But kick the world, break your foot. As they said in Kamchatka.

The train slowed and glided to a smooth stop. They were in Fournier Station, where the Sabishii branch met the main Burroughs-to-Hellas piste.

The Burroughs Japanese filed out of the car, and Maya clicked off her lectern and followed. The station was only a small tent, south of Fournier Crater; its interior was simple, a T-shaped dome. Scores of people wandered the three levels of the interior, in groups or singly, most of them in plain work jumpers, but many in business suits or metanational uniforms, or in casual clothes, which these days consisted of loose pantaloons, blouses, and moccasins.

Maya found the sight of so many people a bit alarming, and she moved awkwardly past the kiosk lines and the crowded cafés fronting the pistes. No one met the eye of such a bald withered androgyne. Feeling the artificial breeze on her scalp, she took her place at the front of the line to get on the next train south, turning over in her mind the photo from the book. Had they ever really been that young?

At one o’clock the train floated in from the north. Security guards came out of a room by the cafés, and under their bored eye she put her wrist to a portable checker, and boarded. A new procedure, and simple; but as she found a seat her heart was racing. Clearly the Sabishiians, with the help of the Swiss, had beaten the Transitional Authority’s new security system. But still she had reason to be afraid— she was Maya Toitovna, one of the most famous women in history, one of the most wanted criminals on Mars, with the passengers in their seats looking up at her as she passed down the aisle, naked under a blue cotton jumper.

Naked but invisible, by reason of unsightliness. And the truth was that at least half the occupants of the car looked as old as her, Mars vets who looked seventy and could have been twice that, wrinkled, gray-haired, balding, irradiated and bespectacled, scattered among all the tall fresh young natives like autumn leaves among evergreens. And there among them, what looked like Spencer Jackson. As she flung her bag onto the overhead rack, she looked at the seat three ahead; the man’s bald pate told her little, but she was pretty sure it was him. Bad luck. On general principle the First Hundred (the First Thirty-nine) tried never to travel together. But there was always the chance that chance itself would screw them up.

She sat in the window seat, wondering what Spencer was doing. Last she had heard, he and Sax had formed a technological team in Vishniac mohole, doing weapons research that they weren’t telling anyone else about, or so Vlad had said. So he was part of Sax’s crazy outlaw ecotage team, at least to some extent. It didn’t seem like him, and she wondered if he had been the moderating influence one recently noticed in Sax’s activities. Was Hellas his destination, or was he returning to the southern sanctuaries? Well— she wouldn’t find out until Hellas at best, as the protocol was to ignore each other until they were in private.