“Face it,” he said. Nadia prepared herself for bad news, but he continued by saying, “Face the dike with a diamond coating. That would last fairly long. Perhaps a few million years.”

“Hmm,” Nadia said. It was probably true. There would be seepage from below, perhaps. But in any case, whatever the particulars, they would have to maintain the system in perpetuity, and with no room for error, as Burroughs was just 20 kilometers south of the dike, and some 150 meters lower than it. A strange place to end up. Nadia trained her binoculars in the direction of the city, but it lay just over her horizon, about 70 kilometers to the northwest. Of course dikes could be effective; Holland’s dikes had held for centuries, protecting millions of people and hundreds of square kilometers, right up until the recent flood— and even now those great dikes were holding, and would be broached first by flanking floods through Germany and Belgium. Certainly dikes could be effective. But it was a strange fate nevertheless.

Nadia pointed her binoculars along the ragged rock of the Great Escarpment. What looked like flowers in the distance were actually massive lumps of coral cactus. A stream looked like a staircase made of lily pads. The rough redrock slope made for a very stark, surreal, lovely landscape. . . . Nadia was pierced by an unexpected paroxysm of fear, that something might go wrong and she might suddenly be killed, prevented from witnessing any more of this world and its evolution. It could happen, a missile might burst out of the violet sky at any moment— this refuge was target practice, if some frightened battery commander out at the Burroughs spaceport learned of its presence and decided to deal with the problem preemptively. They could be dead within minutes of such a decision.

But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always. She dismissed the thought, and went downstairs with Sax.

• • •

She wanted to go into Burroughs and see things, to be on the scene and judge for herself: walk around and observe the citizens of the town, see what they were doing and saying. Late on Thursday she said to Sax, “Let’s go in and have a look.”

But it seemed to be impossible. “Security is heavy at all the gates,” Maya told her over the wrist. “And the trains coming in are checked at the stations very closely. Same with the subway to the spaceport. The city is closed. In effect we’re hostages.”

“We can see what’s happening on-screen,” Sax pointed out. “It doesn’t matter.”

Unhappily Nadia agreed. Shikata ga nai, apparently. But she didn’t like the situation, which seemed to her to be rapidly approaching a stalemate, at least locally. And she was intensely curious about conditions in Burroughs. “Tell me what it’s like,” she asked Maya over their phone link.