Green Mars(267)

She glared at Sax, but he only shrugged.

“Ecopoesis,” he said. “We already have a biosphere. It’s all we need. A beautiful world.”

Outside the broken landscape flashed by in the cool morning light. The slopes of Tyrrhena were tinted khaki by the presence of millions of small patches of grass and moss and lichen, tucked between the rocks. They looked out at it silently. Nadia felt stunned, trying to think about all of it, trying to keep it from all mixing together, blurring like the rust-and-khaki flow outside. . . .

She looked at the people around her, and some key inside her turned. Her eyes were still dry and raw, but she was no longer sleepy. The tautness in her stomach eased, for the first time since the revolt had begun. She breathed freely. She looked at the faces of her friends— Ann still angry at her, Maya still angry at Coyote, all of them beat, dirty, as red-eyed as the little red people, their irises like round chips of semi-precious stone, vivid in their bloodshot settings. She heard herself say, “Arkady would be pleased.”

The others looked surprised. She never talked about him, she realized.

“Simon too,” Ann said.

“And Alex.” “And Sasha.” “And Tatiana—”

“And all our lost ones,” Michel said quickly, before the length of the list grew too great.

“But not Frank,” Maya said. “Frank would be thoroughly pissed off at something.”

They laughed, and Coyote said, “And we have you to carry on the tradition, eh?” And they laughed some more as she shook an angry finger at him.

“And John?” Michel asked, pulling Maya’s arm down, directing the question at her.

Maya freed her arm, kept shaking a finger at Coyote. “John wouldn’t be crying doom and gloom and kissing off Earth as if we could get by without it! John Boone would be ecstatic at this moment!”

“We should remember that,” Michel said quickly. “We should think what he would do.”

Coyote grinned. “He would be running up and down this train getting high. Being high. It would be a party all the way to Odessa. Music and dance and everything.”

They looked at each other.

“Well?” Michel said.

Coyote gestured forward. “It does not sound as if they are actually needing our help.”

“Nevertheless,” Michel said.

And they went forward up the train.