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By Root 378 0

mansions behind the corniche, occupied by the visiting metanat executives. (Everyone in Praxis lived in apartments like theirs, which they had noted with approval.) They had all gotten the treatment, and took that to be normality— they were shocked to hear the way it was being used as an instrument of control back on Earth, but then added that to their list of Terran evils. They were in excellent health, and knew very little about sickness, or crowded health clinics. It was a folk cure among them to go out in a walker and let in a single breath of the ambient air. This was said to kill any ailment you could have. They were big and strong. They had a look in their eye that one night Maya recognized: it was the look on the youthful Frank’s face, in that photo she had seen in her lectern— that idealism, that edge of anger, that knowledge that things were not right, that confidence that they could set them right. The young, she thought. Revolution’s natural constituency.

And there they were, in their small rooms, meeting to argue the issues at hand, looking tired but happy. These were parties as much as anything else, part of their social life. It was important to understand that. And Maya would go to the middle of the room and sit on a tabletop, if possible, and say, “I am Toitovna. I was here since the beginning.”

She would talk about that— about what it had been like in Underhill— working to remember until she became as urgent in her manner as History herself, trying to explain why things on Mars were the way they were. “Look,” she told them, “you can never go back.” Physiological changes had closed Earth to them forever, emigrants and native-born alike, but especially the natives. They were Martian now, no matter what. They needed to be an independent state, sovereign perhaps, semiautonomous at least. Semiautonomy might be enough, given the realities of the two worlds; semiautonomy would justify calling it a free Mars. But in the current state of things they were no more than property, and had no real power over their own lives. Decisions were made for them a hundred million kilometers away. Their home was being chopped up into metal bits and shipped away. It was a waste, it benefited no one except a small metanational elite who were running the two worlds like feudal fiefdoms. No, they needed to be free— and not so that they could cast loose from Earth’s terrible situation, not at all— rather, to be able to exert some real influence over what was happening down there. Otherwise they were only going to be helpless witnesses to catastrophe. And then sucked down into the maelstrom after the first sets of victims. That was intolerable. They had to act.

The communal groups were very receptive to this message, as were the more traditional Marsfirst groups, and the urban Bogdanovists, and even some of the Reds. To all of them, in every meeting, Maya stressed the importance of coordinating their actions. “Revolution is no place for anarchy! If we tried to fill Hellas each on our own we might easily wreck each other’s work, and maybe even overfill the minus one contour, and wreck everything we’ve been working for. It’s the same with this. We need to work together. We didn’t in sixty-one, and that’s why it was such a fiasco. It was interference rather than synergy, you understand? That was stupid. This time we have to work together.”

Tell that to the Reds, the Bogdanovists would say. And Maya would impale them with a look and say, “I’m talking to you right now. You don’t want to hear how I talk to them.” Which might make them laugh, relaxing as they imagined her castigating someone else. That awareness of her as the Black Widow— the evil witch who might curse them, the Medea who might kill them— this was not an unimportant part of her hold on them, and so she let the knives show from time to time. She asked them hard questions, and although usually they were hopelessly naíve, sometimes their answers were really impressive, especially when they were talking about Mars itself. Some of them were collecting tremendous amounts of