“Locusts.”
“I truly don’t know. As President, you are allowed, by your constitution, to negotiate foreign treaties.”
“But not to negotiate surrender during wartime,” I said.
“This is not war,” Dickinson said.
“What is it, for God’s sake?”
“Clever, devastating disruption imposed by a vastly superior power,” Dickinson said. “Why mince words? I don’t think you’re stupid. We have one hour. I understand that if Earth does not receive a reply by then, the knot will tighten.”
These were not negotiations; they were ultimatums. Mars would strangle if I did not agree to everything. I felt lightheaded, almost giddy with suppressed rage.
“Have you any human heart whatsoever?” I asked Dickinson . “Have you any feelings for what your planet is suffering?”
“I was not the one who made this situation,” he answered briskly.
“We are honorable Martians,” Gretyl said.
No choice. No way out. Selling out the Republic’s future, all we had worked for; I would be branded the traitor. A kind of delirium smoothed itself around me with seductive insistence. Die, but do not do this. I could not listen.
Lieh had been monitoring her slate closely for several minutes. Now, she stood up from the gallery and approached me like a delicate crab, eyes full of hatred turned on Dickinson . She bent over and whispered in my ear, “Madam President, we’ve established contact with the Olympians. I’m told that you are not to sell the farm, and that you are to leave this meeting and come with me to the surface. Charles says he has to go see a man about a scary dog.”
I looked at her, baffled. Lieh straightened and backed away.
“I’d like to discuss this with the people I’ve assembled here,“ I said to Dickinson. He nodded, appearing faintly bored. ”You’ll have your answer,“ I said.
I left the table and gestured for Smith and Ely to follow me out of the chamber. We met Firkazzie in the governors’ cloakroom. “What’s going on?” I asked Lieh and Firkazzie, my nerves shot, all confidence fled.
Lieh deferred to Firkazzie.
“We’re to take you Up in the next ten minutes. There’s an observation deck on the top of the main capitol building, but it isn’t pressurized yet.”
“By whose orders?”
“It was not an order, Ma’am,” Firkazzie said. “Charles Franklin requested your presence, and said it was very important.”
I started to laugh and caught myself before it turned into a hysterical bray. “What in hell is more important than negotiating with Earth?”
“I only carry the message,” Lieh said, stiffening and looking me firmly in the eye. I felt adequately chastened.
“Let’s go, then,” I said.
“We don’t have much time,” Firkazzie said. “We have to suit up and climb past the construction barriers.”
Dandy, Firkazzie, and Lieh accompanied me; all the others, senators and aides, were left behind, not essential to this task.
We took an elevator to the upper levels, two stories above the surface. I was too numb and confused to be concerned with politics and protocol. I felt the bleak threat of Mars devastated by Terrie power, by armies in the sands; I could not get over the thought that this pollution, this disruption had caused deaths already, and must end soon, or else. Dickinson had given me an unacceptable ultimatum — and I had no choice but to accept. What could anyone do or say that would change that?
I stood in a dim cold room while Dandy and Lieh dragged out suits, tested them and found them secure. We put them on and attached cyclers. The seals activated. My suit adjusted to my body automatically.
Lieh, Dandy, and an architect whose name I did not catch took me through a short maze of nutritional vats and construction slurry tanks. Beyond the safety barriers, the dark, silent hall opened onto a short, curved corridor, an open hatch with a blinking red low-pressure light, a glimpse of dark brown sky and scattered clouds reddening in the dawn.
We stood on a parapet overlooking Many Hills, surrounded by Schiaparelli Basin , twenty meters above the reddish-brown surface. Smooth scrubbed lava streaked with pockets of smear stretched for kilometers all around. The air was cold and still, the quiet profound. We had not turned on our suit radios for fear of attracting attention from assassins. Terrie ships could spot us from thousands of klicks and do whatever they wished to us.
I lifted my arms in bafflement, wondering what I was supposed to be witnessing. I was almost by accident that I fixed my gaze west and saw Phobos, one hour into its ascent, four hours from setting in the east. I glanced past it, then felt my neck stiffen and my eyes begin to water. Scary dog.
Charles said he was going to see a man about a scary dog. I did not know what Charles was going to do. But a hopeless wish, a wildest guess within me, pushed forward, fantasy turning to conviction. It fit. The Mercury could take them there, the equipment and the thinkers, and Charles was just the quiet sort of megalomaniac to think of such a thing and secretly offer it to Ti Sandra.
I started to speak but realized nobody would hear me. I pointed to the moon. I pulled Lieh toward me, touching helmets, and practically screamed the phrase from Shakespeare. “ ‘Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!’ Fear! Fear and panic, the dogs of war! Look at Phobos! My God, Lieh! He’s going to do it! He’s going to do it!”
She pulled away, her almond eyes squinting in concern, as if I might be insane. I laughed and wept, convinced I knew, convinced that somehow this horrible burden was about to be lifted from my shoulders. Dandy touched his helmet to mine and said, solicitously, “Something wrong, Ma’am?”
I grabbed his shoulders and spun him to look west, to face that familiar moon we had seen so often since our births, that dread canine Fear that accompanies the God of War, so innocuous and innocent for such a dreadful name, small and nicked away by meteoroids and early settlement mining, circling Mars every seven hours forty minutes at six thousand kilometers, low and fast, accompanied by its fellow dog Panic.
Lieh, Dandy and I all faced west. The architect stayed in shadow, not caring to expose himself to whatever had made us mad.
Bright and full against the dark star-strewn sky, Phobos climbed behind a low wisp of ice cloud. It turned ghostly in the cloud, shimmered, and then emerged crystalline, as real and sharp as anything I had ever seen. I focused my will on it, as if helping Charles, as if a psychic link had risen between us all in this extremity and we could each of us know what the other was thinking and doing. My will went out and touched the moon and I was half insane with a terrified desire.
Phobos disappeared. There were no clouds between, no obscuring dust. The clarity of deep gray orbiting stone simply vanished.
My desire became epiphany. Dandy and Lieh scanned the sky, not understanding; they did not know what I knew.
Then Lieh turned to me and her eyes widened with fear. She and Dandy touched helmets with me simultaneously. “Have they blown it up?” Dandy asked.
“No,” I said, weeping. “No! They’ve shown Earth what we can do!”
They still did not comprehend. I didn’t care. In my relief and ecstasy — in my absolute terror for Charles — I loved them as if they had been my own children. I grabbed their arms and shouted, helmets pressed together firmly, “They’ve gone to Phobos and they’ve moved it. Never forget this! Never! Never forget!”
On the parapet of the future observation deck, I did a mad little pirouette, then fetched up against a pillar and stared out over the red and orange vastness of the basin. Phobos had left the skies of Mars, and I did not know when or if it would return.
But I knew, as surely as if Charles and Ti Sandra had told me themselves, where they had sent it. And I knew Charles was riding it… Across the Solar System, to Earth, a dreadful warning from her oppressed child.