The suit dragged on for years and satisfied nobody, but it spurred fresh interest in Martian-grown thinkers.
Martian thinker designers — the best Mars had to offer at the time — claimed they could deactivate the evolvons. Mars would be safe from Terrie "eavesdropping." Alice was soon cleansed and redeemed, and that pleased me. The concern faded. It shouldn't have.
One benefit of the scandal was that we heard no more about Mars's threat to Earth's security. Indeed, a good many Terrie pressures on Mars subsided. But the scandal was not the sole reason. Earth for a time seemed content with a few stopgaps.
Cailetet broke from the Council and negotiated directly with Earth. We could draw our own conclusions. Stan, lawbonded and transferred to Jane's BM, did not know what Cailetet had done, or what agreements had been reached — and I would not ask Charles, who ostensibly still worked for Cailetet. My letter to him requesting information still embarrassed me.
Father told me that Triple dollars smelling of Earth were flooding steadily into Cailetet, but not to the Olympians. Funding for the requested QL thinkers had never gone through.
Cailetet continued to refuse Majumdar BM's offer to join the project. Cailetet revealed little, except to say that the Olympians had been working on improved communications; nothing terribly strategic. And they had failed, losing their funding.
My mother died in a pressure failure at Jiddah. Even now, writing that, I shrink; losing a parent is perhaps the most final declaration of lone responsibility. Losing my mother, however, was an uprooting, a tearing of all my connections.
My father's grief, silent and private, consumed him like an inner flame. I could not have predicted this new man who inhabited my father's body. I thought perhaps we would become closer, but that did not happen.
Visiting him was not easy. He saw my mother in me. My visits, those first few months, hurt too much for him to bear. Like most Martians, he refused grief therapy and so did Stan and I. Our pain was tribute to the dead.
I had to make my own plans, find my own life, rebuild in the time left to my youth. I was thirteen Martian years old and could find only the most mundane employment at Majumdar, or work for my father at Ylla, which I did not want to do.
It was time to seek alliances elsewhere.
My vegetable love grew and blossomed in the Martian spring.
The best fossil finds on Mars had been discovered while I traveled to and from Earth. In the Lycus and Cyane Sulci, spread across a broad band north of the old shield volcano Olympus Mons, canyons twist and shove across a thousand kilometers like the imprint of a nest of huge and restless worms. The Mother Ecos once flourished here, surviving for tens of millions of years while the rest of Mars died.
One of the chief diggers was Kiqui Jordan-Erzul. He had an assistant named Ilya Rabinovitch.
I met Ilya at a BM Grange in Rubicon City, below Alba Patera. He had just finished excavating his twelfth mother cyst. I had heard of his work.
The Grange was uniquely Martian. Held at a different station in each district every quarter, Granges combined courting, dancing, lectures and presentations, and BM business in a holiday atmosphere. BMs could swap informal clues about Triple business, negotiate and strike deals without pressure, and prospect for new family members.
Ilya delivered a vivid report on his fossil finds at Cyane Sulci. Memories of my visit with Charles to the sites near Tres Haut Medoc drew me into conversation with Ilya after his talk.
He was small — a centimeter shorter than me — beautifully made, with dark and lively eyes and a quick refreshing smile. Physically, he reminded me of Sean Dickinson, but his personality could not have been more opposite. He loved dancing, and he loved talking publicly and privately about ancient Mars. During a lull between an exhausting series of Patera reels, he sat with me in a tea lounge under a projected night sky and described the Mother Ecos in loving detail, pouring intimate descriptions of the ancient landscape into my sympathetic ear, as if he had lived in those times.
"To dig is to marry Mars," he said, expecting either a blank stare or a move to another part of the lounge. Instead, I asked him to tell me more.
After the dances, we spent a few hours walking alone around a well-head reservoir. With little warning other than a slow approach and a warning smile, he kissed me and told me he had an irrational attraction. I had heard similar lines before, but coming from Ilya, the technique seemed fresh.
"Oh," I said, noncommittal, but smiling encouragement.
"I've known you for a long time," he said. Then he winced and glanced at me with his head turned half aside. "Does that sound stupid?"
"Maybe we were Martians once," I suggested lightly. I've always been intrigued by the beginning of a courtship, curiously detached and relaxed, wondering how far the mating dance could possibly go. I had given my signals; I was receptive, and the work was now up to him. "Maybe we knew each other a billion years ago."
He laughed, drew back, and stretched, and we listened to the liquid tones of falling and circulating waters. Arbeiters ignored us, rolling along their ramps checking flow and purity. Ilya seemed as relaxed as I was, immensely self-assured without appearing arrogant.
"You went to Earth a couple of years ago, didn't you?"
"Just over a year ago," I said.
"Earth years, I meant"
He was involved with fossils; he used Earth years instead of Martian. I wryly considered that history might be repeating itself. "Yes."
"What was it like?"
"Intense," I said.
"I'd love to be involved in an Earth dig. They're still finding major fossils in China and Australia."
"I don't think I'll go back for a while," I said.
"You didn't enjoy yourself, did you?"
"Parts of it were lovely," I said.
"Disappointed in love?" he asked. I laughed. His smile thinned; like most men, he didn't enjoy being laughed at.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Disappointed by politics."
His smile returned. "Babe in the woods?"
"Embryo in the savage jungle," I said ruefully.
The next day, the third day of the Grange, we met again, gravitating with delicious half-conscious intent. He bought me lunch and we walked through glass tubes on the Up, looking across Rubicon Valley. He prodded gently, asking more questions.
For the first time, with a persistent ache that had me close to tears — tears of old pain and relief at finally speaking — I told someone in detail how I personally felt about Earth and what had happened there. I told about feeling betrayed and ignorant and powerless, about Earth's overwhelming culture.
We finished our lunch and checked into a private space, nothing said, nothing suggested; Ilya led me. I talked some more, and then I leaned on him and he put an arm around my shoulders.
"They treated you pretty shabbily," he said. "You deserve better."
Of course, that was what I wanted to hear; but he meant it with utmost sincerity. And gauging what I was prepared for, and not prepared for, he did not press his suit too strongly.
I had rented guest lodgings at Rubicon City for the duration of the Grange. He suggested I stay afterward with his family, Erzul BM, at Olympus Station. I didn't have time — I had planned to leave early and get back to Jiddah to work on a Majumdar project report. But I promised we'd get together soon.
I wasn't about to let this relationship lapse. My feelings toward Ilya began simply and directly. He was the sweetest, most intuitive, and most straightforward man I had ever met. I wanted to continue talking with him for hours, days, months, and much longer. Making love seemed a natural extension of talking things through; lying naked together, warmed by our exertion, limbs casually locked, giggling at jokes, aghast at the state of the BMs and the Council that bowed low before Earth . . .
When I was with him, I felt an extraordinary peace and wholeness. Here was someone who could help me sort things out. Here was a partner.
Erzul's Olympus Station felt very different from Yl
la, or any other station I had visited on Mars. Erzul BM had begun in 2130 as a joint venture between poor American Hispanic, Hispaniolan, and Asian families on Earth. Trying to finance passage to Mars, they had eventually drawn in Polynesians and Filipinos. When they arrived on Mars, they occupied a ready-built trench dome in the western shadow of the Olympus Rupes. Within five Martian years, they had established liaisons with seven other BMs, including the ethnic-Russian Rabinovitch. Erzul had quickly prospered.
A small, prosperous mining and soil engineering BM, respected and unaligned, Erzul had kept all of its contracts on Mars. Now, with ninety mining claims in four districts, they were still small, but efficient and well-regarded, known for their trustworthiness and friendly dealings.
When I arrived at Olympus Station, I checked in to a guest room — Ilya gave me this much freedom, a way out if I didn't get along with his family — and toured the BM museum, a boring collection of old drilling and digging equipment enlivened by large murals of Polynesian and Hispaniolan myth. He left me before a portrait of Pele, Little Mother of Volcanoes, a passionate and bitchy-looking female of considerable beauty, and returned a few minutes later. A formidable woman accompanied him, taller than Ilya and twice as broad.
"Casseia, I'd like you to meet our syndic, Ti Sandra."
Ti Sandra looked me over with a little frown, lower lip poked out. An impressively large woman, two meters high and big-boned, with an enormous smile, deep-set warm eyes and a soft-spoken alto voice, Ti Sandra Erzul carried herself with stately bearing. Very dark, thick black hair in a halo around her head, a firmly friendly face with prominent and assertive features, she might have been a warrior queen in a fantasy sim . . . But her easy manner, her girlish pride in bright clothes, dissipated whatever threat her physical presence might have implied. "Are you a banker?" she asked.
I laughed. "No," I said.
"Good. I don't think Ilya would get along with a banker. He'd always be asking for research money." She smiled sunnily, her deep warm eyes crinkling almost shut, and pulled a loop of flowers from a bag Ilya carried. She spread her large, strong arms wide and said, "You are always welcome. You have such a lovely name, and Ilya is a good judge. He is like my son, except that we are not too far apart in age — five years, you know!"
We ate a huge dinner in the syndic's quarters that evening, joined by twenty family members, and I met Ti Sandra's husband, Paul Crossley, a quiet, thoughtful man ten years older than Ti Sandra. Paul stood no taller than Ilya. Ti Sandra towered over her husband, but only in size. They flirted like newlyweds.
The gathering's lively informality charmed me. They chatted in Spanish, French, Creole, Russian, Tagalog, Hawaiian, and for my benefit, English. Their curiosity about me was boundless.
"Why don't you speak Hindi?" Kiqui Jordan-Erzul asked.
"I never learned," I said. "My family speaks English ..."
"All of them?"
"Some of the older members speak other languages. My mother and father spoke only English when I was young."
"English is a cramped language. You should speak Creole. All music."
"Not much good for science," Ilya said. "Russian's best for science."
Kiqui snorted. Another "digger," Oleg Schovinski, said he thought German might be best for science.
"German!" Kiqui snorted again. "Good for metaphysics. Not the best for science."
"What kind of tea do you brew in Ylla?" asked Kiqui's wife, Therese.
Ti Sandra was much loved in Erzul. Young and old looked on her as matriarch, even though she was less than twenty Martian years old. After dinner, she carried a huge bowl of fresh fruit around the table, offering everybody dessert, then stood before the group. "All right now, all of you put down your beers and listen."
"Lawbond! Lawbond!" several chanted.
"You be quiet. You have no manners. I am pleased to bring you a friend of Ilya's. You've talked with her, impressed her with our savoir-faire, and she's impressed me, and I'm very pleased to say that she is going to many our little digger-after-useless-things."
Ilya's face reddened with embarrassment.
Ti Sandra held up her hands above the raucous cheering. "She's from Majumdar but she isn't a banker, so you be good to her and don't ask for more loans."
More cheers.
"Her name is Casseia. Stand up, Cassie." I stood and it was my turn to blush. The cheers nearly brought down the insulation.
Kiqui toasted our health and asked if I was interested in fossils.
"I love them," I said, and that was true; I loved them because of their connection to Ilya.
"That's good, because Ilya's the only man I know who gets depressed when he hasn't dug for a week," Kiqui said. "He's my kind of assistant."
"She hasn't decided what arrangements to make, but we'll be happy either way," Ti Sandra said.
"We've decided, actually," Ilya said.
"What?" the crowd asked as one.
"I've offered to transfer to Majumdar," Ilya said.
"Very good," Ti Sandra said, but her expression betrayed her.
"But Casseia tells me she's ready for a change. She's transferring to Erzul."
"If you'll have me," I added.
More cheers. Ti Sandra embraced me again. A hug from her was like being folded in the arms of a large, soft tree with a core of iron. "Another daughter," she said. "That's lovely!"
They crowded around Ilya and me, offering congratulations. Aunts, uncles, teachers, friends, all offered bits of advice and stories about Ilya. Ilya's face got redder and redder as the stories piled one on top of another. "Please!" he protested. "We haven't signed any papers yet . . . Don't scare her off!"
After dessert, we squatted in a circle around a large rotating table and sampled a variety of drinks and liqueurs. They drank more than any Martians I had met, yet kept their dignity and intelligence at all times.
Ti Sandra took me aside toward the end of the evening, saying she wanted to show me her prize tropical garden. The garden was beautiful, but she did not spend much time with the tour.
"I know a little about you, Casseia. What I've heard impressed the hell out of me. We may not look it, but we're an ambitious little family, you know that?"
"Ilya's given me some hints."
"Some of us have been studying the Charter and thinking things through. You've had a lot of experience in politics ..."
"Not that much. Government and management . . . from the point of view of one BM."
"Yes, but you've been to Earth. We have a unique opportunity in this BM. Nobody hates us. We go everywhere, meet everybody, we're friendly ... A lot of trust. We think we might have something to offer Mars."
"I'm sure you do," I said.
"Shall we talk more later?" Her eyes twinkled, but her face was stern, an expression I would come to know very well in the months ahead. Ti Sandra had bigger plans — and more talents — than I could possibly have imagined then.
Ilya and I honeymooned at Cyane Sulci, a few hundred kilometers east of Lycus Sulci. For transportation, we used Professor Jordan-Erzul's portable lab, a ten-meter-long cylinder that rolled on seven huge spring-steel tires. The interior was cramped and dusty, with two pull-down cots, rudimentary nano kitchen producing pasty recycled food, sponge-baths only. The air smelled of sizzle and flopsand and we sneezed all the time. I have never been happier or more at ease in my life.
We followed no schedule. I spent dozens of hours in a pressure suit, accompanying my husband across the lava ridges to deep gorges where mother cysts might be found.
Diversity had never completely separated life on Mars; co-genotypic bau-plans, creatures having different forms but a common progenitor, had been the rule. On Earth, such manifestations had been limited to different stages of growth in individual animals — caterpillar to butterfly, for example. On Mars, a single reproductive organism, depending on the circumstances, could generate offspring with a wide variety of shapes and functions. Those forms which did not survive, did not return to "ch
eck in" with the reproductive organism and were not replicated in the next breeding cycle. New forms could be created from a morphological grab-bag, following rules we could only guess at The reproducers themselves closed up and died after a few thousand years, laying eggs or cysts — some of which had been fossilized.
The mothers had been the greatest triumph of this strategy. A single mother cyst, blessed with proper conditions, could "bloom" and produce well over ten thousand different varieties of offspring, plant-like and animal-like forms together, designed to interact as an ecos. These would spread across millions of hectares, surviving for thousands of years before running through their carefully marshaled resources. The ecos would shrink, wither, and die; new cysts would be laid, and the waiting would begin again.
Across the ages, the Martian springtimes of flash floods and heavier atmosphere from evaporating carbon dioxide came farther apart, and finally stopped, and the cysts ceased blooming. Mars finally died.
Fossil mother cysts were most often buried a few meters below the lip of a gorge, revealed by landslides. Typically, remains of the mother's sons and daughters — delicate spongy calcareous bones and shells, even membranes tanned by exposure to ultraviolet before being buried — would lie in compacted layers around the cysts, clueing us to their locations with a darker stain in the soil.
Months before we met, Ilya and Kiqui discovered that the last bloom of a mother ecos had occurred, not five hundred million Earth years past, but a mere quarter billion. The puzzle remained, however: no organic molecules could remain viable across the tens of thousands of years that the cysts had typically lay buried between blooms.
We parked the lab at the end of a finger of comparatively smooth terrain. A few dozen meters beyond our parking place on the finger lay hundreds upon thousands of labyrinthine cracks and arroyos: the sulci. Fifty meters away, within a particularly productive shallow arroyo, stood a specimen storage shed of corrugated metal sheeting draped with plastic tarps.