They nodded at this, Athos among them looking thoughtful. After that Maya got Vendana to one side, and grilled her about Jackie’s recent liaisons. Mikka was indeed a recent partner, and probably still was. MarsFirst was if anything more anti-immigration than the larger party. Maya nodded; she had begun to see the outlines of a plan.
When the postmortem was over, Maya wandered downtown with Vendana and Athos and the rest, until they passed a large band playing what they called Sheffield sound. This music was only noise to Maya: twenty different drum rhythms at once, on instruments not intended for percussion or even for musical use. But it suited her purposes, as under the clatter and pounding she was able to guide the young Greens unobtrusively toward Antar, whom she had spotted across the dance floor. When they were nearer to him she could say, “Oh, there’s Antar — hello, Antar! These are the people I’m sailing with. We’re right behind you, apparently, headed to Hell’s Gate and then Odessa. How’s the campaign going?”
And Antar was his usual gracious princely self, a man hard to object to even when you knew how reactionary he was, how much he had been in the pocket of Earth’s Arab nations. Now he must be turning on those old allies, another dangerous part of this anti-immigrant strategy. It was curious the way the Free Mars leadership had decided to defy the Terran powers, and at the same time to try to dominate all the new settlements in the outer solar system. Hubris. Or perhaps they just felt threatened; Free Mars had always been the young natives’ party, and if unrestricted immigration brought in millions of new issei, then Free Mars’s status would be endangered, not only its superma-jority but its simple majority as well. These new hordes with all their old fanaticisms intact — churches and mosques, flags, hidden firearms, open feuds — there was definitely a case for the Free Mars position to be made, for during the intensive immigration of the past decade, the new arrivals had clearly begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first one. John would have gone crazy, Frank would have laughed. Arkady would have said I told you so, and suggested yet another revolution.
But Earth had to be dealt with more realistically than that, it could not be banished or wished away. And here in the moment, Antar was being gracious, extra gracious, as if he thought Maya might be useful for something. And as he always followed Jackie around, Maya was not surprised at all when suddenly Jackie and some others were at his side, and everyone saying hello. Maya nodded to Jackie, who smiled back flawlessly. Maya gestured to her new companions, carefully introduced them one by one. When she came to Athos she saw Jackie watching him, and Athos, as he was introduced, gave a friendly glance to her. Swiftly but very casually Maya started asking Antar about Zeyk and Na-zik, who were living on the coast of Acheron Bay, apparently. The two groups were moving slowly toward the music, and soon, if they kept going, they would be thoroughly mingled, and it would be too loud to hear any conversation but one’s own. “I like this Sheffield sound,” Maya said to Antar. “Help me get through to the dance floor?”
An obvious ploy, as she needed no help getting through crowds. But Antar took her arm, and did not notice Jackie talking to Athos — or pretended not to. It was an old story to him anyway. But that Mikka, looking very tall and powerful up close; Scandinavian ancestry perhaps, looking a bit of a hothead; he was now trailing the group with a sour expression. Maya pursed her lips, satisfied that the gambit had started well. If MarsFirst was even more isolationist than Free Mars, then trouble between them might be all the more useful.
So she danced with more enthusiasm than she had felt in years. Indeed if you concentrated on the bass drums only, and held to their rhythms, then it was somewhat like the knocking of an excited heart; and over that fundamental ground bass the chattering of the various woodblocks and kitchen implements and round stones was no more than the ephemera of stomach rumbling or rapid thought. It made a kind of sense; not musical sense as she understood it, but rhythmic sense, in some way. Dance, sweat, watch Antar shuffle gracefully about. He must be a fool but it didn’t show. Jackie and Athos had disappeared. And so had Mikka. Perhaps he would go nova and murder them all. Maya grinned and spun in the dance.
Michel came over and Maya gave him a big smile, a sweaty hug. He liked sweaty hugs, and looked pleased but curious: “I thought you didn’t like this kind of music?”
“Sometimes I do.”
Southwest of Gale the canal rose through lock after lock, up onto the highlands of Hesperia. As it crossed the highlands, to the east of the Tyrrhena massif, it remained at about the four-kilometer elevation, now more often called five kilometers above sea level, and so there was little need for locks. For days at a time they motored along the canal, or sailed under the power of the ship’s line of little mast sails, stopping in some bankside towns, passing others. Oxus, Jaxartes, Scamander, Simois, Xanthus, Steropes, Polyphemus — they stopped in each, keeping a steady pace with the Free Mars campaign, and indeed with most of the other Hellas-bound barges and yachts. Everything stretched out without change to both horizons, although occasionally in this region the lens had burned through something other than the usual basaltic regolith, so that in the vaporizing and falling out there had occurred some variation in the levees, stretches of obsidian or sideromelane, swirls of brilliant glossy color, of marbled porphyry greens, violent sul-furic yellows, lumpy conglomerates, even one long section of clear glass banks, clear on both sides of the canal, distorting the highlands behind them and for long stretches reflecting the sky. This stretch, called Glass Banks, was of course intensively developed. Between the canalside towns ran mosaic paths, shaded by palm trees in giant ceramic pots, and backed by villas complete with grass lawns and hedges. The Glass Banks towns were whitewashed, bright with pastel shutters and window boxes and doors, and blue-glazed tile roofs, and long colored neon signs over blue awnings in the waterfront restaurants. It was a kind of dream Mars, a canal cliche from the ancient dreamscape, but none the less beautiful for that, the obviousness of it indeed part of its pleasure. The days of their passage through this region were warm and windless, the canal surface as smooth as the banks, and as clear: a glass world. Maya sat on the forward deck under a green awning, watching the freight barges and the tourist paddle wheelers heading in the other direction, everyone out on deck to enjoy the sight of the glass banks and the colorful towns decorating them. This was the heart of the Martian tourist industry, the favorite destination for off-world visitors; ridiculous, but true; and one had to admit it was pretty. Gazing at the passing scene it occurred to Maya that whichever party won the next general election, and whichever way the immigration battle fell out, this world would probably go on, gleaming like a toy in the sun. Still, she hoped her gambit would work.
As they barged farther south the southern autumn put a chill in the air. Hardwood trees began to appear on the once-again-basalt banks, their leaves flaring red and yellow; and one morning there was a skim of ice sheeting the smooth water against the shores. When they stood on the top of the western bank, the volcanoes Tyrrhena Patera and Hadriaca Patera loomed on the horizon like flattened Fujis, Hadriaca displaying the banded maypole of white glaciers on black rock which Maya had first seen from the other side, coming up out of Dao Vallis when she had made her tour of the flooding Hellas Basin, so long ago. With that young girl, what was her name? A relative of someone she knew.
The canal cut through the dragonback mounds of the Hesperia Dorsa. The canalside towns grew less equatorial, more austere, more highland. Volga river towns, New England fishing villages, but with names like Astapus, Aeria, Uchronia, Apis, Eunostos, Agathadaemon, Kaiko … on and on the broad band of water led them, south by west, as straight as a compass bearing for day after day, until it was hard to remember that this was the only one, that such canals were not webbed everywhere, as on the maps of the ancient dream. Oh there was one other big canal, at Boone’s Neck, but it was short and very wide, and getting wider every year, as draglines and the eastward current tore at it; no longer a canal, really, but rather an artificial strait. No, the dream of the canals had been enacted only here, in all the world; and while here, cruising tranquilly over the water, one’s view of everything else cut off by the high banks, there was a sense of romance in the air, a sense that their political and personal squabbles had a kind of Barsoomian grandeur.