He smiled sardonically. “But they will let you go. And you’ll know who to thank.”

“Oh yes,” I said, and threw myself back against the big pillows, “I’ll know. But how will I thank you, Shrike? What can poor I, lowly professor at university, give you? You who have—” I waved out at the vast lit map of Alexandria.

He shrugged, a beautiful movement to watch — a movement I tried to imitate in my own affairs. “You do fine. I like your company.”

“I don’t see why.”

“Sometimes I don’t either!” He laughed. “Usually you aren’t this cranky.”

“Ach—” I looked away. “I’m your pet scientist, and we both know it. How many other pets do you keep.”

The silence stretched on. Shrike stepped to the music console, pushed buttons, and the very slowest version of “Django” made its melancholy beginning. When he saw I was watching him again he pointed his pipe at me. “How many other governors do you keep?”

“None!”

He laughed at me, went back to the window. “Perhaps it’s best we forget our pasts. How much could we be saddled with before we buckled under the stupidity of it all?”

“Perhaps we would learn to do better.”

“Perhaps. But I doubt it. Meanwhile, we have no choice. Think of your dig, Hjalmar. When you get to New Houston you’ll be in your element, out in nowhere land up to your elbows in mud and junk, putting together ancient history like a puzzle. What could be nicer?” He laughed again, and again he was laughing at me, but something in it — his pleasure at his own charm — and the sight of him, and the view over the city and Noctis Labyrinthus beyond, and the music, all filled me and forced a turn in my mood. Or something did. Often my moods shift on their own, for no reason I can tell. But frequently Shrike has something to do with it. “Come back to bed?”

Densely Cratered Terrain — the central and southern uplands are as much as a hundred times more cratered than the plains of the north, and are over 3.9 billion years old.

Excavation is slow work. Each dig becomes a little culture of its own, formed partly by the digger’s culture, partly by what they find. McNeil estimated that there were 3,500 buildings on the crater floor, and Kalinin guessed 2,000 of them were still standing, and all of them were filled with the artifacts — and sometimes the occupants — of three hundred years before. We built quite a cemetery out on the ejecta shield. Kalinin’s team came across a mass grave containing four hundred and twenty-eight bodies. Most had been shot or killed in explosions, or asphyxiated. Bodies frozen together like packed fish. Satarwal declared they were victims of the rioters. I only had to walk out on him to make my point, and even Petrini looked disbelieving, in the moment when he knew Satarwal wasn’t watching, in the moment when he knew I was.

I hiked up to the crater rim as I had so often before, for the solitude and the view over the great Martian uplands. Those bodies. Where among them were my parents, my sisters? — But it was stupid to think of it. The real problem was to prove the police had destroyed the city. But what in New Houston would prove it?

I was halfway around the rim before I noticed someone trying to catch up to me. A surprise; since my outburst at the Leaky Tap, my reputation as a madman was enough to keep me undisturbed. When I saw it was Hana I slowed down. “What do you want?” I called out.

She joined me without speaking up, then said, “I’ve identified the taggarts in the explosives that brought down the dome.” Her face glowed under the oxygen flowing from her hood’s edge. She was upset. “They’re American.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“But—” She made her mouth into a side-funnel to suck down more oxygen, and her eyes watered. She wanted praise, reassurance, I didn’t know what. “The Americans?”

“Of course.” I was irritated with her naivete. “Who do you think owns this planet?”

“I know,” she protested. “I mean, they back the Committee. But this—”

“This isn’t anything new. That 1776 thing is just a story. America runs an empire, and we’re part of it. The outermost colony.”

“I’m not so sure it’s that simple—”

“A colony, I say! The Committee works directly for the Americans and the Soviets.”

She sat down on a squarish boulder.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You’ve heard me say this before.”

“I know, but…” She held up the taggart, stared at it.

“But now you know it’s true.”

She nodded, and I felt sorry for her. But I was angry at her too. She should have believed me before. Wasn’t that why she studied with me, to learn what I had taken the trouble to abstract from this mess of a world? That is the trouble with teaching; students only really believe what they’ve discovered for themselves. You might as well give them a hammer and magnifying glass and throw them into the field.

She sat there like a train had run over her dog. I took a seat on an impact-tortured boulder next to her. Down on the crater floor they were ending the day’s work. Through the sepia haze it looked like a town under construction: half the houses done, the other sites covered with building material.

I tried to explain to her how it had come about. “It’s the worst of the American and Soviet systems that combined here, I’m afraid.” I hefted a shard of compressed basalt. “They wanted the same things out of us, and by the time they were partners down there it was a long established fact up here. And the worst of both systems were the parts that meshed the easiest. So that’s what rules us, and everything else too.”

“I suppose so.”

“Now it was the best of the American and Soviet ways that combined to fight the Committee in 2248, if you ask me. An attempt to enact ideals that never were realized on Earth. But—” I waved the rock at the scene below. “You see what happened to them. And after that they cracked down harder than ever.”

Hana nodded. “But they’re letting up now, don’t you think? I mean, here we are at New Houston. And Publications Review lets through almost everything submitted.”

“They know we’ll censor ourselves before submitting.”

“But not you, or Nakayama, or Lebedyan. And all of you have been published extensively. And people can move wherever they want, now. When the forms come through.”

“Publications Review doesn’t care about the past. Try an anti-Committee editorial and it would be a different story.” I tossed the rock down at the city. “But they are letting up a bit, you’re right.”

“Maybe the Committee is getting more liberal. New members and all.”

Did she mean Shrike? Her face was carefully averted, as she pretended to look down at the city. Perhaps this was a try at a personal comment.

“I think it’s only that they don’t need to keep the reins so tight anymore. They can afford to ease off, and in fact it makes sense. Keeping the happy consciousness, you know. Everybody’s happy.”

“You’re not.”

“Uhn.” There, she was doing it again! What did she mean by it? “Maybe I remember too much,” I said, to put her off; but then I laughed. “Which is funny, because I hardly remember anything.”

She looked up at me curiously. “But you remember the fall of the city?”

“I did remember, that night down in the street. Now I remember that I remembered. Which isn’t the same, but it’s enough.”

“So you want to prove the police did it, because you were there.”

Time for some distance; this was making me uncomfortable. “There are other revisionists working with me. Or in the same direction. Nakayama and Lebedyan are both older than me — I wonder if they didn’t see the truth too, in some other city…”

But she was looking back toward the escalator. “That’s Bill!” She hadn’t heard me. “I wonder if he’s up here after me.”

“You’re the only one, then,” I said, and was immediately shocked at my rudeness. “He’s after you all right,” I heard myself go on, with an inane giggle.