She pulled a sweater over her head (her scalp felt funny, bare and raw), then looked at him, surprised. He raised a finger admonishingly. “Your anger will help, but it can’t be everything. Frank was nothing but anger, remember? And you see where it got him. You have to fight not only against what you hate, but for what you love, you see? And so you have to find what it is you love. You have to remember it, or create it.”

“Yes yes,” she said, suddenly irritated. “I love you, but shut up now.” She lifted her chin imperiously. “Let’s go eat.”

2

The train from Sabishii out to the Burroughs-Hellas piste was only four cars long, a little locomotive and three passenger cars, none more than half full. Maya walked through them to the last seats of the final car; people glanced at her, but only briefly. No one seemed perturbed by her lack of hair. There were a lot of vulture women on Mars after all, even some on this very train, also wearing work jumpers of cobalt or rust or light green, also old and UV-weathered: a kind of cliché, the ancient Mars veterans, here from the beginning, seen it all, ready to bore you to tears with tales of dust storms and stuck lock doors.

Well, it was just as well. It would not have done to have people nudging each other and exclaiming There’s Toitovna! Still she could not help sitting down feeling ugly and forgotten. Which was stupid. She needed to be forgotten. And ugliness helped that; the world wants to forget the ugly.

She plumped into her seat and stared forward. Apparently Sabishii had been visited by a contingent of Terran Japanese tourists, all of them clustered in facing seats at the front of the car, chattering and looking around with their vid spectacles, no doubt recording every minute of their life movies, recordings that no one would ever watch.

The train slid gently forward and they were off. Sabishii was still a small tent town in the hills, but the hummocky land between the town and the main piste was studded with carved peak boulders, and small shelters cut into the cliffs. All north-facing slopes were caked with the snow of the autumn’s first storms, and the sun bounced in blinding flashes off slick mirrors of ice as they floated by frozen ponds. The low dark shrubs were all based on ancestors from Hokkaido, and the vegetation gave the land a spiky black-green texture; it was a collection of bonsai gardens, each of them an island separated by a harsh sea of broken rock.