“It wasn’t immediately obvious, where I was. In an office full of foreigners. And it was a Jewish holiday, Passover.

“We had the news on, cube and radio—one of the car bombs had gone off two blocks away.

“Five or six people started having trouble breathing. All of them dead in a couple of minutes. They could breathe in, but couldn’t exhale.

“We called 9-9-9 but of course got nothing. Went down to the street and . . .” Elza put her hand on my knee, under the table; I covered it with mine.

“Millions died all at once,” Snowbird said.

“Within a few minutes. When we got outside, cars were still crashing. Alarms going off all over the city. Dead people everywhere, of course; a few still dying. Some had jumped or fallen from balconies and lay crushed on the street and sidewalks.”

Snowbird spread all four hands. “I’m sorry. This causes you pain.”

“It’s been twenty years,” I said. “Twenty- one. To tell the truth, sometimes it feels like it didn’t happen to me at all. Like it happened to someone else, and he’s told me the story over and over.”

“It did happen to someone else,” Elza said. “It happened to whoever you were before.” Her fingers moved lightly.

“You probably know the numbers,” I said to the Martian. “Almost 70 percent of the country dead in less than ten minutes.”

“They still don’t know who did it?” Snowbird said.

“No one ever claimed responsibility. More than twenty years of intense investigation haven’t turned up one useful clue. They really covered their tracks.”

“So it was done by someone like you,” Moonboy said. “Not really like you.”

“I know what you mean, yes. It wasn’t some band of foaming- at-the-mouth anti-Semites. It was a country or corporation that had . . . people like us.”

“Could you do it?” Paul said. “I don’t mean morally. I mean could you manage the mechanics of it.”

“No. You can’t separate the mechanics from the morals. After twenty-one years, we still don’t have one molecule of testimony. The people who drove the car bombs died, of course—and we don’t think they knew they were going to die; they were all on their way to someplace, not parked at targets—but what happened to the dozens of other people who had to be involved? We think they were all murdered during or just after Gehenna. It wasn’t a time when one dead body more or less was going to stick out. Every lead we’ve ever had ends that day.”

Carmen was nodding slowly. “You don’t hate them?”

I saw what she meant. “Not really. I fear what they represent, in terms of the human potential for evil. But the individuals, no. What would be the point?”

“I read what you wrote about it,” she said, “in that journal overview.”

“International Affairs, the Twentieth Anniversary issue. You’ve been thorough.”

She smiled but looked directly at me. “I was curious, of course. We’ll be together a long time.”