“No,” she snapped. “I guess we’re not. You and your old friends tried to kill me. And they did kill thousands of other people, and destroyed most of this planet. And obviously they’re still out there, or else you wouldn’t be here, would you. In fact they must be pretty widespread, because when I ran a DNA check on your sperm, the official TA records had you as Stephen Lindholm. That put me off the trail for a while. But there was something about you that made me wonder. When we fell in that crevasse. That did it— it reminded me of something that happened when we were in Antarctica. You and Tatiana Durova and I were up on Nussbaum Riegel when Tatiana tripped and sprained her ankle, and it got windy and late and they had to helicopter us back down to the base, and while we were waiting, you found some kind of rock lichen . . .”

Sax shook his head, truly surprised. “I don’t remember that.” And he didn’t. The year of training and evaluation in Antarctica’s dry valleys had been intense, but now the entire year was a dim blur to him, and that incident would not come back at all; it was hard to believe it had happened. He couldn’t even remember what poor Tatiana Durova had looked like.

Absorbed in his thoughts, and in a concerted push for his memories of that year, he missed a bit of what Phyllis was saying, but then he caught “. . . checked again with one of my old copies of my AI’s memory, and there you were.”

“Your AI’s memory units may be degrading,” he said absently. “They’re finding that the circuitry tends to get scrambled by cosmic radiation if it isn’t reinforced from time to time.”

She ignored that weak sally. “The point is, people who can change Transitional Authority records like that are still worth watching out for. I’m afraid I can’t just let this pass. Even if I wanted to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure. It depends what you do. You could just tell me where you were hiding, and who with, and what’s going on. You just showed up at Biotique a year ago, after all. Where were you before that?”

“On Earth.”

Her smile had a bad twist to it. “If that’s the course you take, I’ll be forced to ask for help from some of my associates. There are security people in Kasei Vallis who will be able to refresh your memory.”

“Come on.”

“I don’t mean that metaphorically. They won’t beat the information out of you or anything like that. It’s more a matter of extraction. They put you under, stimulate the hippocampus and the amygdala, and ask questions. People simply answer.”