But Hana appeared to enjoy conversation with me for its own sake. She was undeferential, and watching her I could almost imagine what it would be like to learn the discipline anew. Fifty-two years old, chestnut hair, hazel eyes, nice bones, calm expression: my single graduate students were tripping over each other to be with her, and here she was at a corner table with me, a man who truly did not know how to speak with her. Once I knew what to say to the young (when I was young myself, perhaps) but I’ve lost the art. Life is the history of losses.

So she said, “Is this dig much like the ones you did on Earth?” and I tried to figure out what she meant by it.

“Well. I never actually participated in a dig on Earth — as I thought you knew?” I was almost certain she knew that. “But the site is much like an abandoned Norse settlement on the west coast of Greenland that I visited when I was there,” and I described the terran site using what I could remember of my lecture notes on the place — for my trip to Earth was a blank to me — until I became too aware of the discrepancy between what I described and what we had actually seen that afternoon, and stumbled to a halt, and waited with some trepidation for her to bring up something else to discuss. You see, quiet people know they have a reputation for being close-mouthed. Sometimes the reputation is like a power, for they see their acquaintances think that when they are moved to speak it will be for something special. But that is also a sort of pressure, a pressure that grows as the years pass and the quiet person’s reputation ages. What, after all, is really important enough to say? Not much. And quiet people become overly aware of that, and thus aware that most talk is a code masking vastly more complex meanings — meanings unfathomable to the very people most aware of their existence.

Abruptly I stood. “I’m off to bed now,” I said, and went back to my tent.

“—When we were sure they would honor the truce we met seven of them at the spaceport depot. We told them they were the last city on Mars resisting legal authority, but they did not believe us. I told them their situation was hopeless no matter what was happening elsewhere, and offered them the terms we had offered all the rioters: due process; suspension of the death penalty; and a reasonable dialogue (to be defined later) to be established to air grievances concerning planetary policy. I added that all noncombatants in New Houston were to be released to us immediately. The leader of the group, a bearded man of seventy or eighty years, demanded complete amnesty as a condition of surrender. I said I was unauthorized to grant amnesty, but that it would be considered by the Committee when violence ceased. The rioters discussed the matter in Russian among themselves, and my officers heard the word “Leningrad” repeated. The leader said they would return to the city and put the matter to a vote, and we agreed to meet again in two days. The next morning, however, more than twenty explosions from the crater rim indicated they had brought down the city dome. By the time our forces could enter the city the power plant was destroyed and fires had gone out for lack of oxygen, though the smoke was still thick. This smoke covered rebel snipers, and by the time we could subdue them nearly all the noncombatants in the city had died of asphyxiation. Rescue work continued for three days, and thirty-eight people were found in intact rooms, air locks, individual suits, and the like. All of them claimed noncombatant status; their interviews are appended. When the city was secured it was no longer habitable; damage caused by the rioters was such that it would have been easier to build in a new crater than to reconstruct the city.” So said Police Colonel Ernest Shay, field commander for the Committee police during the Unrest, when he was questioned by the Aimes Commission in 2250. But I had found records of the Royal Dutch police division showing that Shay was in Enkhuisen in December 2248, supervising the war there. Why had he answered the Commission’s questions, and not the officer actually in charge at New Houston? Why had he lied, and said he was there conducting negotiations himself?

I put the bulky printout of the 194th Volume of the Aimes Report down on my nightstand, on top of a thick folder of samizdat, an illegal collection of newsletters, pamphlets, xeroxes and broadsides I had made over many years. In slangy, sarcastic, bitter Russian (the underground language of Mars, the language of resistance, the counter-English) the samizdat, many of them handwritten to avoid police identification of printer or typewriter, told the real story of New Houston. Should I pull out the newsletter carry on with it, by “Yevgeny”? “The Dragon descended, lightning bolted from its mouth, ‘the sky is falling, the sky is falling!’ and no air for the fire so that it fled down throats to combust in lungs, fire balloon people wafting up past the dragon chicks falling on stacks of fire…” Or the more prosaic account by “Medvedev”? “24 December 2248 — tenth politzei blitzkrieg — New Houston, Texan sector — estimated two thousand attack troops descended on rocket packs onto open city after dome knocked down at dawn — resistance continued three days — captured rebels executed—” But I knew them all by heart. These ragged narratives told the true story of the Unrest, I had become convinced. Few historians agreed with me; they sided with the Committee’s official view, that the samizdat were written by malcontents, and were nothing but lies, filled with contradictions and obvious inaccuracies. And it was true that they were anonymous, and contained contradictions, they were sourceless, and had no evidence to support them; and some were full of tall tales, the Unrest made myth. But in some ways writers like “Medvedev” made a more coherent account of the Unrest than the Aimes Report did. And if they were nothing but fictions, why had the Committee made it illegal to publish or own them? Why had the Committee begun the process of installing “watermarks” in every Xerox machine, to help them locate the ones used to print samizdat? And why had excavation of over a dozen abandoned cities been forbidden? No. There was something wrong; the Committee had lied, was lying. The true story of the Unrest had yet to be told.

The excavation teams got to street level in the old city at different speeds, depending on their method and what they found. McNeil worked as if he had the rest of his life to finish the next centimeter of the dig, and he had his students record everything so thoroughly that they could have reconstructed their ruins just as they found them. “You never know what questions you may want to ask a hundred years from now,” McNeil declared. The rest of us already had questions, and only used the string grids and toothbrushes when we were near what we were looking for. I set my team to work in the area of the city’s physical-plant, under the eastern wall of the crater. Under several meters of sand we found the big buildings of the plant, partially buried under the avalanched crater wall, so that the walls were broken and the interiors filled with rubble and shattered equipment. Moving away from the plant we found control terminal housing, administrative offices, and supply sheds; then outside a wrought iron fence were service shops, restaurants, and bars, and beyond them were the dormitories and apartments of those who had worked in the plant. All of these structures, especially the physical plant itself, were scorched, melted, knocked over. Sifting through this evidence of destruction took weeks. We took holograms, and made models of what we found, and programmed computer explosions, and even set up little real explosions in the models, to see what form the assault had taken; and all the while I kept one group enlarging the excavation of the surrounding neighborhood, especially to the north of the plant where the damage was most extensive.