Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [301]
Samantha died. Then Boris. Oh there were two or three years between their deaths, but still, after the long decades during which none of them had died, this frequency pattern felt very fast. So they got through those funerals as best they could, and meanwhile everything was getting darker, as on the corniche when a black squall approached from over the Hellespontus— Terran nations still sending up unauthorized people and landing them, the UN still threatening, China and Indonesia suddenly at each other’s throats, Red ecoteurs blowing things up more and more indiscriminately, recklessly, killing people. And then Michel came up the stairs, heavy with grief; “Yeli died.”
“What? No— oh no.”
“Some kind of heart arrhythmia.”
“Oh my God.”
Maya hadn’t seen Yeli for decades, but to lose another one of the remaining First Hundred— lose the possibility of ever seeing again Yeli’s shy smile . . . no. She didn’t hear the rest of what Michel said, not so much from grief as from distraction. Or grief for herself.
“This is going to happen more and more often, isn’t it?” she said at last, when she noticed Michel staring at her.
He sighed. “Maybe.”
Again most of the surviving members of the First Hundred came to Odessa for the memorial service, organized by Michel. Maya learned a lot about Yeli in those calls, mostly from Nadia. He had left Underhill and moved to Lasswitz early on, he had helped to build the domed town, and had become an expert in aquifer hydrology. In ‘61 he had wandered with Nadia, trying to repair structures and stay out of trouble, but in Cairo, where Maya had seen him briefly, he had gotten separated from the others, and missed the escape down Marineris. At the time they had assumed he had been killed like Sasha, but in fact he had survived, as most of the people in Cairo had, and after the revolt he had moved down to Sabishii and worked again in aquifers, linking up with the underground and helping to make Sabishii into the capital of the demimonde. He had lived for a while with Mary Dunkel, and when Sabishii was closed down by UNTA, he and Mary had come through Odessa; they had been there for the m-50 celebration, which was the last time Maya remembered seeing him, all the Russians in the group offering up the old drinking toasts. Then he and Mary broke up, Mary said, and he moved to Senzeni Na and became one of the leaders there in the second revolution. When Senzeni Na joined Nicosia and Sheffield and Cairo in the east Tharsis alliance, he had gone up to help in the Sheffield situation; after that he had returned to Senzeni Na, served on its first independent town council, and slowly become one of the grandfathers of the community there, just like so many others of the First Hundred had elsewhere. He had married a Nigerian nisei, they had had a boy; he had been back to Moscow twice, and was a popular commentator on Russian vids. Right before his death he had been working on the Argyre Basin project with Peter, siphoning off some big aquifers under the Charitum Montes without disturbing the surface. A great-grandaughter living out on Callisto was pregnant. But then one day during a picnic on the Senzeni Na mohole mound he had collapsed, and they hadn’t been able to revive him.
So they were down to the First Eighteen. Although Sax, of all people, made a provisional inclusion of seven more, for the possibility that Hiroko’s band was still alive somewhere. Maya regarded this as a fantasy, obvious wishful thinking, but on the other hand Sax was not prone to wishful thinking, so maybe there was something to it. Only eighteen for certain, however, and the youngest of them, Mary (unless