But they were joined at this meeting by Jackie Boone and the rest of her crowd, Antar and the zygotes, who had arrived in Odessa on the circumHellas train, on the run from the UNTA troops in the south, and rabidly angry at the assault on Sabishii, more militant than ever. The disappearance of Hiroko and her inner group had sent the ectogenes over the edge; Hiroko was mother to many of them, after all, and they all seemed in agreement that it was time to come out from cover and start a full-scale rebellion. Not a minute to lose, Jackie told the meeting, if they wanted to rescue the Sabishiians and the hidden colonists.
“I don’t think they got Hiroko’s people,” Michel said. “I think they went underground with Coyote.”
“You wish,” Jackie told him, and Maya felt her upper lip curl.
Michel said, “They would have signaled us if they were truly in trouble.”
Jackie shook her head. “They wouldn’t go into hiding again, now that things are going critical.” Dao and Rachel nodded. “And besides, what about the Sabishiians, and the lockup of Sheffield? And it’s going to happen here too. No, the Transitional Authority is taking over everywhere. We have to act now!”
“The Sabishiians have sued the Transitional Authority,” Michel said, “and they’re all still in Sabishii, walking around.”
Jackie just look disgusted, as if Michel were a fool, a weak over-optimistic frightened fool. Maya’s pulse jumped, and she could feel her teeth pressing together.
“We can’t act now,” she said sharply. “We’re not ready.”
Jackie glared at her. “We’ll never be ready according to you! We’ll wait until they’ve got a lock on the whole planet, and then we won’t be able to do anything even if we wanted to. Which is just how you’d like it, I’m sure.”
Maya shot out of her chair. “There is no they anymore. There are four or five metanationals fighting over Mars, just like they’re fighting over Earth. If we stand up in the middle of it we’ll just get cut down in the crossfire. We need to pick our moment, and that has to be when they’ve hurt each other, and we have a real chance to succeed. Otherwise we get the moment imposed on us, and it’s just like sixty-one, it’s just flailing about and chaos and people getting killed!”
“Sixty-one,” Jackie cried, “it’s always sixty-one with you— the perfect excuse for doing nothing! Sabishii and Sheffield are shut down and Burroughs is close, and Hiranyag and Odessa will be next, and the elevator is bringing down police every day and they’ve got hundreds of people killed or imprisoned, like my grandmother who is the real leader of us all, and all you talk about is sixty-one! Sixty-one has made you a coward!”
Maya lunged out and slapped her hard on the side of the head, and Jackie leaped on her and Maya fell back into a table’s edge and the breath whooshed out of her. She was being punched but managed to catch one of Jackie’s wrists, and she bit into the straining forearm as hard as she could, really trying to sever things. Then they were jerked apart and held onto, the room bedlam, everyone shouting including Jackie, who shouted “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch! Murderer!” and Maya heard words grating out of her own throat as well, “Stupid little slut, stupid little slut,” between gasps for air. Her ribs and teeth hurt. People were holding hands over her mouth and Jackie’s too, people were hissing “Sssh, sssh, quiet, they’ll hear us, they’ll report us, the police will come!”
Finally Michel took his hand from Maya’s mouth and she hissed “Stupid little slut” one last time, then sat back in a chair and looked at them all with a glare that caught and stilled at least half of them. Jackie was released and she started to curse in a low voice and Maya snapped, “Shut up!” so viciously that Michel stepped between them again. “Towing all your boys around by the cock and thinking you’re a leader,” Maya snarled in a whisper, “and all without a single thought in your empty head—”
“I won’t listen to this!” Jackie cried, and everyone said “Ssssh!” and she was off, out into the hall. That was a mistake, a retreat, and Maya stood back up and used the time to castigate the rest of them in a tearing whisper for their stupidity— and then, when she had controlled her temper a little, to argue the case for biding their time, the excoriating edge of her anger just under the surface of a rational plea for patience and intention and control, an argument that was essentially unanswerable. All through this peroration everyone in the room was of course staring at her as if she were some bloodied gladiator, the Black Widow indeed, and as her teeth still hurt from sinking them into Jackie’s arm she could scarcely pretend to be the perfect model of intelligent debate; she felt like her mouth must be puffed up, it throbbed so, and she fought a rising sense of humiliation and carried on, cold and passionate and overbearing. The meeting ended in a sullen and mostly unspoken agreement to delay any mass insurrection and continue lying low, and the next thing she knew she was slumped on a tram seat between Michel and Spencer, trying not to cry. They would have to put up Jackie and the rest of her group while they were in Odessa— theirs was the safe house, after all. So it was a situation she wasn’t going to be able to escape. And meanwhile there were police officers standing in front of the town’s physical plant and offices, checking wrists before they let people inside. If she didn’t go to work again they very well might try to track her down to ask why, and if she went to work and got checked, it wasn’t certain that her wrist ID and Swiss passport would pass her. There were rumors that the post-‘61 balkanization of information was beginning to collapse back into some larger integrated systems, which had recovered some prewar data; thus the requirement of new passports. And if she ran into one of those systems, that would be that. Shipped off to the asteroids or to Kasei Vallis, to be tortured and have her mind wrecked like Sax. “Maybe it is time,” she said to Michel and Spencer. “If they lock up all the cities and the pistes, what other choice do we have?”