pacifistic young native street demonstrators that Kasei and Dao seemed to have assumed they were. Her spiritual children, mounting an attack on her only actual child, in complete confidence that they had her blessing. As once they had. But now—
She struggled to keep running, her breath hard and ragged, the sweat beginning to flood through all over her skin. She hurried to the south tent wall, where she came on a little fleet of Red boulder cars, Turtle Rocks from the Acheron car manufactory. But no one inside them answered her calls, and when she looked closer she saw that their rock roofs were punctured by holes at their fronts, where the windshields would have been, underneath the rock overhang. Anyone inside them was dead. She ran on eastward, staying against the tent wall, heedless of debris underfoot, feeling a rising panic. She was aware that a single shot from anyone could kill her, but she had to find Kasei. She tried again over the wrist.
While she was at it, a call came in to her. It was Sax.
‘It isn’t logical to connect the fate of the elevator with terraforming goals,’ he was saying, as if he was speaking to more people than just her. ‘The cable could be tethered to quite a cold planet.’
It was the usual Sax, the all-too-Sax: but then he must have noticed she was on, because he stared owlishly into his wrist’s little camera and said, ‘Listen Ann, we can take history by the arm and break it – make it. Make it new.’
Her old Sax would never have said that. Nor chattered on at her, clearly distraught, pleading, visibly nerve-racked; one of the most frightening sights she had ever seen, actually: ‘They love you, Ann. It’s that that can save us. Emotional histories are the true histories. Watersheds of desire and devolution – devotion. You’re the – the personification of certain values – for the natives. You can’t escape that. You have to act with that. I did it in Da Vinci, and it proved – helpful. Now it’s your turn. You must. You must – Ann – just this once you must join us all. Hang together or hang separately. Use your iconic value.’
So strange to hear such stuff from Saxifrage Russell. But then he shifted again, seemed to pull himself together: ‘… logical procedure is to establish some kind of equation for conflicting interests’. Just like his old self.
Then there was a beep from her wrist and she cut Sax off, and answered the incoming call. It was Peter, there on the Red coded frequency, a black expression on his face that she had never seen before.
‘Ann!’ He stared intently at his own wristpad. ‘Listen, mother – I want you to stop these people!’
‘Don’t you mother me,’ she snapped. ‘I’m trying. Can you tell me where they are?’
‘I sure as hell can. They’ve just broken into the Arsiaview tent. Moving through – it looks like they’re trying to come up on the Socket from the south.’ Grimly he took a message from someone off-camera. ‘Right.’ He looked back at her. ‘Ann, can I patch you into Hastings up on Clarke? If you tell him you’re trying to stop the Red attack, then he may believe that it’s only a few extremists, and stay out of it. He’s going to do what he has to to keep the cable up, and I’m afraid he’s about to kill us all.’
‘I’ll talk to him.’
And there he was, a face from the deep past, a time lost to Ann she would have said; and yet he was instantly familiar, a thin-faced man, harried, angry, on the edge of snapping. Could anyone have sustained such enormous pressures for the past hundred years? No. It was just that kind of time, come back again.
‘I’m Ann Clayborne,’ she said, and as his face twisted even further, she added, ‘I want you to know that the fighting going on down here does not represent Red party policy.’
Her stomach clamped as she said this, and she tasted chyme at the back of her throat. But she went on: ‘It’s the work of a splinter group, called the Kakaze. They’re the ones who broke the Burroughs dyke. We’re trying to shut them down, and expect to succeed by the end of the day.’
It was the most awful string of lies she had ever said. She felt as if Frank Chalmers had come down and taken over her mouth; she couldn’t stand the sensation of such words on her tongue. She cut the connection before her face betrayed what falsehoods she was vomiting. Hastings disappeared without having said a word, and his face was replaced by Peter’s, who did not know she was back on line; she could hear him but his wristpad was facing a wall. ‘If they don’t stop on their own we’ll have to do it ourselves, or else UNTA will and it’ll all go to hell. Get everything ready for a counter-attack, I’ll give the word.’
‘Peter!’ she said without thinking.
The picture on the little screen swung around, came onto his face.
‘You deal with Hastings,’ she choked out, barely able to look at him, traitor that he was. ‘I’m going for Kasei.’
Arsiaview was the southernmost tent, filled now with smoke, which snaked overhead in long amorphous lines that revealed the tent’s ventilation patterns. Alarms were ringing everywhere, loud in the still-thick air, and shards of clear framework plastic were scattered on the green grass of the street. Ann stumbled past a body curled just like the figures modelled in ash in Pompeii. Arsiaview was narrow but long, and it was not obvious where she should go. The whoosh of rocket-launchers led her eastward toward the Socket, the magnet of the madness – like a monopole, discharging Earth’s insanity onto them.
There might be a plan revealed here; the cable’s defences seemed to be capable of handling the Reds’ lightweight missiles, but if the attackers thoroughly destroyed Sheffield and the Socket, then there would be nothing for UNTA to come down to, and so it would not matter if the cable remained swinging overhead. It was a plan that mirrored the one used to deal with Burroughs.
But it was a bad plan. Burroughs was down in the lowlands, where there was an atmosphere, where people could live outside, at least for a while. Sheffield was high, and so they were back in the past, back in ’61 when a broken tent meant the end for everyone in it exposed to the elements. At the same time most of Sheffield was underground, in many stacked floors against the wall of the caldera. Undoubtedly most of the population had retreated down there, and if the fighting tried to follow them it would be impossible, a nightmare. But up on the surface where fighting was possible, people were exposed to fire from the cable above. No, it wouldn’t work. It wasn’t even possible to see what was happening. There were more explosions near the Socket, static over the intercom, isolated words as the receiver caught bits of other coded frequencies cycling through: ’—taken ArsiaviewpM/cfc/c/c—’ ‘We need the AI back but I’d say X axis three two two, Y axis eightpkkkkk—’
Then another barrage of missiles must have been launched at the cable, for overhead Ann caught sight of an ascending line of brilliant explosions of light, no sound to them at all; but after that, big black fragments rained down on the tents around her, crashing through the invisible fabrics or smashing onto the invisible framework, then falling the last distance onto the buildings like the dropped masses of wrecked vehicles, loud despite the thin air and the intervening tents, the ground vibrating and jerking under her feet. It went on for minutes, with the fragments falling farther outward all the time, and any second in all those minutes could have brought death down on her. She stood looking up at the dark sky, and waited it out.
Things stopped falling. She had been holding her breath, and she breathed. Peter had the Red code, and so she called his number and tapped in a patch attempt, heard only static. But as she was turning down the volume in her earphones, she caught some garbled half-phrases – Peter, describing Red movements to Green forces, or perhaps even to UNTA. Who could then fire rockets from the cable defence systems down onto them. Yes,
