Icehenge by Kim Stanley Robinson Page A

looking at our faces, “is to fade away in the city, and pretend you were neutral and hiding the whole time. Could be tough. But we’ve programmed a lot of imaginary people into the city register, and you could become one of those.”
    Then the meeting was called to order by a tall thin man, and Susan joined him. “The police are contained for now,” he said. “But our situation in New Houston is untenable, as you know. As soon as it’s dark, we’re going to disperse, and either evacuate or infiltrate the city. Field cars hidden in Spear Canyon will take off for the north. There we’ll start the revolution over again.” The man looked tired, disappointed. “You all knew this was a possibility. That the best we would do this time would be to establish the hidden outposts. Well, that’s how it has turned out. I’m afraid we’re losing space control. And that we’re one of the last cities left holding out.” He consulted with Susan. “Those of you who want to continue on in the city, we’ve got a list of apartments near here that still have air. And we’ve got the fake identities ready for your pictures and fingerprints and all.”
    He whispered with the people around him some more. Ginger Sims joined us. Conversations began among the forty or fifty people in the room. “Okay. Get some rest before sunset. That’s all for now.”
    *   *   *
    So there it is. Ethel and Yuri are in the next room, arguing about what to do. But I never even thought about it. I’m going into the chaos. In a curious way it is as though I had decided to go with the starship after all … enclosed in a little underground colony, where we will have to work hard to establish a life-support system, I have no doubt. And yet we are still on Mars, and still opposing the Committee. So I have what I want. I’m satisfied.
    There is little time left. I am too nervous to rest, I have been writing for an hour or more. We will leave soon. All of my friends from Rust Eagle are coming along—Ethel and Yuri have just decided. I think of the starship, flying away from all this … of my father. My thoughts are dense and confused, it’s hard to write one thing at a time.
    The police will follow us into the chaotic terrain. The Committee will want to wipe out every vestige of resistance. But this desire is part of what insures that we will succeed. We didn’t come to this red planet to repeat all the miserable mistakes of history, we didn’t. Even if it looks like it so far. Martians want to be free; truly free.
    I’m going to go in the car with Andrew, so he tells me. His sister and my companions will be along. That will be the most dangerous part, the escape tonight. It looks as though it will all happen as I dreamed it out there with the starship, in the asteroid belt—I will run over the surface of red Mars forever and ever, for the rest of my life. Except in the real world they’ll be chasing me.

II
    HJALMAR NEDERLAND
    2547 A.D .
    â€œI was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
    Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
    And there I found myself more truly and more strange.”
    â€” Wallace Stevens, “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”
    Â 
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    Memory is the weak link. This year I will be three hundred and ten years old, but most of my life is lost to me, buried in the years. I might as well be a creature of incarnations, moving from life to life, ignorant of my own past. Oh, I “know” that once I climbed Olympus Mons, that once I visited the Earth, and so on; I can check the record like anyone else; but to recall none of the detail, to feel nothing for this knowledge, is not to have done it.
    It isn’t as simple as that, I admit. Certain events, moments scattered here and there in my life, exist in my memory like artifacts in the layers of an excavation: fragments of meaning in the