Green Mars(231)

One night in the apartment, after a tense visit to Sabishii and the community still hidden in its mound maze, she fell asleep over her lectern, which had been displaying a book about Frank. Then a dream about him woke her. Restlessly she went out to the living room of the apartment and got a drink of water, and went back and began to read the book again.

This one focused on the years between the treaty conference of 2057 and the outbreak of the unrest in 2061. These were the years when Maya had been closest to him, but she remembered them poorly, as if by flashes of lightning— moments of electric intensity, separated by long stretches of pure darkness. And the account in this particular book sparked no feelings of recognition in her at all, despite that fact that she was mentioned fairly frequently in the text. A kind of historical jamais vu.

Coyote was sleeping on the couch, and he groaned in some dream of his own, and woke and looked around to find the source of the light. He padded behind her on the way to the bathroom, looked over her shoulder. “Ah,” he said meaningfully. “They say a lot about him.” And he went down the hall.

When he came back Maya said, “I suppose you know better.”

“I know some things about Frank that they don’t, that’s for sure.”

Maya stared at him. “Don’t tell me. You were in Nicosia too.” Then she remembered reading that, somewhere.

“I was, now you mention it.”

He sat down heavily on his couch, stared at the floor. “I saw Frank that night, throwing bricks through windows. He started that riot single-handed.”

He looked up, met her stare. “He was speaking to Selim el-Hayil in the apex park, about a half hour before John was attacked. You figure it out for yourself.”

Maya clenched her teeth and stared at the lectern, ignoring him.

He stretched out on the couch and began to snore.

It was old news, really. And as Zeyk had made clear, no one would ever untangle that knot, no matter what they had seen or thought they remembered seeing. No one could be sure of anything that far in the past, not even of their own memories, which shifted subtly at every rehearsal. The only memories one could trust were those unbidden eruptions from the depths, the mémoires involuntaires, which were so vivid they had to be true— but often concerned unimportant events. No. Coyote’s was just one more unreliable account among all the rest.

When the words of the text on the screen started registering again, she read on.



Chalmers’s efforts to stop the outbreak of violence in 2061 were unsuccessful because in the end he was simply ignorant of the full extent of the problem. Like most of the rest of the First Hundred, he could never quite imagine the actual population of Mars in the 2050s, which was well over a million; and while he thought that the resistance was led and coordinated by Arkady Bogdanov, because he knew him, he was unaware of the influence of Oskar Schnelling in Korolyov, or of the widespread Red movements such as Free Elysium, or the unnamed disappeareds who left the established settlements by the hundreds. Through ignorance and a failure of the imagination, he addressed only a small fraction of the problem.

Maya pulled back, stretched, looked over at Coyote. Was that really true? She tried to think back into those years, to remember. Frank had been aware, hadn’t he? “Playing with needles when the roots are sick.” Hadn’t Frank said that to her, sometime in that period?

She couldn’t remember. Playing with needles when the roots are sick. The statement hung there, separated from anything else, from any context that could give it meaning. But she had the very strong impression that Frank had been aware that there was a huge unseen pool of resentment and resistance out there; no one had been more aware of it, in fact! How could this writer have missed that! For that matter how could any historian, sitting in a chair and sifting through the records, ever know what they had known, ever capture the way it had felt at the time, the fractured kaleidoscopic nature of the daily crisis? Each moment of the storm they had struggled. . . .

She tried to remember Frank’s face, and there came to her an image of him, hunched over miserably at a café table, a white coffee cup handle spinning under his feet; and she had broken the coffee cup; but why? She couldn’t remember. She clicked forward through the book on the screen, flying through months with every paragraph, the dry analysis utterly divorced from anything like what she could recall. Then a sentence caught her eye, and she read on as if a hand were at her throat, forcing her to:



Ever after their first liaison in Antarctica, Toitovna had a hold over Chalmers that he never broke, no matter how much it damaged his own plans. Thus when he returned from Elysium in the final month before the Unrest broke out, Toitovna met him in Burroughs, and they stayed together for a week, during which it was clear to others they were fighting; Chalmers wanted to stay in Burroughs, where the conflict was at a crisis; Toitovna wanted him to return to Sheffield. One night he showed up in one of the cafés by the canal so angry and distraught that the waiters were afraid, and when Toitovna appeared, they expected him to explode. But he only sat there as she reminded him of every connection they had ever had, every debt owed, all their past together, such as it was; and finally he bowed to her wishes, and returned to Sheffield, where he was unable to control the growing violence in Elysium and Burroughs. And so the revolution came.