Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [238]
She followed Spencer through the garden and into the building, checked in with the concierge right after he did, got her key, and went to the apartment that had been assigned to her. The whole building belonged to Praxis, and some apartments functioned as safe houses, including hers, and no doubt Spencer’s. They got in the elevator together and went to the third floor, not speaking. Maya’s apartment was four doors down from Spencer’s. She went inside. Two spacious rooms, one with a kitchen nook; a bathroom, an empty balcony. The view from the kitchen window overlooked the balcony, and the distant ice.
She put her bag on the bed and went back out, down to the market to buy dinner. She bought from vendors with carts and umbrellas, and sat on a bench placed on the grass bordering the corniche, eating souvlakia and drinking from a little bottle of retsina, watching the evening crowd make their leisurely promenade up and down the corniche. The closest edge of the ice sea looked to be about forty kilometers away, and now all but the easternmost part of the ice was in the shadow of the Hellespontus, a dusky blue shading in the east to alpenglow pink.
Spencer sat down beside her on the bench. “Nice view,” he remarked.
She nodded and continued eating. She offered him the bottle of retsina, and he said, “No thank you,” holding up a half-eaten tamale. She nodded and swallowed.
“What are you working on?” she asked when she was done.
“Parts for Sax. Bioceramics, among other things.”
“For Biotique?”
“For a sister company. She Makes Seashells.”
“What?”
“It’s the name of the company. Another Praxis division.”
“Speaking of Praxis . . .” She glanced at him.
“Yes. Sax wants these parts pretty bad.”
“For weapons?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “Can you keep him on a leash for a while?”
“I can try.”
They watched the sunlight drain out of the sky, flowing westward like a liquid. Behind them lights flicked on in the trees over the market, and the air began to chill. Maya felt grateful that there was an old friend sitting beside her, in comfortable silence. Spencer’s behavior toward her made a telling contrast to Sax; in his friendliness was his apology for his recriminations in the car after Kasei Vallis, and his forgiveness for what she had done to Phyllis. She appreciated it. And in any case he was one of the primal family, and it was nice to have that during yet another move. A new start, a new city, a new life— how many was it now?
“Did you know Frank very well?” she said.
“Not really. Not like you and John knew him.”
“Do you think . . . do you think he could have been involved in John’s murder?”
Spencer continued to look out at the blue ice on the black horizon. Finally he took the retsina bottle from the bench beside her, drank. He looked at her. “Does it matter anymore?”
3
She had spent many of the early years working in the Hellas Basin, convinced as she had been that its low elevation was going to make it an obvious site for settlement. Now the land just above the—1-kilometer contour was being settled in places all around the basin, places she had been among the first to explore. She had her old notes on them in her AI, and now, as Ludmilla Novosibirskaya, she got to put them to use.
Her job was in the administration of the hydrological company that was flooding the basin. The team was part of a conglomerate of organizations developing the basin, among them the Black Sea Economic Group’s oil companies, the Russian company that had tried to resuscitate the Caspian and Aral seas, and her company, Deep Waters, which was Praxis-owned. Maya’s job involved coordinating the many hydrological operations