He stood, and waved a hand outward; it was nearing sunset, and the enormous curved plate of the planet was dappled with an infinite texture of shadows. “Hiroko, can I have a word with you in private? Just for a second. We can go down into the tent below here. I just have a couple questions, and then we can come right back up.”
The others stared at them curiously. Under that gaze Hiroko finally bowed, and walked ahead of John to the tube down to the next tent.
They stood at one tip of that tent’s crescent, under the gazes of their friends above, and the occasional observer below. The tent was mostly empty; people were respecting the first hundred’s privacy by leaving a gap.
“You have suggestions for how I can identify the saboteurs?” Hiroko said.
“You might start with the boy named Kasei,” John said. “The one that is a mix of you and me.”
She would not meet his eye.
John leaned toward her, getting angry. “I presume there’s kids from every man in the first hundred?”
Hiroko tilted her head at him, and shrugged very slightly. “We took from the samples everyone gave. The mothers are all the women in the group, the fathers all the men.”
“What gave you the right to do all these things without our permission?” John asked. “To make our children without asking us – to run away and hide in the first place – why? Why?”
Hiroko returned his gaze calmly. “We have a vision of what life on Mars can be. We could see it wasn’t going to go that way. We have been proved right by what has happened since. So we thought we would establish our own life—”
“But don’t you see how selfish that is? We all had a vision, we all wanted it to be different, and we’ve been working as hard as we can for it, and all that time you’ve been gone, off creating a little pocket world for your little group! I mean we could have used your help! I wanted to talk to you so often! Here we have a kid between us, a mix of you and me, and you haven’t talked to me in twenty years!”
“We didn’t mean to be selfish,” Hiroko said slowly. “We wanted to try it, to show by experiment how we can live here. Someone has to show what you mean when you talk about a different life, John Boone. Someone has to live the life.”
“But if you do it in secret then no one can see it!”
“We never planned to stay secret forever. The situation has gotten bad, and so we’ve stayed away. But here we are now, after all. And when we are needed, when we can help, we will appear again.”
“You’re needed every day!” John said flatly. “That’s how social life works. You’ve made a mistake, Hiroko. Because while you’ve been hiding, the chances for Mars remaining its own place have gone way down, and a lot of people have been working to speed that disappearance, including some of the first hundred. And what have you done to stop them?”
Hiroko said nothing. John went on: “I suppose you’ve been helping Sax a little in secret. I saw one of your notes to him. But that’s another thing I object to – helping out some of us and yet not others.”
“We all do that,” Hiroko said, but she looked uncomfortable.
“Have you had the gerontological treatments in your colony?”
“Yes.”
“And you got the process from Sax?”
“Yes.”
“Do these kids of yours know their parentage?”
“Yes.”
John shook his head, exasperated and more. “I just can’t believe you would do these things!”
“We do not ask for your belief.”
“Obviously not. But aren’t you the least bit concerned about stealing our genes and making kids by us without our knowledge or consent? About bringing them up without giving us any part in their upbringing, any part in their childhood?”
She shrugged. “You can have your own kids if you want. As for these, well. Were any of you interested in having children twenty years ago? No. The subject never came up.”
“We were too old!”
“We were not too old. We chose not to think of it. Most ignorance is by choice, you know, and so ignorance is very telling about what really matters to people. You did not want children, and so you did not know about late birth. But we did, and so we learned the techniques. And when you meet the results, I think you will see it was a good idea. I think you will thank us. What have you lost, after all? These children are ours. But they have a genetic link to you, and from now on they will exist for you, as an unexpected gift, say. As a quite extraordinary gift.” Her Mona Lisa smile appeared and disappeared.
The concept of the gift, again. John paused to think about it. “Well,” he finally said. “We’ll be talking about that for a long time, I suspect.”
Twilight had turned the atmosphere below them into a dark purple band, running like a velvet border around the black star-studded bowl which had appeared over their heads. In the tents below they were singing, led by the Sufis: “Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh; Harmakhis, Mangala, Nirgala, Aquakuh,” and around again, time after time, adding grace notes that were other names for Mars, and encouraging the bands already there to add instrumental accompaniments of all kinds, until every tent was filled with this song, all of them singing together. The Sufis then began their whirling, and little knots of dancers swirled all through the crowds.
“Will you at least stay in contact with me now?” John said intently to Hiroko. “Will you give me that?”
“Yes.”
They returned to the upper tent and the group went down together into the general party and joined the celebration. John made his way slowly to the Sufis, and tried the spins he had learned from them on their mesa, and people cheered and caught him when he spun out of control into the spectators. After one fall he was helped to his feet by the thin-faced man with dreadlocks who had led the midnight visit to his rover. “Coyote!” John cried.
“It’s me,” the man said, and his voice caused a ripple of electricity down John’s spine. “But no reason for alarm.”
He offered John a flask; after a moment’s hesitation John took it and drank. Fortune favors the bold, he thought. Tequila, apparently. “You’re Coyote!” he shouted over the music of the magnesium drum band.
The man grinned widely and nodded once, took the flask back and drank.
“Is Kasei with you?”
“No. He doesn’t like this meteor.” And then with a friendly slap to the arm the man moved off into the swirling crowd. He looked over his shoulder and shouted, “Have fun!”
John watched him disappear among the faces in the crowd, feeling the tequila burn in his stomach. The Sufis, Hiroko, now Coyote; the gathering was blessed. He saw Maya and hurried over to her and threw an arm over her shoulder, and they walked through the tents and the connecting tunnels, and people toasted them as they passed. The semi-rigid tent floors were gently bouncing up and down.
The countdown reached two minutes, and many people ascended to the upper tents, and then pressed against the clear walls of the south-facing arcs. The ice asteroid would probably burn up in a single orbit, its injection trajectory was so steep; an object a quarter the size of Phobos burned to steam and then, as it got hotter, to oxygen and hydrogen molecules; and all in a matter of minutes. No one could be sure what it would look like.
So they stood there, some of them still singing the chords of the name round. And then a final countdown was picked up by more and more of them, until they were all into the last ten, shouting out the reversed sequence of numbers at the top of their lungs, in the astronaut’s