Green mars (38 page)

They almost ran right by Coyote, who leaped out from behind a rock and scared them enough to knock them down like ninepins. Then they clambered up the rocky trail he had marked on the cliff wall, and were on the rim, under the full dome of the stars again, the bright lights of Senzeni Na like a spaceship that had dived into the opposite cliff.

Back in the boulder car Art gasped for air, still out of breath from the run down the canyon. “You’re going to have to—teach me that lung-gom,” he said to Nirgal. “My Lord you run fast.”

“Well, you too. I don’t know how you do it.”

“Fear.” He shook his head, sucked at the air. “This kind of thing is dangerous,” he complained to Coyote.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Coyote snapped. “If those bastards hadn’t stolen my supplies, we wouldn’t have had to do it.”

“Yeah, but you do stuff kind of like this all the time, right? And it’s dangerous. I mean, you need to be doing something other than sabotage in the outback. Something systemic.”

It turned out that fifty kilos was the absolute minimum they needed to get home, so they limped south with all noncritical systems shut off, so that the interior of the car was dark, and fairly cold. It was cold outside as well; through the lengthening nights of the early southern winter they began to encounter frost on the ground, and snowdrifts. Salt crystals on top of the drifts served as the seed points for ice flakes, which grew into thickets of ice flowers. They navigated between these white crystalline fields, dimly glowing in the starlight, until the fields merged into one great white blanket of snow, frost, rime, and ice flowers. Slowly they drove . over it, until one night the hydrogen peroxide ran out. “We could have got more,” Art said. “Shut up,” Coyote replied.

They ran on battery power, which would not last long. In the dark of the unlit car, the light cast by the white world outside was ghostly. None of them talked, except to discuss the essentials of driving. Coyote was confident that the distance the batteries would take them would be enough to see them home, but they were cutting it awfully fine, and if anything failed, if one of the ice-clogged wheels jammed in its well—they would have to try walking, Nirgal thought. Running. But Spencer and Sax wouldn’t be able to run far.

On the sixth night after the raid on Senzeni Na, however, around the end of the timeslip, the frosty ground ahead became a pure white line, which thickened on the horizon, and then came clear of it: the white cliffs of the southern polar ice cap. “It looks like a wedding cake,” Art said, grinning.

They were almost out of battery power, to the point that the car was slowing down. But Gamete was just a few kilometers clockwise around the polar cap. And so just after dawn, Coyote guided the halting car into the outlying garage in Nadia’s crater rim complex. They walked the last stretch, crunching over new frost in the raw long-shadowed morning light, under the great white overhang of dry ice.

Gamete gave Nirgal
the same feeling it always did, that he was trying to fit into old clothes that were much too small. But this time Art was there with him, and so the visit had the interest of showing a new friend an old home. Every day Nirgal took him around, explaining features of the place and introducing him to people. As he watched the range of expressions plainly exposed on Art’s face, from surprise to amazement to disbelief, the whole enterprise of Gamete began to strike Nirgal as truly odd. The white ice dome; its winds, mists, birds; the lake; the village, always freezing, weirdly shadowless, its white-and-blue buildings dominated by the crescent of bamboo treehouses ... it was a strange place. And Art found all of the issei equally amazing; he shook their hands, saying, “I’ve seen you on the vids, very pleased to meet you.” After introductions to Vlad and Ursula, Marina and Iwao, he muttered to Nirgal, “It’s like a wax museum.”

Nirgal took him down to meet Hiroko, and she was her usual benign, distant self, treating Art with about the same reserved friendliness she gave to Nirgal. Mother goddess of the world... . They were in her labs, and feeling obscurely annoyed by her, Nirgal took Art by the ectogene tanks, and explained what they were. Art’s eyes went perfectly round when he was surprised, and now they were like big white-and-blue marbles. “They look like refrigerators,” he said, and stared closely at Nirgal. “Was it lonesome?”

Nirgal shrugged, looked down at the small clear windows, like portholes. Once he had floated in there, dreaming and kicking... . It was hard to imagine the past, hard to believe in it. For billions of years he had not existed, and then one day, inside this little black box ... a sudden appearance, green in the white, white in the green.

“It’s so cold here,” Art remarked when they went back outside. He was wearing a big borrowed fiberfill coat, with the hood over his head.

“We have to keep a water ice layer coating the dry ice, so the air stays good. So it’s always a little under freezing, but not much. I like it myself. It strikes me as the best temperature of all.”

“Childhood.”

“Yeah.”

They visited Sax every day, and he would croak “Hello” or “Good-bye” in greeting, and try his best to talk. Michel was spending several hours a day working with him. “It’s definitely aphasia,” he told them. “Vlad and Ursula did a scan, and the damage is in the left anterior speech center. Nonfluent aphasia, sometimes called Broca’s aphasia. He has trouble finding the word, and sometimes he thinks he’s got it, but what comes out will be synonyms, or antonyms, or taboo words. You should hear the way he can say Bad results. It’s frustrating for him, but improvement from this particular injury is often good. Slow, however. Essentially, other parts of the brain have to learn to take over the functions of the damaged part. So—we work on it. It’s nice when it goes well. And it could be worse, obviously.”

Sax, who had been staring at them through this, nodded quizzically. He said, “I want to teach. To speech.”

Of all the people in Gamete to whom Nirgal introduced Art, the one Art hit it off with best was Nadia. They were drawn to each other instantly, to Nirgal’s surprise. But it pleased him to see it, and he watched his old teacher fondly as she made her own kind of confession in response to Art’s question barrage, her face looking very ancient except for her startling light brown eyes, with the green flecks around the pupil—eyes that radiated friendly interest and intelligence, and amusement at Art’s interrogation.

The three of them ended up spending hours together in Nirgal’s room talking, looking down at the village, or out the other window to the lake. Art walked around the little cylinder from window to door to window, fingering the cuts in the glossy green wood. “Do you call it wood?” he asked, looking at the bamboo. Nadia laughed. “I call it wood,” she said. “It’s Hiroko’s idea to live in these things. And a good one; good insulation, incredible strength, no carpentry but door and window installation ...”

“I guess you wish you had these bamboo in Underbill, eh?”

“The spaces we had were too small. Maybe in the arcades. Anyway this species wasn’t developed until recently.”

She turned the interrogation on him, and asked him scores of questions about Earth. What did they use for housing materials now? Were they going to use fusion power commercially? Was the UN irrevocably damaged by the war of ‘61? Were they trying to build a space elevator for Earth? How much of the population had gotten the aging treatments? Which of the big transnational were the most powerful? Were they fighting among themselves for preeminence?

Art answered these questions as fully as he could, and though he shook his head at the inadequacy of his answers, Nirgal for one learned a lot from them, and Nadia seemed to feel the same. And they both found themselves laughing fairly often.

When Art asked Nadia questions in turn, her answers were friendly, but varied greatly in length. Talking about her current projects she went on in detail, happy to describe the scores of construction sites she was working on in the southern hemisphere. But when he asked her questions about the early years in Underbill, in that bold direct way of his, she usually just shrugged, even if he asked about building details. “I don’t really remember it very well,” she would say.

“Oh come on.”

“No, I’m telling the truth. It’s a problem, actually. How old are you?”

“Fifty. Or fifty-one, I guess. I’ve lost track of the date.”

“Well, I am one hundred and twenty. Don’t look so shocked! With the treatments it’s not so old—you’ll see! I just had the treatment again two years ago, and I’m not exactly like a teenager, but I feel pretty good. Very good in fact. But I think memory may be the weak link. It may be the brain just won’t hold that much. Or maybe I just don’t try. But I’m not the only one having the problem. Maya is even worse than me. And everyone my age complains about it. Vlad and Ursula are getting concerned. I’m surprised they didn’t think of this back when they developed the treatments.”

“Maybe they did and then forgot.”

Her laugh seemed to take her by surprise.

Later at dinner, after talking about her construction projects again, Art said to her, “You really ought to try to convene a meeting of all these underground groups.”

Maya was at their table, and she looked at Art as suspiciously as she had in Echus Chasma. “It isn’t possible,” she declared. She looked much better than she had when they had parted, Nirgal thought—rested, tall, rangy, graceful, glamorous. She seemed to have shrugged off the guilt of murder as if it were a coat she didn’t like.

“Why not?” Art asked her. “You’d be a lot better off if you could live on the surface.”

“This is obvious: And we could move into the demimonde, if it were just that simple. But there is a large police force on the surface and in orbit, and the last time they saw us they were trying to kill us as quickly as possible. And the way they treated Sax does not give me any confidence that things have changed.”

“I’m not saying they have. But I think there are things you could do to oppose them more effectively. Getting together, for instance, and making a plan. Making contact with surface organizations that would help you. That kind of thing.”

“We have such contacts,” Maya said coldly. But Nadia was nodding. And Nirgal’s mind was racing with images of his years in Sabishii. A meeting of the underground... .

“The Sabishiians would come for sure,” he said. “They’re already doing stuff like this all the time. That’s what the demimonde is, in effect.”

Art said, “You should think about contacting Praxis as well. My ex-boss William Fort would be very interested in such a meeting. And the whole membership of Praxis is involved in innovations you would like.”

“Your ex-boss?” Maya said.

“Sure,” Art said with an easy smile. “I’m my own boss now.”

“You could say you are our prisoner,” Maya pointed out sharply.

“When you’re the prisoner of anarchists it’s the same thing, right?”

Nadia and Nirgal laughed, but Maya scowled and turned away.

Nadia said, “I think a meeting would be a good idea. We’ve let Coyote run the network for too long.”

“I heard that!” Coyote called from the next table.

“Don’t you like the idea?” Nadia asked him.

Coyote shrugged. “We have to do something, no doubt of that. They know we’re down here now.”

This caused a thoughtful silence.

“I’m going north next week,” Nadia said to Art. “You can come with me if you like—Nirgal, you too if you want. I’m going to drop in on a lot of sanctuaries, and we can talk to them about a meeting.”

“Sure,” Art said, looking pleased. And Nirgal’s mind was still racing as he thought of the possibilities. Being in Gamete again brought dormant parts of his mind back alive, and he saw clearly the two worlds in one, the white and the green, split into different dimensions, folded through each other—like the underground and the surface world, joined clumsily in the demimonde. A world out of focus... .

So the next week Art and Nirgal joined Nadia, and drove north. Because of Sax’s arrest Nadia did not want to risk staying in any of the open towns along their way, and she did not even seem to trust the other hidden sanctuaries; she was one of the most conservative of the old ones in terms of secrecy. Over the years of hiding she, like Coyote, had built a whole system of small shelters of her own, and now they drove from one to the next, spending the short days sleeping and waiting in relative comfort. They could not drive during the winter days because the fog hood had been lessening in thickness and area for several years now, and this year was often no more than a light mist, or patchy low clouds, swirling over the rough lumpy land. Once they were descending a rough drop in a foggy morning, after a 10 A.M. dawn, and Nadia was explaining that Ann had identified it as the remnant qf an earlier Chasma Australe—”She says there are literally scores of fossil Chasma Aus-trales down here, cut at different angles during earlier points in the cycle of precession”—and the fog swept away, and they could suddenly see for many kilometers, all the way to the shaggy ice walls at the mouth of the present Chasma Australe, gleaming in the distance. They were exposed—then the clouds closed over them again, very swiftly, enveloping them in murky flowing white, as if they were traveling in a snowstorm in which the snowflakes were so fine that they defied gravity, and blew about in suspension forever.

Nadia hated that kind of exposure, no matter how brief, and so she continued to hide through the days. They looked out the little windows of her shelters onto swirling clouds, which sometimes caught the light in sparkling arrays, so bright it hurt to look at them. Sunbeams cut through gaps between clouds, striking the long ridges and scarps of the blindingly white land. Once they even experienced a full whiteout, when all shadows disappeared, and everything else: a pure white world, in which it was impossible to make out even the horizon.

On other days icebows threw curves of pale pastel color against the intense whites, and once when the sun broke through, low over the land, it was surrounded by a ring of light as bright as it was. The landscape blazed white under this display, not uniformly but in patches, all shifting rapidly in the ceaseless winds. Art laughed to see it, and he never stopped exclaiming over the ice flowers, now as large as shrubs, and studded with spikes and lacy fans, and growing into each other at their edges, scr that in many areas the ground itself completely disappeared, and they drove across a crackling surface of shard blooms, crushing hundreds of them under their wheels. The long dark nights were almost a comfort after days like that.

Days passed, one like the next. Nirgal found it very comfortable to travel with Art and Nadia; they were both even-tempered, calm, funny; Art was 51 and Nadia 120, and Nirgal only 12, which was around 25 Terran years; but despite the discrepancies in age they interacted as equals. Nirgal could test his ideas on them freely, and they never laughed or scoffed, even when they saw problems and pointed them out. And in fact their ideas meshed fairly well, for the most part. They were, in Martian political terms, moderate green assimilationists—Booneans, Nadia called it. And they had similar temperaments, which was something that Nirgal had never felt before about anyone, not for the rest of his family in Gamete or his friends in Sabishii.

As they talked, night after night, they dropped in briefly on some of the big sanctuaries of the south, introducing Art to the people there, and broaching the idea of a meeting or congress. They took him to Bogdanov Vishniac, and amazed him with the giant complex built deep into the mohole, so much bigger than any other sanctuary. Art’s pop-eyed face was as eloquent as a speech, and brought back to Nirgal most acutely the feeling he had had as a child when he first visited it with Coyote.

The Bogdanovists were clearly interested in a meeting, but Mik-hail Yangel, one of the only one of Arkady’s associates to survive ‘61, asked Art what the long-range purpose of such a meeting would be.

“To retake the surface.”

“I see!” Mikhail’s eyes were wide. “Well, I’m sure you would have our support for that! People have been afraid to even bring that subject up.”

“Very good,” Nadia told Art as they drove on north. “If the Bogdanovists support a meeting, then it will probably happen. Most of the hidden sanctuaries are either Bogdanovist or else heavily influenced by them.”