“We got out the escape tunnel, we saw them coming—”

Inside the shelter they took off their helmets and went through a hundred rounds of embracing. Art slapped him on the back, his eyes popping out like eggs: “So glad to see you two!” He pulled Jackie into a rough hug, then held her out at arm’s length and looked at her wet snotty red-eyed girlish face with approval and admiration, as if just this moment accepting that she was human too, and not some feline goddess.

As they staggered down the narrow tunnel to the refuge’s rooms, Nadia told them the story, scowling as she recalled it. “We saw them coming and got way up the back tunnel, and then brought down both domes, and all the tunnels. So we may have killed a good number of them, but I don’t know — I don’t know how many they sent in, or how far they got. Coyote’s out shadowing them to see if he can tell. Anyway, it’s done.”

 At the end of the tunnel was a crowded refuge of several little chambers, roughly walled, floored and ceilinged by insulation panels, set right against cavities in the ice. Every room radiated from a larger central chamber that served as kitchen and dining hall. Jackie hugged everyone in there but Maya, ending with Nirgal. They held each other hard, and Nirgal felt her trembling, and realized he was trembling as well, in a kind of synchronic vibration. The silent, desperate, fearful drive would strengthen the bond as much as their lovemaking by the volcano, or more — it was hard to tell — he was too tired to be able to read the powerful vague emotions sloshing through him. He disengaged from Jackie and sat, feeling suddenly exhausted to tears. Hiroko sat beside him, and he listened to her as she told him what had happened in more detail. The attack had started with the sudden appearance of several space planes, dropping onto the flat outside the hangar in a group. So they had had very little warning inside, and the people at the hangar had reacted in confusion, telephoning in to warn the others, but failing to activate Coyote’s defense system, which apparently they had simply forgotten. Coyote was disgusted about this, Hiroko said, and Nirgal could well believe it. “You have to stop paratrooper attacks at the very moment of landing,” he said. Instead the people at the hangar had retreated into the dome. After some confusion they had gotten everyone up into the escape tunnel, and once they were past the blast point Hiroko had ordered them to use the Swiss defense and bring down the dome, and Kasei and Dao had obeyed her, and so the whole dome had been blown down, killing whatever part of the attack force was inside, burying them in million of tons of dry ice. Radiation readings seemed to indicate that the Rick-over had not suffered a meltdown, although it certainly had been crushed along with everything else. Coyote had disappeared down a side tunnel with Peter, out a bolt-hole of his own, and Hiroko didn’t know exactly where they had gone. “But I think those space planes may be in trouble.”

So Gamete was gone, and the shell of Zygote too. In some future age the polar cap would sublime away and reveal their flattened remnants, Nirgal thought absently; but for now it was buried, utterly unreachable.

And here they were. They had gotten out with only some AIs, and the walkers on their backs. And now they were at war with the Transitional Authority (presumably), with some part of the force that had assaulted them still out there.

“Who were they?” Nirgal asked.

Hiroko shook her head. “We don’t know. Transitional Authority, Coyote said. But there are a lot of different units in UNTA security, and we need to find out if this is the full Transitional Authority’s new policy, or if some unit has gone on a rampage.”

“What will we do?” Art asked.

At first no one answered.

Finally Hiroko said, “We’ll have to ask for shelter. I think Dorsa Brevia has the most room.”

“What about the congress?” Art asked, reminded of it by the mention of Dorsa Brevia.

“I think we need it now more than ever,” Hiroko said.

Maya was frowning. “It could be dangerous to congregate,” she pointed out. “You’ve told a lot of people about this.”

“We had to,” Hiroko said. “That’s the point of it.” She looked around at them all, and even Maya did not dare contradict her. “Now we have to take the risk.”

PART 7

What Is to Be Done?

The few big buildings in Sabishii were faced with polished stone, picked for colors that were unusual on Mars: alabaster, jade, malachite, yellow jasper, turquoise, onyx, lapis lazuli. The smaller buildings were wooden. After traveling by night and hiding by day, the visitors found it a pleasure to walk in the sunlight between low wooden buildings, under plane trees and fire maples, through stone gardens and across wide boulevards of streetgrass, past canals lined by cypress, which occasionally widened into lily-covered ponds, crossed by high arching bridges. They were almost on the equator here, and winter meant nothing; even at aphelion hibiscus and rhododendron were flowering, and pine trees and many varieties of bamboo shot high into the warm breezy air.

The ancient Japanese greeted their visitors as old and valued friends. The Sabishii issei dressed in copper jumpsuits, went barefoot, and wore long ponytails, and many earrings and necklaces. One of them, bald, with a wispy white beard and a deeply wrinkled face, took the visitors on a walk, to stretch their legs after their long drives. His name was Kenji, and he had been the first Japanese to step on Mars, though no one remembered that anymore.

At the city wall they looked out at enormous boulders balancing on nearby hilltops, carved into one fantastic .shape after another.

“Have you ever been to the Medusae Fossae?”

Kenji only smiled and shook his head. The kami stones on the hills were honeycombed with rooms and storage spaces, he told them, and along with the mohole mound maze they now could house a very great number of people, as many as twenty thousand, for as long as a year. The visitors nodded. It seemed possible it might become necessary.

Kenji took them back to the oldest part of town, where the visitors had been given rooms in the original compound. The rooms were smaller and more spare than most of the town’s student apartments, and had a patina of age and use that made them more like nests than rooms. The issei still slept in some of them.

As the visitors walked through these rooms, they did not look at each other. The contrast between their history and those of the Sabishiians was too stark. They stared at the furniture, disturbed, distracted, withdrawn. And after that evening’s meal, after a lot of sake had gone down the hatches, one said, “If only we had done something like this.”

Nanao began to play a bamboo flute.

“It was easier for us,” Kenji said. “We were all Japanese together. We had a model.”

“It doesn’t seem much like the Japan I remember.”

“No. But that isn’t the true Japan.”

They took their cups and a few bottles, and climbed up stairs to a pavilion on top of a wooden tower next to their compound. Up there they could see the trees and rooftops of the city, and the jagged array of boulders standing on the black skysill It was the last hour of twilight, and except for a wedge of lavender in the west the sky was a rich midnight blue, liberally flecked with stars. A string of paper lanterns hung in a grove of fire maples below.

“We are the true Japanese. What you see in Tokyo today is transnational. There is another Japan. We can never go back to that, of course. It was a feudal culture in any case, and had features we cannot accept. But what we do here has its roots in that culture. We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place.”