Blue Mars(16)
And there, down a broad boulevard with a line of linden trees in its center, was another knot of bodies— not Reds— they wore green headbands, and one of them looked like Peter, it was his back— she walked over weak-kneed, under a compulsion, as in a nightmare, and stood over the body and finally circled it. But it was not Peter. Some tall young native with shoulders like Peter’s, poor thing. A man who would have lived a thousand years.
She moved on carelessly. She came to her little rover without incident, got in and drove to the train terminal at the west end of Sheffield. There a piste ran down the south slope of Pavonis, into the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia. Seeing it she conceived a plan, very simple and basic, but workable because of that. She got on the Kakaze band and made her recommendations as though they were orders. Run away, disappear. Go down into South Saddle, then around Arsia on the western slope above the snowline, there to slip into the upper end of Aganippe Fossa, a long straight canyon that contained a hidden Red refuge, a cliff dwelling in the northern wall. There they could hide and hide and start another long underground campaign, against the new masters of the planet. UNOMA, UNTA, metanat, Dorsa Brevia— they were all green.
She tried calling Coyote, and was somewhat surprised when he answered. He was somewhere in Sheffield as well, she could tell; lucky to be alive no doubt, a bitter furious expression on his cracked face.
Ann told him her plan; he nodded.
“After a time they’ll need to get farther away,” he said.
Ann couldn’t help it: “It was stupid to attack the cable!”
“I know,” Coyote said wearily.
“Didn’t you try to talk them out of it?”
“I did.” His expression grew blacker. “Kasei’s dead?”
“Yes.”
Coyote’s face twisted with grief. “Ah, God. Those bastards.”
Ann had nothing to say. She had not known Kasei well, or liked him much. Coyote on the other hand had known him from birth, back in Hiroko’s hidden colony, and from boyhood had taken him along on his furtive expeditions all over Mars. Now tears coursed down the deep wrinkles on Coyote’s cheeks, and Ann clenched her teeth.
“Can you get them down to Aganippe?” she asked. “I’ll stay and deal with the people in east Pavonis.”
Coyote nodded. “I’ll get them down as fast as I can. Meet at west station.”
“I’ll tell them that.”
“The greens will be mad at you.”
“Fuck the greens.”
• • •
Some part of the Kakaze snuck into the west terminal of Sheffield, in the light of a smoky dull sunset: small groups wearing blackened dirty walkers, their faces white and frightened, angry, disoriented, in shock. Wasted. Eventually there were three or four hundred of them, sharing the day’s bad news. When Coyote slipped in the back, Ann rose and spoke in a voice just loud enough to carry to all of them, aware as she never had been in her life of her position as the first Red; of what that meant, now. These people had taken her seriously and here they were, beaten and lucky to be alive, with dead friends everywhere in the town east of them.
“A direct assault was a bad idea,” she said, unable to help herself. “It worked in Burroughs, but that was a different kind of situation. Here it failed. People who might have lived a thousand years are dead. The cable wasn’t worth that. We’re going to go into hiding and wait for our next chance, our next real chance.”
There were hoarse objections to this, angry shouts: “No! No! Never! Bring down the cable!”
Ann waited them out. Finally she raised a hand, and slowly they went silent again.
“It could backfire all too easily if we fight the greens now. It could give the metanats an excuse to come in again. That would be far worse than dealing with a native government. With Martians we can at least talk. The environmental part of the Dorsa Brevia agreement gives us some leverage. We’ll just have to keep working as best we can. Start somewhere else. Do you understand?”
This morning they wouldn’t have. Now they still didn’t want to. She waited out the protesting voices, stared them down. The intense, cross-eyed glare of Ann Clayborne. . . . A lot of them had joined the fight because of her, back in the days when the enemy was the enemy, and the underground an actual working alliance, loose and fractured but with all its elements more or less on the same side. . . .
They bowed their heads, reluctantly accepting that if Clayborne was against them, their moral leadership was gone. And without that— without Kasei, without Dao— with the bulk of the natives green, and firmly behind the leadership of Nirgal and Jackie, and Peter the traitor. . . .