Michel looked up from his AI and peered at it, and nodded approvingly. “It’s amazing how much you can read from people’s faces.”
“Frank didn’t think so.”
“He was just afraid of the ability.”
“Hmm,” Maya said. She couldn’t remember. She recalled instead the looks on the faces of the people at that night’s meeting. It was true, they had revealed everything— they had been like masks expressing exactly the sentences their owners had spoken. The metanats are out of control. They’re screwing things up. They’re selfish, they only care about themselves. Metanationalism is a new kind of nationalism, but without any home feeling. It’s money patriotism, a kind of disease. People are suffering, not so much here, but on Earth. And if it doesn’t change it will happen here too. They will infect us.
All said with the look from the photo, that knowing confident righteous blaze. It could change to cynicism, no doubt about it; Frank was the proof of that. It was possible to break that fervor, or lose it, in cynicism which could be so contagious. They would have to act before that happened;not too soon, but not too late. Timing would be everything. But if they timed it right. . . .
• • •
One day at the office, news came in from the Hellespontus. They had discovered a new aquifer, very deep compared to the others, very far away from the basin, and very big. Diana speculated that earlier glacial ages had run west off the Hellespontus range, and come to rest out there, underground— some twelve million cubic meters, more than any other aquifer, raising the amount of located water from 80 percent to 120 percent of the amount needed to fill the basin to the—1-kilometer contour.
It was amazing news, and the whole headquarters group gathered in Maya’s office to discuss it and plot it onto the big maps, the areographers already charting pipeline routes over the mountains, and debating the relative merits of different kinds of pipeline. The Low Point sea, called “the pond” in the office, already supported a robust biotic community based on the Antarctic krill food chain, and there was a spreading melt zone at its bottom, heated by the mohole and the accumulating weight of the many tons of ice pressing down from above. Increased air pressure and ever-warming temperatures meant that there would be more and more surface melting as well; bergs would be slipping and crashing together and breaking up, exposing more surfaces, and warming things with friction and sunlight, until they reached a kind of pack ice, and then brash ice. At that point newly pumped-in water, properly aimed to reinforce the Coriolis forces, would start a counterclockwise current.
On and on they talked about it, getting further and further ahead of the game, until when they went out to celebrate with a big lunch, it was almost a shock to see the corniche standing over the rocky plain of the empty basin floor. But today they would not be deterred by the present. They all had a lot of vodka with lunch, so much so that they gave themselves the rest of the afternoon off.
And so when Maya went back to the apartment, she was in no shape to deal with the sight of Kasei, Jackie, Antar, Art, Dao, Rachel, Emily, Frantz, and several of their friends, all there in her living room. They were passing through on a trip to Sabishii, where they planned to meet with some Dorsa Brevia friends, and enter Burroughs and spend a few months working there. They were perfunctory in their congratulations on the discovery of the new aquifer, all but Art; they weren’t really interested. This and the sudden crowding of her apartment made Maya cross, and it did not help that she was still affected by the vodka, or that Jackie was so effervescent, with her hands all over both proud Antar (named after the unbeaten knight of the pre-Islamic epic, as he had once explained to her) and dour Dao— both of whom stretched under her touch without appearing to mind when she was on the other one, or playing with Frantz. Maya ignored it. Who knew what perversion the ectogenes were capable of, brought up like a litter of cats as they were. And now they were rovers, gypsies, radicals, revolutionaries, whatever— like Nirgal, except not, as he had a profession, and a plan, while this crowd— well, she forced herself to suspend judgment. But she had her doubts.
She talked to Kasei, who was usually much more serious than the younger ectogenes— a gray-haired mature man, who somewhat resembled John in feature but not in expression, his stone eyetooth exposed like a fang as he darkly eyed his daughter’s behavior. Unfortunately this time through he was full of plans for ridding the world of the Kasei Vallis security compound. Obviously he felt that the relocation of Korolyov to his namesake valley had been a kind of personal affront, and the damage done to the complex by their raid to rescue Sax had not been enough to assuage him— indeed, it seemed only to have given him a taste for more. A brooding man, Kasei, with a temper— perhaps that had come from John— though really he was not much like either John or Hiroko, which Maya found endearing. But his plan to destroy Kasei Vallis was a mistake. Apparently he and Coyote had worked up a decryption program that had broken all the lock codes for the Kasei Vallis compound, and now he planned to storm the sentries, shut the occupants of the city into rovers on a locked course for Sheffield, and then blow up all the structures in the valley.