Repression. Thinking of Michel made him think of Maya. Ann was on the horizon now, he would never catch her; he wasn’t sure he wanted to at that moment, still stunned by this so-surprising, so-painful memory. He went looking for Maya. Past where Arkady had laughed at their tawdriness when he came down from Phobos, past Hiroko’s greenhouse where she had seduced him with her impersonal friendliness, like primates on the savanna, the alpha female grabbing one male among the others, an alpha, a beta, or that class of could-be-alpha-but-not-interested which struck him as the only decent way to behave; past the trailer park where they had all slept on the floor together, a family. With Desmond in a closet somewhere. Desmond had promised to show them how he had lived then, all his hiding places. Jumble of Desmond images, the flight over the burning canal, then the flight over burning Kasei, the fear in Kasei as the security people strapped him into their insane device; that had been the end of Saxifrage Russell. Now he was something else, and Ann was Counter-Ann, also the third woman that was neither Ann nor Counter-Ann. He could perhaps speak to her on that basis: as two strangers, meeting. Rather than the two who had met in the Antarctic.

Maya was sitting in the barrel-vault kitchen, waiting for a big teapot to boil. She was making tea for them.

“Maya,” Sax said, feeling the words like pebbles in his mouth, “You should try it. It’s not so bad.”

She shook her head. “I remember everything that I want to. Even now, without your drugs, even now when I hardly remember anything, I still remember more than you ever will. I don’t want any more than that.”

It was possible that minute quantities of the drugs had gotten into the air and thus onto her skin, giving her a small fraction of the hyperemotional experience. Or perhaps this was just her ordinary state.

“Why shouldn’t now be enough?” she was saying. “I don’t want my past back, I don’t want it. I can’t bear it.”

“Maybe later,” Sax said.

What could one say to her? She had been like this in Underhill as well— unpredictable, moody. It was amazing what eccentrics had been selected to the First Hundred. But what choice had the selection committee had? People were all like that, unless they were stupid. And they hadn’t sent stupid people to Mars, or not at first, or not too many. And even the dull-witted had their complexities.

“Maybe,” she said now, and patted his head, and took the teapot off the burner. “Maybe not. I remember too much as it is.”

“Frank?” Sax said.

“Of course. Frank, John— they’re all there.” She stabbed her chest with a thumb. “It hurts enough. I don’t need more.”

“Ah.”