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studies could be carried on without having to deal
with gross contaminations. This had been Ann’s position from the very start,
and it was still where she felt most comfortable; she had moved from that
scientific position into political activism only because it had been forced on
her by the situation. This was true for a lot of areologists now supporting the
Reds. They were her natural peer group, really—the people she understood, and
with whom she sympathized.
    But they were few; she could almost name them individually. The
regular contributors to the Journal, more or less. As for the rest of the Reds,
the Kakaze and the other radicals, what they advocated was a kind of
metaphysical position, a cult—they were religious fanatics, the equivalent of
Hi-roko’s greens, members of some kind of rock-worshiping sect. Ann had very
little in common with them, when it came down to it; they formulated their
redness from a completely different worldview.
    And given that there was that kind of fractionization among the
Reds themselves, what then could one say about the Martian independence
movement as a whole? Well. They were going to fall out. It was happening
already.
    Ann sat down carefully on the edge of the final bench. A good
view. It appeared there was a station of some kind down there on the caldera floor,
though from five thousand meters up, it was hard to be sure. Even the ruins of
old Sheffield were scarcely visible—ah—there they were, on the floor under the
new town, a tiny pile of rubble with some straight lines and plane surfaces in
it. Faint vertical scorings on the wall above might have been caused by fall of
the city in ‘61. It was hard to say.
    The tented settlements still on the rim were like toy villages in
paperweights. Sheffield with its skyline, the low warehouses across from her to
the east, Lastflow, the various smaller tents all around the rim .. . many of
them had merged, to become a kind of greater Sheffield, covering almost 180
degrees of the rim, from Lastflow around to the southwest, where pistes
followed the fallen cable down the long slope of west Tharsis to Amazonis
Planitia. All the towns and stations would always be tented, because at
twenty-seven kilometers high the air would always be a tenth as thick as it was
at the datum—or sea level, one could now call it. Meaning the atmosphere up
here was still only thirty or forty millibars thick.
    Tent cities forever; but with the cable (she could not see it)
spearing Sheffield, development would certainly continue, until they had built
a tent city entirely ringing the caldera, looking down into it. No doubt they
would then tent the caldera itself, and occupy the round floor—add about 1,500
square kilometers to the city, though it was a question who would want to live
at the bottom of such a hole, like living at the bottom of a mohole, rock walls
rising up around you as if you were in some circular roofless cathedral ...
perhaps it would appeal to some. The Bogda-novists had lived in moholes for
years, after all. Grow forests, build climber’s huts or rather millionaires’
penthouses on the arcuate balcony ledges, cut staircases into the sides of the
rock, install glass elevators that took all day to go up or down ... rooftops,
row houses, skyscrapers reaching up toward the rim, heliports on their flat
round roofs, pistes, flying freeways ... oh yes, the whole summit of Pa-vonis
Mons, caldera and all, could be covered by the great world city, which was
always growing, growing like a fungus over every rock in the solar system.
Billions of people, trillions of people, quadrillions of people, all as close
to immortal as they could make themselves....
    She shook her head, in a great confusion of spirits. The radicals
in Lastflow were not her people, not really, but unless they succeeded, the
summit of Pavonis and everywhere else on Mars would become part of the great
world city. She tried to concentrate on the view, she tried to feel it, the