their years in Sabishii Nirgal had seen it coming even before Jackie had, and in a strange way it was almost a pleasure to watch her at work. Quite a sight, in fact — she the proud daughter of the greatest matriarchy since Atlantis, Antar the proud heir of the most extreme patriarchy on Mars, a young man with a grace and ease of manner so pure it was as if he were king of the world.

After the meal the two of them disappeared. Nirgal settled back with scarcely a twinge, and talked with Nadia and Art and Zeyk, and Zeyk’s wife, Nazik, who came out to join them. Zeyk and Nazik were Mars old-timers, who had met John Boone, and been friends of Frank Chalmers. Contrary to the Sufis’ prediction, they were very friendly to the idea of a congress, and they agreed that Dorsa Brevia would be a good place to hold it.

“What we need is equality without conformity,” Zeyk said at one point, squinting seriously as he chose his words. This was close enough to what Nadia had been saying on the drive there that it caught Nirgal’s attention even more than it otherwise would have. “This is not an easy thing to establish, but clearly we have to try, to avoid fighting. I’ll spread the word through the Arab community. Or at least the Bedu. I must say, there are Arabs in the north who are very much involved with the transnational, with Amexx especially. All the African Arab countries are falling into Amexx, one after the next. A very odd pairing. But money …” He rubbed his fingers together. “You know. Anyway, we will contact our friends. And the Sufis will help us. They are becoming the mullahs down here, and the mullahs don’t like it, but I do.”

Other developments worried him. “Armscor has taken on the Black Sea Group, and that’s a very bad combination — old Afrikaaner leadership, and security from all the member states, most of them police states — Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.” He ticked them off on his fingers, wrinkling his nose. “Think about those histories for a while! And they have been building bases on the Great Escarpment, a band around Mars, in effect. And they’re in tight with the Transitional Authority.” He shook his head. “They will crush us if they can.”

Nadia nodded her agreement, and Art, looking surprised at this assessment, pumped Zeyk with a hundred questions. “But you don’t hide,” he noted at one point.

“We have sanctuaries if we need them,” Zeyk said. “And we are ready to fight.”

“Do you think it will come to that?” Art asked.

“I am sure of it.”

Much later, after several more tiny cups of mudlike coffee, Zeyk and Nazik and Nadia talked to each other about Frank Chalmers, all three of them smiling peculiar fond smiles. Nirgal and Art listened, but it was hard to get a sense of that man, dead long before Nirgal had been born. In fact it was a shocking reminder of just how old the issei were, that they had known such a figure from the videotapes. Finally Art blurted out, “But what was he like!”

The three old ones thought it over.

Slowly Zeyk said, “He was an angry man. He listened to Arabs, though, and respected us. He lived with us for a time and learned our language, and truthfully there are few Americans who have ever done that. And so we loved him. But he was no very easy man to know. And he was angry. I don’t know why. Something in his years on Earth, I suppose. He never spoke of them. In fact he never spoke about himself at all. But there was a gyroscope in him, spinning like a pulsar. And he had black moods. Very black. We sent him out in scouting rovers, to see if he could help himself. It didn’t always work. He would rip us from time to time, even though he was our guest.” Zeyk smiled, remembering. “Once he called us all slaveowners, right to our faces over coffee.”

“Slaveowners?”

Zeyk waved a hand. “He was angry.”

“He saved us, there at the end,” Nadia told Zeyk, stirring from deep in her own thoughts. “In sixty-one.” She told them of a long drive down Valles Marineris, accomplished at the very same time that the Compton Aquifer outbreak was flooding the great canyon; and how when they were almost clear of it, the flood had caught Frank and swept him away. “He was out getting the car off a rock, and if he hadn’t acted so quickly, the whole car would have gone.”

“Ah,” said Zeyk. “A happy death.”

“I don’t think he thought so.”

The issei all laughed, briefly, then reached together for their empty cups, and made a small toast to their late friend. “I miss him,” Nadia said as she put her cup down. “I never thought I would say that.”

She went silent, and watching her Nirgal felt the night cosseting them, hiding them. He had never heard her speak of Frank Chal-mers. A lot of her friends had died in the revolt. And her partner too, Bogdanov, whom so many people still followed.

“Angry to the last,” Zeyk said. “For Frank, a happy death.”

From Lyell they continued counterclockwise around the South Pole, stopping at sanctuaries or tent towns, and exchanging news and goods. Christianopolis was the largest tent town in the region, center of trade for all the smaller settlements south of Argyre. The sanctuaries in the area were mostly occupied by Reds. Nadia asked all the Reds they met to convey news of the congress to Ann Clay-borne. “We’re supposed to have a phone link, but she’s not answering me.” A lot of the Reds clearly thought a meeting was a bad idea, or at least a waste of time. South of Schmidt Crater they stopped at a settlement of Bologna communists who lived in a hollowed-out hill, lost in one of the wildest zones of the southern highlands, a region very hard to travel in because of the many wandering scarps and dikes, which rovers could not negotiate. The Bolognese gave them a map marking some tunnels and elevators they had installed in the area, to allow passage through dikes, and up or down scarps. “If we didn’t have them our trips would be nothing but detours.”