Perhaps half an hour passed, with everyone on the corniche standing still and watching, in a general silence that only began to end when the flood was frozen, and the twilight ended. Then there was a sudden return of human voices, and electric music from a café two down. A peal of laughter. Maya went to the bar and ordered champagne for the table, feeling her high spirits sizzle. For once her mood was in tune with events, and she was ready to celebrate the bizarre sight of their own powers unleashed, lying out there on the landscape for their inspection. She offered a toast to the café at large:
“To the Hellas Sea, and all the sailors who will sail it, dodging icebergs and storms to reach the far shore!”
Everyone cheered, and people all up and down the corniche picked it up and cheered as well, a wild moment. The gypsy band struck up a tango version of a sea chantey, and Maya felt the small smile shifting the stiff skin of her cheeks for the entire rest of that evening. Even a long discussion of the possibility of another surge washing up and over Odessa’s seawall could not take that smile off her face. Down at the office they had calculated the possibilities very finely indeed, and any slopover, as they called it, was unlikely or even impossible. Odessa would be all right.
• • •
But news kept flooding in from afar, threatening to overwhelm them in its own way. On Earth the wars in Nigeria and Azania had caused bitter worldwide economic conflict between Armscor and Subarashii. Christian, Muslim, and Hindu fundamentalists were all making a vice of necessity and declaring the longevity treatment the work of Satan; great numbers of the untreated were joining these movements, taking over local governments and making direct, human-wave assaults on the metanational operations within their reach. Meanwhile all the big metanationals were trying to resuscitate the UN, and put it forth as an alternative to the World Court; and many of the biggest metanat clients, and now the Group of Eleven, were going along with it. Michel considered this a victory, as it again showed fear of the World Court. And any strengthening of an international body like the UN, he said, was better than none. But now there were two competing arbitration systems erected, one controlled by the metanats, which made it easier to avoid the one they didn’t like.
And on Mars things were little better. The UNTA police were roving in the south, unhindered except by occasional unexplained explosions among their robot vehicles, and Prometheus was the latest hidden sanctuary to have been discovered and shut down. Of all the big sanctuaries only Vishniac remained hidden, and they had gone dormant in an effort to stay that way. The south polar region was no longer part of the underground.
In this context it was no surprise to see how frightened the people who came to the meetings sometimes were. It took courage to join an underground that was visibly shrinking, like Minus One Island. People were driven to it by anger, Maya supposed, and indignation and hope. But they were frightened as well. There was no assurance that this move would do any good.
And it would be so easy to plant a spy among these newcomers. Maya found it hard to trust them, sometimes. Could all of them be what they claimed to be? It was impossible to be sure of that, impossible. One night at a meeting with a lot of newcomers there was a young man in the front with a look she didn’t like, and after the meeting, which was uninspired, she had gone with Spencer’s friends right back to the apartment, and told Michel about it. “Don’t worry,” he said.
“What do you mean, don’t worry.”
He shrugged. “The members keep track of each other. They try to make sure they’re all known to each other. And Spencer’s team is armed.”
“You never told me that.”
“I thought you knew.”
“Come on. Don’t treat me as if I was stupid.”
“I don’t, Maya. Anyway, it’s all we can do, unless we hide entirely.”
“I’m not proposing to do that! What do you think I am, a coward?”“Putaine!” he roared. “Pourquoi ce ça? Pourquoi?”
A sour expression crossed his face, and he said something in French. Then he took a deep breath and shouted at her in French, one of his curses. But she could see that this was a deliberate decision on his part— that he had decided the fights were good for her, and cathartic for him, so that they could be pursued, when inevitable, as a kind of therapeutic method— and this of course was intolerable. An act, a manipulation of her— without another thought she took a step into the kitchen area and picked up a copper pot and heaved it at him, and he was so surprised that he barely managed to knock it away.
“I won’t be patronized,” she told him, satisfied that he was genuinely angry now, but still blazing herself. “You damned head-shrinker, if you weren’t so bad at your job the whole First Hundred wouldn’t have gone crazy and this world wouldn’t be so fucked up. It’s all your fault.” And she slammed out the door and went down to the café to brood over the awfulness of having a shrink as a partner, also over her own ugly behavior, so quick to leap out of her control and attack him. He did not come down and join her that time, though she sat around till closing.