Green mars (36 page)

“Waiting for what?”

“For Sax Russell, basically. For Taneev, Kohl, Tokareva, Russell ...” He looked at Sax, shrugging almost apologetically.

Sax croaked something wordlike.

“Hey!” Coyote said.

Sax cleared his throat hard, tried again. His mouth pursed to a little O, and a horrible noise started deep in his throat: “W-w-w-w-w-” He looked over at Nirgal, gestured as if Nirgal would know.

“Why?” Nirgal said.

Sax nodded.

Nirgal felt his cheeks burn as an electric flush of acute relief ran through his skin, and he leaped up and gave the little man a hard hug. “You do understand!”

“Well,” Art was saying, “they did it as a kind of gesture. It was Fort’s idea, the guy who founded Praxis. ‘Maybe they’ll come back,’ he supposedly said to the Praxis people in Sheffield. I don’t know if he thought out the practicalities or not.”

“This Fort is strange,” Coyote said, and Sax nodded again.

“True,” Art said. “But I wish you could meet him. He reminds me of the stories you tell about Hiroko.”

“Does he know we’re out here?” Spencer asked.

Nirgal’s pulse leapt, but Art showed no sign of discomfort. “I don’t know. He suspects. He wants you to be out here.”

“Where does he live?” Nirgal asked.

“I don’t know.” Art described his visit to Fort. “So I don’t know exactly where he is. Somewhere on the Pacific. But if I could get word to him ...”

No one responded.

“Well, maybe later,” Art said.

Sax was looking out the rover’s low windshield at the distant rock fin, at the tiny line of lit windows marking the labs behind them, empty and silent. Coyote reached out and squeezed his neck. “You want it back, don’t you.” Sax croaked something.

On the empty plain of Amazonis there were few settlements of any kind. This was the back country, and they rolled rapidly south through it, night after night, and slept in the darkened cabin of the car through the days. Their biggest problem was finding adequate hiding places. On flat open plains the boulder car stood out like a glacial erratic, and Amazonis was almost nothing but flat open plain. They usually tucked into the apron of ejecta around one of the few craters they passed. After the dawn meals Sax sometimes exercised his voice, croaking incomprehensible words, trying to communicate with them and failing. This upset Nirgal even more than it seemed to bother Sax himself, who, though clearly frustrated, did not seem pained. But then he had not tried to talk to Simon in those last weeks... .

Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. “Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. “I’m afraid his interrogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”

“There’s such a thing as fluent aphasia?” Coyote said.

“Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can’t read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”

Sax nodded, as if to confirm the description.

“In fluent aphasia the subjects talk at great length, but are unaware that what they’re saying makes no sense.”

Art said, “I know a lot of people with that problem.”

Spencer ignored him. “We’ve got to get Sax down to Vlad and Ursula and Michel.”

“That’s what we’re doing.” Coyote gave Sax a squeeze on the arm before retiring to his mat.

On the fifth night after leaving the Bogdanovists, they approached the equator, and the double barrier of the fallen elevator cable. Coyote had passed the barrier in this region before, using a glacier formed by one of the aquifer outbursts of 2061, in Mangala Vallis. During the unrest water and ice had poured down the old arroyo for a hundred and fifty kilometers, and the glacier left behind when the flood froze had buried both passes of the fallen cable, at 152° longitude. Coyote had located a route over an unusually smooth stretch of this glacier, which had taken him across the two passes of the cable.

Unfortunately, when they approached Mangala Glacier—a long tumbled mass of gravel-covered brown ice, filling the bottom of a narrow valley—they found that it had changed since Coyote had last been there. “Where’s that rampway?” he kept demanding. “It was right here.”

Sax croaked, then made kneading motions with his hands, staring all the while through the windshield at the glacier.

Nirgal had a difficult time comprehending the glacier’s surface; it was a kind of visual static, all patches of dirty white and gray and black and tan, tumbled together until it was hard to distinguish size, shape, or distance. “Maybe it isn’t the same place,” he suggested.

“I can tell,” Coyote said.

“Are you sure?”

“I left markers. See, there’s one there. That trail duck on the lateral moraine. But beyond it should be a rampway up onto smooth ice, and it’s nothing but a wall of icebergs. Shit. I’ve been using this trail for ten years.”

“You’re lucky you had it that long,” Spencer said. “They’re slower than Terran glaciers, but they still flow downhill.”

Coyote only grunted. Sax croaked, then tapped at the inner lock door. He wanted to go outside.

“Might as well,” Coyote muttered, looking at a map on the screen. “We’ll have to spend the day here anyway.”

So in the predawn light Sax wandered the rubble plowed up by the glacier’s passage: a little upright creature with a light shining out of his helmet, like some deep-sea fish poking about for food. Something in the sight made Nirgal’s throat tighten, and he suited up and went outside to keep the old man company.

He wandered through the lovely chill gray morning, stepping from rock to rock, following Sax in his winding course through the moraine. Illuminated one by one in the cone of Sax’s headlamp were eldritch little worlds, the dunes and boulders interspersed with spiky low plants, filling cracks and hollows under rocks. Everything was gray, but the grays of the plants were shaded olive or khaki or brown, with occasional light spots, which were flowers—no doubt colorful in the sun, but now light luminous grays, glowing among thick furry leaves. Over his intercom Nirgal could hear Sax clearing his throat, and the little figure pointed at a rock. Nirgal crouched to inspect it. In cracks on the rock were growths like dried mushrooms, with black dots all over their shriveled cups, and sprinkled with what looked like a layer of salt. Sax croaked as Nirgal touched one, but he could not say what he wanted. “R-r-r ...”

They stared at each other. “It’s okay,” Nirgal said, stricken again by the memory of Simon.

They moved to another patch of foliage. The areas that supported plants appeared like little outdoor rooms, separated by zones of dry rock and sand. Sax spent about fifteen minutes in each frosty fellfield, stumbling around awkwardly. There were a lot of different kinds of plants, and only after they had visited several glens did Nirgal begin to see some that appeared again and again. None of them resembled the plants he had grown up with in Zy-gote, nor were they like anything in the arboretums of Sabishii. Only the first-generation plants, the lichens, mosses, and grasses, looked at all familiar, like the ground cover in the high basins above Sabishii.

Sax didn’t try to speak again, but his headlamp was like a pointed finger, and Nirgal often trained his headlamp on the same area, doubling the illumination. The sky turned rosy, and it began to feel like they were in the planet’s shadow, with sunlight just overhead.

Then Sax said, “Dr—!” and aimed his headlamp at a steep slope of gravel, over which a network of woody branches grew, like a mesh put there to hold the rubble in place. “Dr—/”

“Dryad,” Nirgal said, recognizing it.

Sax nodded emphatically. The rocks under their feet were covered with light green patches of lichen, and he pointed at a patch, and said, “Ap-ple. Red. Map. Moss.”

“Hey,” Nirgal said. “You said that really well.”

The sun rose, throwing their shadows over the gravel slope. Suddenly the dryad’s little flowers were picked out by the light, the ivory petals cupping gold stamens. “Dry-ad,” Sax croaked. Their headlamp beams were now invisible, and the flowers blazed with daylight color. Nirgal heard a sound over the intercom and looked into Sax’s helmet, and saw that the old man was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Nirgal pored over maps
and photos of the region. “I have an idea,” he said to Coyote. And that night they drove to Nicholson Crater, four hundred kilometers to the west. The falling cable had to have landed across this large crater, at least on its first pass, and it seemed to Nirgal that there might be some kind of break or gap near the rim.

Sure enough, when they rolled up the low flat-topped hill that was the crater’s north apron, they came to the eroded rim and saw the weird vision of a black line, crossing the middle of the crater some forty kilometers away, looking like an artifact of some long-forgotten race of giants. “Big Man’s ...” Coyote began.

“Hair strand,” Spencer suggested.

“Or black dental floss,” Art said.

The inner wall of the crater was much steeper than the outer apron, but there were a number of rim passes to choose from, and they drove without trouble down the stabilized slope of an ancient landslide, then crossed the crater floor, following the curve of the western inner wall. As they approached the cable, they saw that it emerged from a depression it had crushed in the rim, and drooped gracefully to the crater floor, like the suspension cable of a buried bridge.

They drove slowly under it. Where it left the rim, it was nearly seventy meters off the crater floor, and it didn’t touch down until it was over a kilometer out. They pointed the boulder car’s cameras up, and watched the view on the screen curiously; but the black cylinder was featureless against the stars, and they could only speculate about what the burn of the descent had done to the carbon.

“That’s nifty,” Coyote remarked as they drove up a smooth slope of eolian deposit, over another rim pass and out of the crater. “Now let’s hope there’s a way over the next pass.”

From the southern flank of Nicholson they could see south for many kilometers, and midway to the horizon was the black line of the cable’s second time around. This section had impacted many times harder than the first pass, and two swaths of ejecta paralleled the cable like henge mounds. It appeared that the cable just barely stuck out of the trench it had smashed into the plain.

As they got closer to it, weaving between ejecta boulders, they could see that the cable was a shattered mass of black rubble, a mound of carbon three to five meters higher than the plain, and steep on its sides, so that it did not look like it would be possible to drive over it in the boulder car.

Off to the east, however, was a dip in the mound of wreckage, and when they drove down the line to investigate, they found that a meteor impact subsequent to the cable’s fall had landed on the wreckage itself, smashing the cable and the ejecta swaths on both sides, and creating a new low crater that was all flecked and studded with black cable fragments, and occasional chunks of the diamond matrix that had spiraled inside the cable. It was a disordered mess of a crater, with no well-defined rim to block their way; and it looked like it would be possible to find a route through.

“Incredible,” said Coyote.

Sax shook his head vigorously. “Dei—Dei—”

“Phobos,” Nirgal said, and Sax nodded.

“Do you think so?” Spencer exclaimed.

Sax shrugged, but Spencer and Coyote discussed the possibility enthusiastically. The crater appeared oval, a so-called bathtub crater, which would support the idea of a low-angle impact. And while a random meteor hitting the cable in the forty years since its fall would be quite a coincidence, the fragments of Phobos had fallen entirely in the equatorial zone, and so a piece of it hitting the cable was much less surprising. “Very useful,” Coyote noted after he had negotiated their way over the little crater, and gotten the car south of the ejecta zone.

They parked next to one of the last big chunks of ejecta, and suited up and went back to have a look at the site.

There were brecciated chunks of rock everywhere, so that it was not obvious which were pieces of the meteor and which ejecta excavated by the cable’s fall. But Spencer was pretty good at rock ID, and he collected several samples that he said were exotic carbonaceous chondrite, very likely to be pieces of the impact rock. It would take a chemical analysis to be sure, but back in the car he looked at them under magnification, and declared himself confident that these were pieces of Phobos. “Arkady showed me a piece just like it, the first time he came down.” They passed around a heavy burned-looking black chunk. “Impact brecciation has metamorphosed it,” Spencer said, inspecting the stone when it came back to him. “I suppose it has to be called phobosite.”

“Not the rarest rock on Mars, either,” Coyote said.

To the southeast of Nicholson Crater, the two big parallel canyons of the Medusae Fossae ran for over three hundred kilometers, into the fteart of the southern highlands. Coyote decided to drive up East Medusa, the bigger of the two fractures. “I like to go through canyons when I can, see if the walls have any overhangs or caves. That’s how I’ve found most of my cache sites.”

“What if you run into a transverse scarp that crosses the whole canyon?” Nirgal asked.

“I backtrack. I’ve done an inhuman lot of backtracking, no doubt about that.”

So they drove up the canyon, which proved mostly flat-floored, for the rest of the night. The following night, as they continued south, the floor of the canyon began to rise, in steps that they were always able to negotiate. Then they reached a new and higher level of flat floor, and Nirgal, who was driving, braked the car. “There’s buildings up there!”

They all crowded around to look through the windshield. On the horizon, under the eastern wall of the canyon, a cluster of small white stone buildings stood silently.

After a half hour’s examination .with the car’s various imagers and scopes, Coyote shrugged. “No obvious electricity or warmth. Doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Let’s go have a look.”

So they drove toward the structures, and stopped beside a massive chunk of the cliff wall, which had rolled well out on the floor. From this distance they could see that the buildings were freestanding, with no tent around them; they appeared to be solid blocks of whitish rock, like the caliche blanco in the badlands north of Olympus. Small white figures stood motionlessly between these buildings, on white plazas ringed by white trees. It was all made of stone.

“A statue,” Spencer said. “A town of stone!”

“Mud,” Sax croaked, then pounded the dashboard angrily, giving it four sharp slams that startled them all. “Muh!—du!—sa!”

Spencer and Art and Coyote laughed. They clapped Sax on the shoulders as if they were trying to pile-drive him into the floor. Then they all suited up again, and went out to have a closer look.

The white walls of the buildings glowed eerily in the starlight, like giant soap carvings. There were some twenty buildings, and many trees, and a couple of hundred people—and also a few score lions, mixed freely among the people. All carved from white stone, which Spencer identified as alabaster. The central plaza seemed to have been petrified during an active morning; there was a crowded farmers’ market, and a group clustered around two men playing chess, with waist-high pieces on a large board. The black chess pieces and the black squares of the chessboard stood out dramatically in their surroundings—onyx, in an alabaster world.

Another group of statues watched a juggler, who looked up at invisible balls. Several of the lions were watching this exhibition closely, as if ready to bat something out of the air if the juggler came too close. All the faces of the statues, human or feline, were rounded and almost featureless, but every one of them somehow expressed an attitude.

“Look at the circular arrangement of the buildings,” Spencer said over the intercom. “It’s Bogdanovist architecture, or something like.”

“No Bogdanovist ever mentioned this to me,” Coyote said. “I don’t think any of them have ever been in this region. I don’t know anyone who has. This is pretty remote.” He looked around, a grin showing through his faceplate. “Someone spent a bit of time at this!”

“It’s strange what people will do,” Spencer said.

Nirgal wandered around the edges of the construct, ignoring the talk on the intercom, looking into one blurred face after another, looking into white stone doorways and white stone windows, his blood stirring. It was as if the sculptor had made the place in order to speak to him, to strike him with his own vision. The white world of his childhood, thrusting right out into the green—or, out here, into the red... .

And there was something in the peace of the place. Not just the stillness, but the marvelous relaxation in all the figures, the flowing calm of their stances. Mars could be this way. No more hiding, no more strife, the children racing around the market, the lions walking among them like cats... .

After an extended tour of the alabaster town, they returned to the car and drove on. About fifteen minutes later Nirgal spotted another statue, a white bas-relief face only, emerging from the cliff face opposite the town. “The Medusa herself,” Spencer said, pausing in his nightly drink. The basilisk glare of the Gorgon was directed back at the town, and the stone snakes of her hair twisted away from her head and back into the cliffside, as if the rock had only just seized her by a serpentine ponytail, preventing her from emerging completely from the planet.

“Beautiful,” Coyote said. “Remember that face—if that’s not a self-portrait of the sculptor, I’m much mistaken.” He drove on without stopping, and Nirgal stared at the stone face curiously. It seemed to be Asian, although perhaps that was only the effect of having the snake hair pulled back. He tried to memorize the features, feeling it was someone he already knew.

They came out of the Medusa’s canyon before dawn, and stopped to hide through the day, and chart their next move. Beyond Burton Crater, which lay before them, the Memnonia Fossae cut the land east to west for hundreds of kilometers, blocking their way south. They had to go west, toward Williams and Ejriksson craters, then south again toward Columbus Crater, and after that weave through a narrow gap in the Sirenum Fossae farther south— and so on. Doing a continuous dance around craters, cracks, escarpments, and hollows. The southern highlands were extremely rough compared to the smooth long vistas of the north—Art commented on the difference, and Coyote said irritably, “It’s a planet, man. There’s all kind of land.”

Every day they woke to an alarm set for an hour before sunset, and spent the last light of day eating a spare breakfast, and watching the garish alpenglow colors spread with the shadows over the rugged landscape. Then every night they drove, without ever being able to use the autopilot, navigating the broken terrain kilometer by kilometer. Nirgal and Art took the graveyard shift together on most nights, and continued their long conversations. Then as the stars faded, and dawn’s pure violet light stained the eastern sky, they found places where the boulder car would be inconspicuous—in this latitude the work of a moment, almost just a matter of stopping, as Art said—and ate a leisurely supper, watching the sharp blast of sunrise and its sudden creation of great fields of shadow. A couple of hours later, after a planning session, and occasional trips out, they would darken the windshield, and sleep through the day.

At the end of another long night’s conversation about their respective childhoods, Nirgal said, “I suppose it wasn’t until Sabishii that I realized that Zygote was ...”

“Unusual?” Coyote said from his sleeping mat behind them. “Unique? Bizarre? Hirokolike?”

Nirgal was not surprised to discover that Coyote was awake; the old man slept poorly, and often muttered a dreamy commentary to Nirgal and Art’s narrative, which they generally ignored, as he was mostly asleep. But now Nirgal said, “Zygote reflects Hiroko, I think. She’s very inward.”

“Ha,” Coyote said. “She didn’t use to be.”

“When was that?” Art pounced, swiveling in his chair to include Coyote in their little circle of talk.

“Oh, back before the beginning,” Coyote said. “In prehistoric times, back on Earth.”

“Is that when you met her?”

Coyote grunted affirmatively.

This was where he always stopped, when he was talking to Nirgal. But now with Art there, with just the three of them awake in all the world, in a little circle lit by the infrared imager, Coyote’s thin crooked face had a different expression than its usual mulish dismissal, and Art leaned over him and said firmly, “So just how did you get to Mars, anyway?”

“Oh God,” Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “It’s hard to remember something that long ago. It’s almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anyniore.”

He glanced up at them, then closed his eyes, as if recalling the opening lines. The two younger men stared down at him, waiting.

“It was all due to Hiroko, of course. She and I were friends. We met young, when we were students at Cambridge. We were both cold in England, so we warmed each other. This was before she met Iwao, and long before she became the great mother goddess of the world. And back theft we shared a lot of things. We were outsiders at Cambridge, and we were good at the work. And so we lived together for a couple of years there. Very much like what Nirgal has been saying about Sabishii. Even what he said about Jackie. Although Hiroko ...”