But for the moment, she was left alone. The police were gone. Maya’s finger knocked on the lectern, and without thinking about it she called back what she had been reading. Michel was right; she felt tough and hard, diving back into this stuff. Theories to explain the death of John Boone. John had been killed, and now she was being checked by police while traveling over Mars in an ordinary train. It was hard not to feel that there was some sort of cause and effect there, that if John had lived, it wouldn’t be this way.
All the principal figures in Nicosia that night have been accused of being behind the assassination: Russell and Hoyle on the basis of sharp disagreements in Marsfirst policy; Toitovna on the basis of a lovers’ quarrel; and the various ethnic or national groups in town on the basis of political quarrels either real or imaginary. But certainly the most suspicion over the years has fallen on the figure of Frank Chalmers. Though he was observed to be with Toitovna at the time of the attack (which in some theories gets Toitovna called an accessory or coconspirator), his relationship with the Egyptians and Saudis in Nicosia that night, and his long-standing conflict with Boone, make it inevitable that he is often identified as the ultimate cause of Boone’s murder. Few if any deny that Selim el-Hayil was the leader of the three Arabs who eventually confessed before their suicide/murders. But this only adds to suspicion of Chalmers, as he was a known acquaintance of el-Hayil’s. Samizdat and one-read documents are reputed to tell the story that “the stowaway” was in Nicosia, and spotted Chalmers and el-Hayil in conversation that night. As “the stowaway” is a myth mechanism by which people convey the anonymous perceptions of the common Martian, it is quite possible that such a tale expresses the observations of people who did not want to be identified as witnesses.
Maya clicked to the end.
El-Hayil was in the late stages of a fatal paroxysm when he broke into the hotel occupied by the Egyptians and confessed to the murder of Boone, asserting that he had been the leader, but had been aided by Rashid Abou and Buland Besseisso of the Ahad wing of the Moslem Brotherhood. The bodies of Abou and Besseisso were found later that afternoon in a room in the medina, poisoned by coagulants that appeared to be self-administered or given to each other. The actual murderers of Boone were dead. Why they acted, and with whom they may have acted, will never be known. Not the first time such a situation has existed, and not the last; for we hide as much as we seek.
Scrolling through footnotes, Maya was struck again by what a Topic this was, debated by historians and scholars and conspiracy nuts of every persuasion. With a shudder of revulsion she tapped the lectern off, and faced the double window and shut her eyes hard, trying to restore the Frank she had known, and the Boone. For years she had scarcely ever thought of John, the pain was so great; and in a different way she hadn’t wanted to think of Frank either. Now she wanted them back. The pain had become the ghost of pain, and she needed to have them back, for her own life’s sake. She needed to know.
The “mythical” stowaway . . . She ground her teeth, feeling the weightless hallucinatory fear of that first sight of him, his brown face distorted and big-eyed through the glass . . . did he know anything? Had he really been in Nicosia? Desmond Hawkins, the stowaway, the Coyote— he was a strange man. Maya had her own particular relationship with him, but she doubted whether he would tell her much about that night.
What is it? she had asked Frank when they heard the shouting.
A hard shrug, a look away. Something done on the spur of the moment. Where had she heard that before? He had looked away as he said it, as if he could not bear her gaze. As if he had somehow said too much.
• • •
The mountain ranges ringing the Hellas Basin were widest in the western crescent called the Hellespontus Montes, the range on Mars most reminiscent of Terran mountains. To the north, where the piste from Sabishii and Burroughs crossed into the basin, the range was narrower and lower, not so much a matter of mountainous terrain as of an uneven drop to the basin floor, the land seemingly shoved to the north in low concentric waves. The piste threaded its way down this hilly slope, and often it had to switch-back down long ramps cut into the sides of the rock waves, each new one lower than the last. The train slowed greatly for the turns, and for many minutes at a time Maya could look out her window either straight at the bare basalt of the wave they were descending, or out over a big expanse of northwest Hellas, still three thousand meters below them: a wide flat plain, ochre and olive and khaki in the foreground, then, out on the horizon, a dirty jumble of white, winking like a broken mirror. That was the glacier over Low Point, still mostly frozen, but thawing more each year, with melt ponds on its surface, and deeper pods of water far below— pods which teemed with life, and occasionally broke onto the surface of the ice, or even the adjacent land— for this lobe of ice was growing fast. They were pumping water out of aquifers below the surrounding mountains onto the basin floor. The deep depression in the northwest part of the basin, where Low Point and the mohole had been, was the center of this new sea, which was over a thousand kilometers long, and at its widest, over Low Point, three hundred kilometers across. And situated in the lowest point on Mars. A situation rich with promise, as Maya had been maintaining from the very moment they had landed.