There were five of them, all men. Their walkers were frayed, dirty, patched with material that had not been made for walkers. Their helmets were without identification, stripped of all paint. As they took off the helmets he saw that one of the men was Asian, and young; he looked about eighteen. The youth went forward and sat in the driver’s seat, leaned over the steering wheel to look closer at the instrument array. Another got off his helmet; a short brown-skinned man, with a thin face and long dreadlocks. He sat on the padded bench across from John’s bed, and waited for the other three men to get their helmets off too. When they did they crouched on their haunches, watching John attentively. He had never seen any of them before.
The thin-faced man said, “We want you to slow the rate of immigration.” He was the one who had spoken outside; now his accent sounded Caribbean. He spoke in a low voice, almost in a whisper, and John found it very difficult not to emulate him.
“Or stop it,” the young man in the driver’s seat said.
“Shut up, Kasei.” The thin-faced man never took his gaze from John’s face. “There are too many people coming up. You know that. They’re not Martian, and they don’t care what happens here. They’re going to overwhelm us, they’re going to overwhelm you. You know that. You’re trying to turn them into Martians, we know, but they’re coming in a lot faster than you can work. The only thing that will work is slowing down the influx.”
“Or stopping it.”
The man rolled his eyes, appealed with a grimace for John’s understanding. The youth was young, his look said.
“I don’t have any say— ” John began, but the man cut him off:
“You can advocate it. You’re a power, and you’re on our side.”
“Are you from Hiroko?”
The youth snicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. The thin-faced man said nothing. Four faces stared at John; the other looked resolutely out the window.
John said, “Have you been sabotaging the moholes?”
“We want you to stop the immigration.”
“I want you to stop the sabotage. It’s just bringing more people here. Police.”
The man eyed him. “What makes you think we can contact the saboteurs?”
“Find them. Break in on them at night.”
The man smiled. “Out of sight, out of mind.”
“Not necessarily.”
They had to be with Hiroko. Occam’s razor. There couldn’t be more than one hidden group. Or maybe there could. John felt light-headed, and wondered if they were doctoring the air. Releasing aerosol drugs. He definitely felt strange, it was all surreal, dreamy; the wind buffeted the rover, sent a sudden burst of aeolian music coursing by, a weird drawn-out hoot. His thoughts were slow and ponderous, and he felt the edge of a yawn. That’s it, he thought. I’m still trying to wake from a dream.
“Why do you hide?” he heard himself say.
“We’re building Mars. Just like you. We’re on your side.”
“You ought to help, then.” He tried to think. “What about the space elevator?”
“We don’t care about it.” The kid snicked. “That isn’t what matters. It’s people that matter.”
“The elevator will bring a lot more people.”
The man considered that. “Slow the immigration, and it can’t even be built.”
Another long silence, punctuated by the wind’s eerie commentary. Can’t even be built? Did they think people would build it? Or maybe they meant the money.
“I’ll look into it,” John said. The kid turned and stared at him, and John raised a hand to forestall him. “I’ll do what I can.” His hand stood before him, a huge pink thing. “That’s all I can say. If I promised results, it would be lying. I know what you mean. I’ll do what I can.” He thought about it more, with difficulty. “You ought to be out in the open, helping us. We need more help.”
“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”
“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”
The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.
The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”
One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass: an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.
When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”
When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm; and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?
But if they had been tracking him …
Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR; so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map, and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.
He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails; a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little autoclave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe, John wasn’t sure, Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.
He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out for a walk in the cleartunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east.
“I think I met the Coyote,” John said.
“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”
“No.”
Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums – about two percent, to be precise – and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was non-existent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation