It began to snow. First swirling flakes, then big soft blobs, pouring down on the wind. It was relatively warm out, and the snow was slushy, then sleety, then an ugly mix of hail and wet snow, all falling down in a hard wind. As the storm progressed, the snow became very dirty; apparently it had been pushed up and down in the atmosphere for a long time, collecting fines and dust and smoke particulates, and crystallising more moisture and then flying up on another updraught in the thunderhead to do it again, until what came down was nearly black. Black snow. And then it was a kind of frozen mud that was falling, filling in the holes and gaps between the ventifacts, coating their tops, then dropping off their sides, as the keening wind caused a million little avalanches. Ann staggered aimlessly, pointlessly, until she twisted an ankle and stopped, her breath racking in and out of her, a rock clutched in each cold gloved hand. She understood that the long runout was still running. And mud snow pelted down out of the black air, burying the plain.
But nothing lasts, not even stone, not even despair.
Ann got back to her car, she didn’t know how or why. She drove a little every day, and without consciously intending to, came back to Coyote’s cache. She stayed there for a week, walking over the dunes and mumbling her food.
Then one day: “Ann, di da do?”
She only understood the word Ann. Shocked at the return of her glossolalia, she put both hands to the radio speaker, and tried to talk. Nothing came out but a choking sound.
“Ann, di da do?”
It was a question.
“Ann,” she said, as if vomiting.
Ten minutes later he was in her car, reaching up to give her a hug. “How long have you been here?”
“Not … not long.”
They sat. She collected herself. It was like thinking, it was thinking out loud. Surely she still thought in words.
Coyote talked on, perhaps a bit more slowly than usual, eyeing her closely.
She asked him about the ice-drilling rig.
“Ah. I wondered if you would run across one of those.”
“How many are there?”
“Fifty.”
Coyote saw her expression, and nodded briefly. He was eating voraciously, and it occurred to her that he had arrived at the cache empty. “They’re putting a lot of money into these big projects. The new elevator, these water rigs, nitrogen from Titan … a big mirror out there between us and the sun, to put more light on us. Have you heard of that?”
She tried to collect herself. Fifty. Ah, God …
It made her mad. She had been angry at the planet, for not giving her her release. For frightening her, but not backing it up with action. But this was different, a different kind of anger. And now as she sat watching Coyote eat, thinking about the inundation of Vastitas Borealis, she could feel that anger contracting inside her, like a pre-stellar dustcloud, contracting until it collapsed and ignited. Hot fury—it was painful to feel it. And yet it was the same old thing, anger at the terraforming. That old burnt emotion that had gone nova in the early years, now coalescing and going off again; she didn’t want it, she really didn’t. But damn it, the planet was melting under her feet. Disintegrating. Reduced to mush in some Terran cartel’s mining venture.
Something ought to be done.
And really she had to do something, if only just to fill the hours that she had to fill before some accident had mercy on her. Something to occupy the preposthumous hours. Zombie vengeance—well, why not? Prone to violence, prone to despair …
“Who’s building them?” she asked.
“Mostly Consolidated. There’s factories building them at Mareotis and Bradbury Point.” Coyote wolfed down food for a while more, then eyed her. “You don’t like it.”
“No.”
“Would you like to stop it?”
She didn’t reply.
Coyote seemed to understand. “I don’t mean stop the whole terraforming effort. But there are things that can be done. Blow up the factories.”
“They’ll just rebuild them.”
“You never can tell. It would slow them down. It might buy enough time for something to happen on a more global scale.”
“Reds, you mean.”
“Yes. I think people would call them Reds.”
Ann shook her head. “They don’t need me.”
“No. But maybe you need them, eh? And you’re a hero to them, you know. You would mean more to them than just another body.”
Ann’s mind had gone blank again. Reds—she had never believed in them, never believed that mode of resistance would work. But now—well, even if it wouldn’t work, it might be better than doing nothing. Poke them in the eye with a stick!
And if it did work …
“Let me think about it.”
They talked about other things. Suddenly Ann was hit by a wall of fatigue, which was strange as she had spent so much time doing nothing. But there it was. Talking was exhausting work, she wasn’t used to it. And Coyote was a hard man to talk to.
“You should go to bed,” he said, breaking off his monologue. “You look tired. Your hands—” He helped her up. She lay down on a bed, in her clothes. Coyote pulled a blanket over her. “You’re tired. I wonder if it isn’t time for another longevity treatment for you, old girl.”
“I’m not going to take them any more.”
“No! Well, you surprise me. But sleep, now. Sleep.”
She caravanned with Coyote back south, and in the evenings they ate together, and he told her about the Reds. It was a loose grouping, rather than any rigidly organised movement. Like the underground itself. She knew several of the founders: Ivana, and Gene and Raul from the farm team, who had ended up disagreeing with Hiroko’s areophany and its insistence on viriditas; Kasei and Dao and several of the Zygote ectogenes; a lot of Arkady’s followers, who had come down from Phobos and then clashed with Arkady over the use value of terraforming to the revolution. A good many Bogdanovists, including Steve and Marian, had become Reds in the years since 2061, as had followers of the biologist Schnelling, and some radical Japanese nisei and sansei from Sabishii, and Arabs who wanted Mars to stay Arabian forever, and escaped prisoners from Korolyov, and so on. A bunch of radicals. Not really her type, Ann thought, feeling a residual sensation that her objection to terraforming was a rational scientific thing. Or at least a defensible ethical or aesthetic position. But then the anger burned through her again in a flash, and she shook her head, disgusted at herself. Who was she to judge the ethics of the Reds? At least they had expressed their anger, they had lashed out. Probably they felt better, even if they hadn’t accomplished anything. And maybe they had accomplished something, at least in years past, before the terraforming had entered this new phase of transnat gigantism.
Coyote maintained