A very faint moiré pattern of light appeared in the dark disc, unlike anything ever seen in any natural eclipse. Everyone on the daylight side of Mars gasped, squinted as they looked up. And then, as when one tugs open Venetian blinds, the sun came back all at once.
Blinding light!
And now more blinding than ever, as the sun was noticeably brighter than it had been before the strange eclipse had begun. Now they walked under an augmented sun, the disc appearing about the same size as it did from Earth, the light some twenty percent greater than before—noticeably brighter, warmer on the back of the neck—the red expanse of the plains more brilliantly lit. As if floodlights had suddenly been turned on, and all of them were now walking a great stage.
A few months after that a third mirror, much smaller than the soletta, spun down into the highest reaches of the Martian atmosphere. It was another lens made of circular slats, and looked like a silver UFO. It caught some of the light pouring down from the soletta, and focused it still further, into points on the surface of the planet that were less than a kilometre across. And it flew like a glider over the world, holding that concentrated beam of light in focus, until little suns seemed to bloom right there on the land, and the rock itself melted, turning from solid to liquid. And then to fire.
The underground wasn’t big enough for Sax Russell. He wanted to get back to work. He could have moved into the demi-monde, perhaps taken a teaching position at the new university in Sabishii, which ran outside the net and covered many of his old colleagues, and provided an education for many of the children of the underground. But on reflection he decided he didn’t want to teach, or remain on the periphery—he wanted to return to terraforming, to the heart of the project if possible, or as close as he could get to it. And that meant the surface world. Recently the Transitional Authority had formed a committee to co-ordinate all the work on terraforming, and a Subarashii-led team had got the old synthesis job that Sax had once held. This was unfortunate, as Sax didn’t speak Japanese. But the lead in the biological part of the effort had been given to the Swiss, and was being run by a Swiss collective of biotech companies called Biotique, with main offices in Geneva and Burroughs, and close ties with the transnational Praxis.
So the first task was to insinuate himself into Biotique under a false name, and get himself assigned to Burroughs. Desmond took charge of this operation, writing a computer persona for Sax similar to the one he had given to Spencer years before, when Spencer had moved to Echus Overlook. Spencer’s persona, and some extensive cosmetic surgery, had enabled him to work successfully in the materials labs in Echus Overlook, and then later in Kasei Vallis, the very heart of transnat security. So Sax had faith in Desmond’s system. The new persona listed Sax’s physical ID data—genome, retina, voice, and finger prints—all slightly altered, so that they still almost fit Sax himself, while escaping notice in any comparative matching searches in the nets. These data were given a new name with a full Terran background, credit rating, and immigration record, and a viral subtext to attempt to overwhelm any competing ID for the physical data, and the whole package was sent off to the Swiss passport office, which had been issuing passports to these arrivals without comment. And in the balkanised world of the transnat nets, that seemed to be doing the job. “Oh yeah, that part works no problem,” Desmond said. “But you First Hundred are all movie stars. You need a new face too.”
Sax was agreeable. He saw the need, and his face had never meant anything to him. And these days the face in the mirror didn’t much resemble what he thought he looked like anyway. So he got Vlad to do the work on him, emphasising the potential usefulness of his presence in Burroughs. Vlad had become one of the leading theoreticians of the resistance to the Transitional Authority, and he was quick to see Sax’s point. “Most of us should just live in the demi-monde,” he said, “but a few people hidden in Burroughs would be a good thing. So I might as well practise my cosmetic surgery on a no-lose situation like yours.”
“A no-lose situation!” Sax said. “And verbal contracts are binding. I expect to come out handsomer.”
And for a wonder he did, although it was impossible to tell until the spectacular bruising went away. They capped his teeth, puffed his thin lower lip, and gave his button nose a prominent bridge, and a little bit of a bend. They thinned his cheeks and gave him more of a chin. They even cut some muscles in his eyelids so that he didn’t blink so often. When the bruises went away he looked like a real movie star, as Desmond said. Like an ex-jockey, Nadia said. Or an ex-dance instructor, Maya said, who had faithfully attended Alcoholics Anonymous for many years. Sax, who had never liked the effects of alcohol, waved her off.
Desmond took photos of him and put them in the new persona, then inserted this construct successfully into the Biotique files, along with a transfer order from San Francisco to Burroughs. The persona appeared in the Swiss passport listings a week later, and Desmond chuckled when he saw it. “Look at that,” he said, pointing at Sax’s new name. “Stephen Lindholm, Swiss citizen! Those folks are covering for us, there’s no doubt about it. I’ll bet you anything they put a stopper on the persona, and checked your genome with old print records, and even with my alterations I bet they figured out who you really are.”
“Are you sure?”
“No. They aren’t saying, are they? But I’m pretty sure.”
“Is it a good thing?”
“In theory, no. But in practice, if someone is on to you, it’s nice to see them behaving as a friend. And the Swiss are good friends to have. This is the fifth time they’ve issued a passport to one of my personas. I even have one myself, and I doubt they were able to find out who I really am, because I was never ID’d like you folks in the First Hundred. Interesting, don’t you think?”
“Indeed.”
“They are interesting people. They have their own plans, and I don’t know what they are, but I like the look of them. I think they’ve made a decision to cover for us. Maybe they just want to know where we are. We’ll never know for sure, because the Swiss dearly love their secrets. But it doesn’t matter why when you’ve got the how.”
Sax winced at the sentiment, but was happy to think that he would be safe under Swiss patronage. They were his kind of people—rational, cautious, methodical.
A few days before he was going to fly with Peter north to Burroughs, he took a walk around Gamete’s lake, something he had rarely done in his years there. The lake was certainly a neat bit of work. Hiroko was a fine systems designer. When she and her team had disappeared from Underhill so long ago, Sax had been quite mystified; he hadn’t seen the point, and had worried that they would begin to fight the terraforming somehow. When he had managed to coax a response out of Hiroko on the net, he had been partly reassured; she seemed sympathetic to the basic goal of terraforming, and indeed her own concept of viriditas seemed just another version of the same idea. But Hiroko appeared to enjoy being cryptic, which was very unscientific of her; and during her years of hiding she had indulged herself to the point of information damage. Even in person she was none too easy to understand, and it was only after some years of coexistence that Sax had become confident that she too desired a Martian biosphere that would support humans. That was all the agreement he asked for. And he could not think of a better single ally to have in that particular project, unless it was the chairperson of this new Transitional Authority committee. And probably the chair was an ally too. There were not too many opposed, in fact.
But there on the beach sat one, as gaunt as a heron. Ann Clayborne. Sax hesitated, but she had already seen him. And so he walked on, until he stood by her side. She glanced up at him, and then stared out again at the white lake. “You really look different,” she said.
“Yes.” He could still feel the sore spots in his face and mouth, though the bruises had cleared up. It felt a bit like wearing a mask, and suddenly