Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [187]
Hiroko wrinkled her nose. “They’re crowns. A composite rather than true stone. A silly fashion.”
“And a kind of badge. And there are people out on the surface who have picked it up, people in contact with your kids, helping them with the sabotages. I almost got killed by some of them in Senzeni Na. My guide there had a stone eyetooth, although it took me a long time to remember where it was I had seen it. I assume it was an accident that we were down there at the time the truck fell. I hadn’t given them any warning I was going to visit, so I assume the whole thing was planned before I got there, and they didn’t know to stop it. Okakura probably went down the hole thinking he was going to get squished like a bug for the cause.”
After another pause Hiroko said, “Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. It was confusing for a long time, because it’s not just them— there’s more than one thing going on. But when I remembered where I had seen that first stone tooth I looked into it, and I found out that a whole shipment of dental equipment from Earth arrived empty, back in 2044. A whole freighter ripped off. It made me think I was onto something. And then, the sabotages kept happening in places and at times when no one who was in the net could possibly have done it. Like that time I visited Mary at the Margaritifer aquifer, and the well housing was blown up. It was clear it hadn’t been done by anyone stationed there, it just wasn’t possible. But that’s a really isolated station, and there was no one else anywhere nearby at the time. So it had to be someone outside the net. And so I thought of you.”
He shrugged apologetically. “When you check it out, you find that about half the sabotages simply couldn’t have been done by anyone in the net. And in the other half, someone with a stone tooth was usually spotted in the area. It’s becoming a pretty widespread fashion now, but still. I figured it was you, and I had my AI do an analysis which showed that about three-quarters of the cases have happened in the lower southern hemisphere, that or else inside a three-thousand-kilometer circle with the chaotic terrain at the east end of Marineris as its center point. That’s a circle that holds a lot of settlements, but even allowing for that it seemed to me the chaos was a logical place for the saboteurs to hide. And we’ve all figured for years that that was where you folks went when you left Underhill.”
Hiroko’s face revealed nothing. Finally she said, “I will look into this.”
“Good.”
Sax said, “John, you said there was more than one thing going on?”
John nodded. “It hasn’t just been sabotage, you see. Someone’s been trying to kill me.”
Sax blinked, and the rest of them looked shocked. “At first I thought it was the saboteurs,” John said, “trying to stop my investigation. It made sense, and the first incident really was an act of sabotage, so it was easy to get confused. But now I’m pretty sure that that time was a mistake. The saboteurs aren’t interested in killing me— they could have done it and they didn’t. One night a group of them stopped me, including your son Kasei, Hiroko, and the coyote, who I take it is the same as the stowaway that you were hiding on the Ares—”
This caused an uproar— apparently a fair number of them had had suspicions about this stowaway, and Maya rose to her feet and pointed a dramatic finger at Hiroko, crying out. John shouted them all down and forged on: “Their visit— their visit!— that was the best proof of my theory about the sabotages, because I managed to get a few skin cells off one of them, and I was able to get his DNA read and compared with some other samples found at some of the sabotage sites, and this person had been there. So those were the saboteurs, but they weren’t trying to kill me, obviously. But one night at Hellas Low Point I was knocked down, and my walker cut open.”
He nodded at his friends’ exclamations. “That was the first intentional attack on me, and it came pretty soon after I went up to Pavonis, and talked to Phyllis and a bunch of transnational types about internationalizing