Ann had been silent, but now she said, “The landforms aren’t unique to glaciation. All of them are common in Martian ranges, because they were all formed by rock falling out of the sky. Every kind of formation you can think of is out here somewhere, bizarre shapes limited only by the the angle of repose.” She had refused any cognac, which surprised John, and now she stared at the floor with a disgusted look.

“Not U-shaped valleys, surely,” John said.

“Yes, U-shaped valleys too.”

“The problem is that the oceanic model isn’t very falsifiable,” Simon said quietly. “You can keep failing to find good evidence for it, and we are, but that doesn’t disprove it.”

The kitchen clean, John asked Ann to go out for a sunset walk. She hesitated, unwilling; but it was one of her rituals and everyone knew it, and with a quick grimace and a hard glance she agreed.

Once outside he led her up to the same peak he had napped on. The sky was a plum colored arch over the black serrated ridges surrounding them, and stars were popping into existence in a flood, hundreds per eyeblink. He stood by her side; she stared away from him. The ragged skyline might have been a scene from Earth. She was a bit taller than him, a gaunt, angular silhouette. John liked her, but whatever reciprocal liking she may have had for him-and they had had some good talks in years past-had dissipated when he chose to work with Sax. He could have done anything he liked, her hard looks said, and yet he had chosen terraforming.

Well, it was true. He put his hand before her, forefinger raised. She punched her wristpad and suddenly her breathing sighed in his ear. “What,” she said, without looking his way.

“It’s about the sabotage incidents,” he said.

“I thought so. I suppose Russell thinks I’m behind them.”

“It’s not so much that-”

“Does he think I’m stupid? Does he imagine I think a little bit of vandalism will stop you from your boys’ games?”

“Well, it’s a bit more than little bits. There’ve been six major incidents now, and any of them could have killed people.”

“Knocking mirrors out of orbit can kill people?”

“If they’re doing maintenance on them.”

She hmphed. “What else has happened.”

“A truck was knocked off one of the mohole shaft roads yesterday, and almost landed on me.” He heard her breath catch. “That’s the third truck to go. And that mirror was knocked into a spin with a maintenance worker on it, and she had to do a free solo to a station, it took her more than an hour to get there, and she almost didn’t make it. And then an explosives dump went off by accident at the Elysian mohole, a minute after a whole crew left it. And all the lichen at Underhill were killed by a virus that shut down the whole lab.”

Ann shrugged. “What do you expect from GEMs? It could have been an accident, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often.”

“It wasn’t an accident.”

“It all adds up to peanuts. Does Russell think I’m stupid?”

“You know he doesn’t. But it’s a matter of tipping the balance. A lot of terran money is being invested in the project, but it wouldn’t take much bad publicity to get a lot of it to drop out.”

“Maybe so,” Ann said. “But you ought to listen to yourself when you say things like that. You and Arkady are the biggest advocates of some kind of new Martian society, you two plus Hiroko, maybe. But the way Russell and Frank and Phyllis are bringing up terran capital, the whole thing’s going to be out of your hands. It’ll be business as usual, and all your ideas will disappear.”

“I tend to think we all want something similar here,” John said. “We want to do good work in a good place. We just emphasize different parts of the process of getting there, that’s all. If we only coordinated our efforts, and worked as a team-”

“We don’t want the same things!” Ann said. “You want to change Mars, and I don’t. It’s as simple as that.”

“Well…” John faltered before her bitterness. They were moving slowly around the hill, in a complicated dance that imitated the conversation, sometimes face to face, sometimes back to back; and always her voice was right in his ear, and his in hers. He liked that about walker conversations, and used it, that insidious voice in the ear which could be so persuasive, caressing, hypnotic. “It’s not that simple, even so. I mean, you ought to be helping those of us who are closest to your beliefs, and opposing those furthest away.”

“I do that.”

“Which is why I came to ask you what you know about these saboteurs. It makes sense, right?”

“I know nothing about them. I wish them luck.”

“In person?”

“What?”

“I’ve traced your movements in the last couple of years, and you’ve always been near every incident, within a month or so before it happened. You were in Senzeni Na a few weeks ago on your way here, right?”

He listened to her breathe. She was angry. “Using me as cover,” she muttered, and something more he didn’t catch.

“Who?”

She turned her back on him. “You should ask the coyote about this stuff, John.”

“The coyote?”

She laughed shortly. “Haven’t you heard of him? He wanders around on the surface without a walker, people say. Pops up here and there, sometimes on both sides of the world in a single night. Knew Big Man himself, back in the good old days. And a big friend of Hiroko’s. And a big enemy of terraforming.”

“Have you met him?”

She didn’t reply.

“Look,” he said after nearly a minute of their shared breathing, “people are going to get killed. Innocent bystanders.”

“Innocent bystanders are going to get killed when the permafrost melts and the ground collapses under our feet. I don’t have anything to do with that either. I just do my work. Trying to catalog what was here before we came.”

“Yes. But you’re the most famous red of all, Ann. These people must have contacted you because of that, and I wish you’d discourage them. It might save some lives.”

She turned to face him. Her helmet’s faceplate reflected the western skyline, purple above, black below, the border between the two colors jagged and raw. “If you left the planet alone, it would save lives. That’s what I want. I’d kill you if I thought it would help.”

After that there was little to say. On the way back down to the trailer, he tried another topic. “What do you think happened to Hiroko and the rest of them?”

“They disappeared.”

John rolled his eyes. “She didn’t talk to you about it?”

“No. Did she talk to you?”

“No. I don’t think she talked to anyone but her group. Do you know where they went?”

“No.”

“Do you have any idea why they left?”

“They probably wanted to get free of us. Make something new. What you and Arkady say you want, they really wanted.”

John shook his head. “If they do it, they’ll do it for twenty people. I mean to do it for everyone.”

“Maybe they’re more realistic than you.”

“Maybe. We’ll find out. There’s more than one way to do this, Ann. You have to learn that.”

She didn’t reply.

The others stared at them as they entered the trailer, and Ann, storming into the kitchen nook, was no help. John sat on the arm of the one couch and asked them more questions about their work, and about groundwater levels in Argyre and the southern hemisphere generally. The big basins were low in elevation, but had been dehydrated in the impacts that formed them; and in general it appeared that the planet’s water had mostly seeped north. Another part of the mystery: no one had ever explained why the northern and southern hemispheres were so different, it was the problem in areology, a solution to which might prove the key to explaining all the other enigmas of the Martian landscape, as tectonic plate theory had once explained so many different problems in geology. In fact some people wanted to use the tectonic explanation again, postulating that an old crust had slid over itself onto the southern half, leaving the north to form a new skin, then all of it freezing in position when planetary cooling stopped all tectonic movement. Ann thought that was ridiculous; in her opinion the northern hemisphere was simply the biggest impact basin of all, the ultimate bang of the Noachian. A similar-sized strike had knocked the moon out of the Earth, probably around the same time. The areologists discussed various aspects of the problem for a while, and John listened, asking an occasional neutral question.