sweep of a bronze world. Every day for a week the caravans arrived, and dirigibles labored up the long slope, and were tethered inside Zp, filling it so that the interior of the little crater looked like a bowl of birthday balloons.
The size of the crowd surprised John, as he had expected only a few friends to travel to such a remote site. It was yet another proof of his inability to comprehend the planet’s current population; there were nearly a thousand people gathered there together, it was amazing. Although many were faces he had seen before, and quite a few he knew by name. So it was a collection of friends, in a way. It was as if a home town that he hadn’t known existed had suddenly sprung up around him. And since so many of the first hundred had come, forty of them in all, including Maya and Sax, Ann and Simon and Nadia and Arkady, Vlad and Ursula and the rest of the Acheron group, Spencer, Rya, Alex and Raul and Janet and Mary and Dmitri and Elena and the rest of the Phobos group, and Arnie and Sasha and Yeli and several more, some of whom he hadn’t seen in twenty years – everyone he was close to, in fact, except for Frank, who had said he was too busy, and Phyllis, who hadn’t replied to the invitation at all.
And it wasn’t just the first hundred; many of the others were old friends as well, or friends of friends: a lot of Swiss, including the roadbuilding gypsies; Japanese from all over; most of the Russians on the planet; his Sufi friends; and all of them scattered up and down the terraced crescent tents, in collections of caravan groups and dirigible teams, rushing from time to time to the locks to greet the latest arrivals.
During the days many of them wandered around outside the tents, collecting loose rock from the great curved slope. The Zp meteor’s impact had scattered chunks of brecciated lava everywhere, including shishtovite shattercones like pottery shards, some dead black, others a bright blood red, or flecked with impact diamonds. An areological team from Greece started laying these in a pattern on the ground under the raised floor of their tent, and they had brought a little kiln with them, so they could glaze some shards yellow or green or blue, to accent their designs. This idea caught on as soon as others saw it, and within two days each clear tent floor stood over a flagged parquet with a mosaic design: circuitry maps, pictures of birds and fish, fractal abstracts, Escher drawings, the Tibetan calligraphy spelling Om Mani Padme Hum, maps of the planet and of smaller regions, equations, people’s faces, landscapes, and so on.
John spent his time wandering from tent to tent, talking with people and enjoying the carnival atmosphere – an atmosphere which did not preclude arguments, there were a lot of those – but most people spent the time partying, talking, drinking, going out on excursions on the wavy surface of the old lava flows, making mosaic floors, dancing to music made by various amateur bands. The best of these was a magnesium drum band, the instruments local, the players from Trinidad and Tobago, a notorious transnational flag of convenience with a vigorous local resistance movement of which the band were representatives. There was also a country and western group with a good slide guitar player, and an Irish band with home-made instruments and a large shifting membership, which allowed it to play more or less non-stop. These three bands were all surrounded by crowds of dancers, and indeed the tents they occupied had all of their movement transformed into a kind of pulsing dance, as just getting from here to there was suddenly stuffed with the grace and exuberance of the music, the gravity, the view.
So it was a great festival, and John was pleased, partying hard in every waking moment. He didn’t need any omegendorph or pandorph; once when Marian and the Senzeni Na crowd hustled him in a corner and started passing tabs around, he could only laugh; “I don’t think so right now,” he said to the young hotheads, waving a hand weakly. “It’d be carrying coals to Newcastle at this point, really it would.”
“Carrying coals to Newcastle?”
“He means it’d be like taking permafrost to Borealis.”
“Or pumping more CO2 into the atmosphere.”
“Bringing lava to Olympus.”
“Putting more salt in the goddamn soil.”
“Putting any more ferric oxide anywhere on the whole damn planet!”
“Exactly,” John said, laughing. “I’m already full red.”
“Not as red as these folks,” one of them said, pointing down to the west. A string of three sand-colored dirigibles floated up the slope of the volcano. They were small and antiquated, and did not answer radio inquiries. By the time they had scraped over Zp’s rim and anchored among the larger and more colorful dirigibles in the crater, everyone was waiting to hear from the observers at the lock who they might be. When their gondolas popped open, and twenty or so figures in walkers stepped out, a silence fell. “That’s Hiroko,” Nadia said suddenly over the common band. The first hundred made their way quickly to the upper tent, looking up at the walktube that ran over the rim. And then the new visitors were walking down the tube to the tent lock, and were through and inside, and yes, it was Hiroko – Hiroko, Michel, Evgenia, Iwao, Gene, Ellen, Rya, Raul, and a whole crowd of youngsters.
Shrieks and shouts pierced the air, people were embracing, a few crying, and there were a good number of angry accusations; John himself couldn’t help it when he got a chance to hug Hiroko, all those hours in his rover worrying about things, wishing he could have talked to her; now he took her shoulders in his hands and almost shook her, ready for hot words to pour from his throat; but her grinning face was so much like his memory of her and yet not – her face thinner and more lined, not her and yet clearly her – that her face blurred and flowed in his vision, from what he expected to see to what he saw. He was confused enough by this hallucinatory smear (in his feelings too) that he only said, “Oh, I’ve wanted to talk to you so!”
“And me to you,” she said, although it was hard to hear her in the din; Nadia was intervening between Maya and Michel, for Maya was shouting “Why didn’t you tell me?” again and again, before bursting into tears. John was distracted by this, and then he saw Arkady’s face over Hiroko’s shoulder, bunched in an expression that said there’s going to be questions answered later, and he lost his train of thought. There were going to be some hard things said – but still, here they were! Here they were. Down in the tents the noise level had jumped twenty decibels. People were cheering their reunion.
Late in the afternoon John convened the first hundred, now numbering almost sixty. They gathered in the highest tent by themselves, and looked out over those below, and the land beyond.
It was all so much huger than Underhill and the tight rocky plain around it. Everything had changed, it seemed; the world and its civilization all grown vastly larger and more complicated. And yet there they stood nevertheless, all the oh-so-familiar faces changed, aged in all the ways human faces age: time texturing them with erosion as if they had lived for geological ages, giving them a knowing look, as if one could see the aquifers behind their eyes. They were in their seventies now, most of them. And the world was indeed larger – in many different ways: after all it was now quite possible that they were destined to watch each other age a lot more, if they were lucky. It was a strange sensation.
So they milled about, looking at the people in the tents below, and beyond them to the variegated orange carpet of the planet; and the conversations rushed this way and that in quick chaotic waves, creating interference patterns, so that sometimes they all went still at once and stood there together, stunned or bemused or grinning like dolphins. In the tents below, people occasionally looked up through the plastic arcs at them, curious to catch a glimpse of such a historic meeting.
Finally they sat in a scattering of chairs, passing around cheese and crackers and bottles of red wine. John leaned back in his chair and looked around. Arkady had one arm over Maya’s shoulders, the other over Nadia’s, and the three of them were laughing at something Maya had said; Sax was blinking his owlish pleasure, and Hiroko was beaming. John had never seen that look on her face in the early years. It was a shame to disturb such a mood, but there would never be a good time; and the mood would return. So in a quiet moment he said to Sax in clear loud tones, “I can tell you who’s behind the sabotages.”
Sax blinked. “You can?”
“Yes.” He looked Hiroko in the eye.