“We could have a contest— who does Jackie listen to least?”

Maya laughed out loud. “Everyone would win.”

Art grinned. “You should slip your recommendations into Pauline. Get it to imitate Boone’s voice.”

Maya laughed again. “Good idea!”

They talked about the Hellas project, and she described the import of the new discovery west of Hellespontus. Art had been in contact with Fort, and he described the intricacies of the latest World Court decision, of which Maya had not heard. Praxis had brought a suit against Consolidated for arranging to tether their Terran space elevator in Colombia, which was so close to the site in Ecuador that Praxis had planned to use that both sites would be endangered. The court had decided in favor of Praxis, but had been ignored by Consolidated, who had gone ahead and built a base in their new client country, and were already prepared to maneuver their elevator cable down onto it. The other metanats were happy to see the World Court defied, and they were backing Consolidated in every way possible, which was creating trouble for Praxis.

Maya said, “But these metanationals are squabbling all the time yes?”

“That’s right.”

“The thing to do would be to start a big fight between some of them.”

Art’s eyebrows shot up. “A dangerous plan!”

“For who?”

“For Earth.”

“I don’t give a damn about Earth,” Maya said, tasting the words on her tongue.

“Join the crowd,” Art said ruefully, and she laughed again.

5

Happily, Jackie’s troop soon left for Sabishii. Maya decided to travel out to the site of the newly discovered aquifer. She took a train counterclockwise around the basin, over Niesten Glacier and south down the great western slope, past the hill town of Montepulciano to a tiny station called Yaonisplatz. From there she drove a little car along a road that followed a mountain valley through the violent ridges of the Hellespontus.

The road was no more than a rough cut in the regolith, secured by a fixative, marked by transponders, and obstructed in shadowed places by drifts of dirty hard summer snow. It ran through strange country. From space the Hellespontus had a certain visual and areomorphological coherence, as the ejecta had been thrown back from the basin in concentric rings. But on the surface these rough rings were almost impossible to make out, and what was left was random pilings of rock, stone dropped from the sky chaotically. And the fantastic pressures engendered by the impact had resulted in all manner of bizarre metamorphoses, the most common being giant shattercones, which were conical boulders fractured on every scale by the impact, so that some had faults you could drive into, while others were simply conical rocks on the ground, with microscopic flaws that covered every centimeter of their surfaces, like old china.