current situation.” He cut the connection.
Reason was useless. Also anger, also sarcasm, not to mention irony. He could only try to match them in fantasyland. So he stood up in meetings and did his very best, haranguing them about what Mars was, how it had come to be, what a fine future it could have as a collective society, specifically and organically Martian in its nature, “with the dross of all those Terran hatreds burnt away, all those dead habits that keep us from really living, from the creation that is the world’s only real beauty, damn it!”
Useless. He tried to arrange meetings with some of the disappeared, and once he talked with a group by phone, and asked them to pass the word along to Hiroko if possible, that he urgently needed to talk to her. But no one seemed to know where she was.
Then one day he got a message from her, in print faxed down from Phobos. He’d be better off talking to Arkady, it said. But Arkady had disappeared while down in Hellas, and was no longer taking calls. “It’s like playing fucking hide-and-seek,” Frank exclaimed bitterly to Maya one day. “Did you have that game in Russia? I remember playing with some older kids one time, it was around sunset and a storm over the water making it really dark, and there I was, wandering around empty streets knowing I’d never find any of them.”
“Forget the disappeared,” she advised. “Concentrate on who you can see. The disappeared will be monitoring you anyway. It doesn’t matter if you can’t see them or if they don’t reply.”
He shook his head.
Then there was a new wave of emigration. He shouted for Slusinski and ordered him to get an explanation from Washington.
“Apparently, sir, the elevator consortium has been bought in a hostile takeover by Subarashii, so its assets are in Trinidad Tobago and it is no longer interested in responding to American concerns about the matter. Infrastructure construction capability is now in line with a moderate emigration rate, they say.”
“Damn them!” Frank said. “They don’t know what they’re doing with this!”
He walked in a circle, grinding his teeth. The words spilled quietly out of him, in a monologue of their own making. “You see but you don’t understand. It’s like John used to say, there’s parts of Martian reality that don’t make it across the vacuum, not just the feel of the gravity, but the feel of getting up in a dorm and going down to the baths, and then across the alley to a dining hall. And so you’re getting it all wrong, you arrogant, ignorant, stupid sons of bitches. . ”
He and Maya took the train from Burroughs back up to Pavonis
And then there one was, Pavonis Mons, an enormous dream mountain, as if the world were a print by Hokusai. Frank found it difficult to talk. He avoided looking at the TV at the front of the car— news flashed up and down the train almost instantly anyway, in snatches of overheard conversation or the looks on people’s faces. It was never necessary to watch the video to find out the really important news. The train ran through a forest of Acheron pines, tiny things with bark like black iron and cylindrical bushes of needles, but the needles were all yellow and drooping. He had heard about this, there was some kind of problem with the soil, too much salt or too little nitrogen, they weren’t sure. Helmeted figures stood around one on a ladder, plucking specimens of the sick needles. “That’s me,” Frank said to Maya under his breath, as she was asleep. “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.”
In the Sheffield offices he started meeting with the new elevator administrators, at the same time beginning another round of simultaneous meetings with Washington. It turned out Phyllis was still in control of the elevator, having aided Subarashii in the hostile takeover.
Then they heard that Arkady was in Nicosia, just down the slope from Pavonis, and that he and his followers had declared Nicosia a free city like New Houston. Nicosia had become a big jump-off point for the disappeared. You could slip into Nicosia and never be heard of again, it had happened hundreds of times, so many that it was clear there was some system there, of contact and transmission, an underground railroad kind of thing that no undercover agent had yet been able to penetrate, or at least to return from. “Let’s go down there and talk to him,” Frank said to Maya when he heard. “I really want to confront him in person.”
“It won’t do any good,” Maya said darkly. But Nadia was supposed to be there as well, and so she came along.
All down the slope of Tharsis they rode in silence, watching the frosted rock fly by. At Nicosia the station opened for their train as if there was not even a question of refusing them. But Arkady and Nadia were not in the small crowd that greeted them; instead it was Alexander Zhalin. Back at the city manager’s offices, they called up Arkady on a vidlink; judging by the sunlight behind him, he was already many kilometers to the east. And Nadia, they said, had never been in Nicosia at all.
Arkady looked the same as ever, expansive and relaxed. “This is madness,” Frank said to him, furious that he had not gotten him in person. “You can’t hope to succeed.”
“But we can,” Arkady said. “We do.” His luxuriant red-and-white beard was an obvious revolutionary badge, as if he were the young Fidel about to enter Havana. “Of course it would be easier with your help, Frank. Think about it!”
Then before Frank could say more, someone off-screen got Arkady’s attention. A muttered conversation in Russian, and then Arkady faced him again. “Sorry, Frank,” he said. “I must attend to something. I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”
“Don’t you go!” Frank shouted, but the connection was gone. “God
Nadia came on the line. She was in Burroughs, but had been linked into the exchange, such as it was. In contrast to Arkady she was taut, brusque, unhappy. “You can’t support what he’s doing!” Frank cried.
“No,” Nadia said grimly. “We aren’t talking. We still have this phone contact, which is how I knew where you were, but we don’t use it direct anymore. No point.”
“You can’t influence him?” Maya said.
“No.”
Frank could see that this was hard for Maya to believe, and it almost made him laugh: not influence a man, not manipulate him? What was Nadia’s problem?
That night they stayed at a dorm near the station. After supper Maya went back to the city manager’s office, to talk to Alexander and Dmitri and Elena. Frank wasn’t interested, it was a waste of time. Restlessly he walked the circumference of the old town, through alleys running against the tent wall, remembering that night so long ago. Only nine years, in fact, though it felt like a hundred. Nicosia looked little these days. The park at the western apex still had a good view of the whole, but a blackness filled things so that he could scarcely see.
In the sycamore grove, now mature, he passed a short man hurrying the other way. The man stopped and stared at Frank, who was under a street lamp. “Chalmers!” the man exclaimed.
Frank turned. The man had a thin face, long tangled dreadlocks, dark skin. No one he knew. But seeing him, he felt a chill. “Yes?” he snapped.
The man regarded him. He said, “You don’t know me, do you.”
“No I don’t. Who are you?”
The man’s grin was asymmetrical, as if his face had been cracked at the point of the jaw. Underneath the streetlight it looked warped, half-crazed.
“Who are you?” Frank said again.
The man raised a finger. “The last time we met, you were bringing down the town. Tonight it’s my turn. Ha!” He strode off laughing, each sharp “Ha!” higher than the last.
Back at the city manager’s, Maya clutched his arm. “I was worried, you shouldn’t be walking around alone in this town!”
“Shut up.” He went to a phone and called the physical plant. Everything was normal. He called the UNOMA police, and told them to mount an armed guard at the plant and the train station. He was still repeating the order to someone higher up the chain of command, and it seemed likely it would go all the way up to the new factor for final confirmation, when the screen went blank. There was a tremor underfoot, and every alarm bell in town went off at once. A concerted, adrenal
