Eventually the flood of new dark water whitened all over its surface, and stopped moving. “It’s coming out somewhere else now,” Diana said. “It works like sedimentation in a river delta. The main channel for this lobe is actually well to the south of here.”

“I’m glad I saw this. Let’s get back.”

They drove back to Hell’s Gate, and that night had supper together again, on the same restaurant terrace under the great bridge. Maya asked Diana a great number of questions about Paul and Esther and Kasei and Nirgal and Rachel and Emily and Reull and the rest of Hiroko’s brood, and their children and their children’s children. What were they doing now? What were they going to do? Did Nirgal have lots of followers?

“Oh yes, of course. You saw how it is. He travels all the time, and there’s a whole network of natives in the northern cities who take care of him. Friends, and friends of friends, and so on.”

“And you think these people will support a . . .”

“Another revolution?”

“I was going to say independence movement.”

“Whatever you call it, they’ll support it. They’ll support Nirgal. Earth looks like a nightmare to them, a nightmare trying to drag us down into it. They don’t want that.”

“They?” Maya said, smiling.

“Oh me too.” Diana smiled back. “Us.”

• • •

As they continued clockwise around Hellas, Maya had cause to remember that conversation. A consortium from Elysium, without any metanat or UNTA connections that Maya could discover, had just finished roofing over the Harmakhis-Reull valleys, using the same method that had been used to roof Dao. Now there were hundreds of people in those two linked canyons, outfitting the aerators and working up soils, and seeding and planting the nascent biosphere of the canyons’ mesocosm. Their on-site greenhouses and manufacturing plants were producing much of what they needed for this work, and metals and gases were being mined out of the badlands of Hesperia to the east, and brought into the town at the mouth of Harmakhis Vallis called Sukhumi. These people had the starter programs and the seeds, and they did not appear to put much stock in the Transitional Authority; they had not asked permission from it to engage in their project, and they actively disliked the official crews from the Black Sea Group, who were usually Terran metanat representatives.

They were hungry for manpower, however, and were happy to get more technicians or generalists from Deep Waters, and any equipment they could cadge from its headquarters. Practically every group Maya met in the Harmakhis-Reull region made a pitch for aid, and most of them were young natives, who seemed to think they had just as much chance at the equipment as anyone else, even though they were not affiliated with Deep Waters or any other company.