“I’ve been planning that,” Charles said. “We can take the Mercury and the original tweaker to Phobos within a few days. The larger tweakers should stay here.”
“We need to disperse the tweakers and thinkers, in case Earth makes another, more directed attempt to stop us.”
Charles looked away. “We could destroy all of our equipment,” he said. “Provide proof to Earth.”
“I’d do that in an instant,” I said, “if Earth could possibly believe us. They can’t. The stakes are too high. Politics and survival drive everything now.”
“I thought I’d make the suggestion. I would kill myself if I thought it would change the situation. If I thought I could stop your grieving.”
I glared at him. “I’d kill all of you, myself, if…” The admission startled me, and the last few words came out weakly, with a sudden decrease of breath. Charles did not seem startled or shocked.
“I envied Ilya. I remember you years ago,” he said after a pause of many seconds. “I’ve been with a fair number of women since, and none has had your strength of purpose, your conviction.”
“Purpose?” I asked. “Conviction?”
“I said to myself, ‘She’s as crazy as you are.’ ”
“Jesus,” I said, forcing a laugh.
“I believed I could rock the century-long status quo, discover how the universe worked. And you… I said you’d become President of Mars. Remember?”
“I’ll go back through my diaries and check it out,” I said. “Maybe you can read tarot after all this is settled.”
“It will never be settled,” Charles said. “Events this large never finish. You’ve never asked about my wife.”
“It’s none of my business.”
“She was a sweet woman, a true Martian. She stood by me for three years. She had a strong sense of duty, and she really tried. But eventually she left. She said she never knew where I was — what I was thinking.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “You obviously weren’t well-matched.”
“No.” He turned away, seeming to wilt. I wondered how much the QL links were draining him.
I needed to bring us back to our focus. “Where should Mars go?” I asked.
Charles straightened and linked his slate to the main display. “Aelita, these are rough coordinates and star numbers. Link and update with the astronomy library.”
Aelita graphically depicted a scatter of densely-packed stars.
“We can’t just move a few light-years away. With present tracking and measuring, Earth could find us anywhere within a few hundred light-years. If we move at all, it’s because Earth has proven it will do everything it can to destroy us… And will keep on trying.“
Bald expression of our dilemma still had power to chill me.
“So I’m suggesting we make a grand leap. I’ve looked at the new surveys, run them through Aelita for processing, and come up with a candidate. It’s the best of all possible places in the near galaxy. About ten thousand light-years away, five thousand light-years closer to galactic center. A narrow, restricted cloud separating from the leading edge of a galactic arm. A thick cluster of stars a few billion years younger than most of the stars near the sun, stable and rich with metals. Beautiful skies, bright nights.
“I searched the Galactic Survey Twenty-Two Catalog and found a yellow dwarf star about nine-tenths the size of the sun, with perturbations suggesting four large planets. Rocky worlds unknown, of course. And there are a dozen similar stars in the same region.
“I give them to you,” he concluded. “All the clouds and stars, a new garden of flowers.” He watched me closely. “Choose. Become mother to the new Mars.”
I remembered the ancient flowers Charles had given me near Trés Haut Médoc, cut from the Glass Sea beds. Now he offered me a bouquet of stars. After the weariness and grief, Charles could still take my breath away.
“I want to apologize,” I said. “I’ve been very rough on you. You’ve done magnificent work.”
“Thank you,” he said. His face brightened, and he watched me with gentle intensity. I still had such power to please Charles. I had never had such a hold on Ilya, and perhaps that was why I loved him.
I stared at the stars circled and blinking on the outskirts of the elongated blob. “Will we need reservations?” I asked.
I interrupted an argument the next day, as I walked with Dandy and Lieh to inspect the progress on the big tweakers.
The central laboratory had been finished the week before, the equipment had been consolidated in one chamber, and a few simple tests had been run converting small samples of oxygen to anti-oxygen. When we entered the lab, I heard Leander’s voice rise above shouting.
“Doesn’t anybody understand what we’re up against?”
Mitchell Maspero-Gambacorta and Tamara Kwang had squared off against Charles, Leander, and Royce. Kwang saw me enter the lab and fixed her face in a chilly mask. Maspero-Gambacorta shook his head, swearing beneath his breath, and walked to squat on the low bench supporting the larger force disorder pumps. Royce gathered up his slate and a few tools and seemed about ready to leave, but relented, standing awkwardly with his arms full. Leander’s face had flushed with emotion; Charles, sitting with hands wrapped on one crossed knee, appeared calm, even a little distanced from the row.
“Disagreements?” I asked.
“Nothing we can’t handle,” Leander said, a little too quickly.
“Tamara and Mitchell feel we should open our research to public scrutiny,” Charles said.
“It’s the sanest thing to do,” Kwang said.
“None of this is sane,” Maspero-Gambacorta murmured, folding his arms.
“Whom would we tell first?”
“Earth, obviously,” Kwang said. “I have friends on Earth, people who could help all of us sort these things through — the political problems, the misunderstandings — ”
“Misunderstandings?” I asked.
“I’m not a fool,” Kwang said defensively. “I know what our situation is, but if only we could talk, find common ground… It would make me feel so much better…” Her words faded and she shook her head.
“We’ve been over this time and again,” Leander said.
“It’s a feedback dilemma,” Charles said.
“I know!” Kwang shouted, raising her fists. “They might kill us if they think we know how to kill them… But they won’t kill us if they think we can get to them first. We can’t tell them what we know, because we know how to kill them. And if we tell them, they’ll know how to kill us. That is not sane!”
“I agree,” I said. “The best solution is to let things equalize, cool off.”
“By running away?” Maspero-Gambacorta asked. “Doesn’t seem very adult.”
“Can you think of a better idea?” I asked.
“Yes,” he replied. “A dozen better ideas. None of them supported by Charles or Stephen.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Maybe I’ll see their value.”
He screwed up his face in frustration. “All right, they’re idealistic, screwball risks, not better ideas. But maybe if we tried one of them, we would sleep better nights!”
“The point is not for us to sleep better,” I said. “It’s for Mars to live, and live free.”
“We’re all working as hard as we can,” Kwang said. “Don’t think just because we disagree, we’re not doing our work.”
“I don’t think that,” I said. “If you come up with a better idea — idealistic or cynical or whatever — please let me know.”
Royce sat emphatically, arms still folded, and said, “All right. Over with? Can we get back to work now?”
“We’ve got about four more weeks before we have no secrets whatsoever,” Ti Sandra said at the beginning of our next daily conference call. Alone in my quarters, surrounded by hollow sounds of construction echoing through the soil into the tunnels, I watched Ti Sandra’s range of expressions as I might examine the face of an idol, hoping for clues. “It’s time to survey,” she said. “Take Phobos to our suggested destination. People will notice that a moon has been borrowed, so we’ll need to have the moon back before any alarm is raised. The trip must take less than five hours.”