Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [278]
They didn’t answer. They didn’t know what to do any more than she did. Suddenly the whole independence project again seemed a fantasy, a dream that was just as impossible now as it had been when Arkady had espoused it, Arkady who had been so cheerful and so wrong. They would never be free of Earth, never. They were helpless before it.
“I want to talk to Sax first,” Spencer said.
“And Coyote,” Michel said. “I want to ask him more about what happened in Sabishii.”
“And Nadia,” Maya said, and her throat tightened; Nadia would have been ashamed of her if she had seen her at that meeting, and that hurt. She needed Nadia, the only person on Mars whose judgment she still trusted.
“There’s something odd going on with the atmosphere,” Spencer complained to Michel as they changed trams. “I really want to hear what Sax has to say about it. Oxygen levels are rising faster than I would have expected, especially on north Tharsis. It’s like some really successful bacteria has been distributed without any suicide genes in it. Sax has basically reassembled his old Echus Overlook team, everyone still alive, and they’ve been working at Acheron and Da Vinci on projects they’re not telling us about. It’s like those damn windmill heaters. So I want to talk to him. We have to get together on this, or else—”
“Or else sixty-one!” Maya insisted.
“I know, I know. You’re right about that, Maya, I mean I agree. I hope enough of the rest of us do.”
“We’re going to have to do more than hope.”
Which meant she was going to have to get out there and do it herself. Go fully underground, move from city to city, from safe house to safe house as Nirgal had been doing for years, without a job or a home, meeting with as many of the revolutionary cells as she could, trying to hold them on board. Or at least keep them from popping off too soon. Working on the Hellas Sea project wasn’t going to be possible anymore.
So this life was over. She got off the tram and glanced briefly through the park down the corniche, then turned and walked up to their gate and through the garden, up the stairwell, down the familiar hall, feeling heavy and old and very, very tired. She stuck the right key into the lock without thinking about it, and walked into the apartment and looked at her things, at Michel’s stacks of books, the Kandinsky print over the couch, Spencer’s sketches, the battered coffee table, the battered dining table and chairs, the kitchen nook with everything in its place, including the little face on the cabinet by the sink. How many lifetimes ago had she known that face? All these pieces of furniture would go their ways. She stood in the middle of the room, drained and desolate, grieving for these years that had slipped by almost without noticing; almost a decade of productive work, of real life, now blowing away in this latest gale of history, a paroxysm that she was going to have to try to direct or at least ride out, trying her best to nudge it in ways that would allow them to survive. Damn the world, damn its intrusiveness, its mindless charge, its inexorable roll through the present, wrecking lives as it went. . . . She had liked this apartment and this town and this life, with Michel and Spencer and Diana and all her colleagues at work, all her habits and her music and her small daily pleasures.
She looked glumly at Michel, who stood behind her in the doorway, staring around as if trying to commit the place to memory. A Gallic shrug: “Nostalgia in advance,” he said, trying to smile. He felt it too— he understood— it wasn’t just her mood, this time, but reality itself.
She made an effort and smiled back,