Green mars (41 page)

All such calculations disappeared as Jackie pulled her hand free of his and began to take off her glove. Nirgal did the same, rolling the stretching fabric up until the wrist was exposed and his thumb free. The glove popped off his fingertips. It was about 278 degrees, he reckoned, brisk but not particularly cold. And then a wave of warm air buffeted him, followed by a wave of hot air, perhaps 315°K, which quickly passed and was followed by the jostling cool air his hand had been exposed to first. As he peeled off his other glove it became clear that the temperature was all over the place, each knock of the wind distinctly different. Jackie had already unzipped her jacket from her helmet, and down the front, and now as Nirgal watched she pulled it off, baring her upper body. The air struck her and goose-pimples ran over her skin like cat’s paws over water. She leaned over to get off her boots, and her air tank lay in the hollow of her spine, her ribs standing out under her skin. Nirgal stepped over and pulled her pants down over her bottom. She reached back and pulled him to her and wrestled him to the ground, and they went down together in a tangle, twisting fast to get onto the thinsulate pads; the ground was very chill. They got their clothes off, and she lay back with her air tank above her right shoulder. He lay on her; in the chill air her body was amazingly warm, radiating heat like the lava, buffets of heat pushing him from below and from the side, the wind airy and cooked, her body pink and muscular, wrapping him hard with arms and legs, startlingly tangible in the sunlight. They bonked faceplates. Their helmets were pumping out air hard, to compensate for the leaks around shoulders, backs, chests, collarbones. For a time they looked each other in the eye, separated by the double layer of glass, which seemed the only thing keeping them from fusing into one being. The sensation was so powerful it felt dangerous—they bonked and bonked, expressing the desire to fuse, but knowing they were safe. Jackie’s eyes had a strange vibrant border between iris and pupil. The little black round windows were deeper than any mohole, a drop to the center of the universe. He had to look away, he had to! He lifted off her to look at her long body, which, stunning as it was, was still less stunning than the depths of her eyes. Wide rangy shoulders, oval navel, the so-feminine length of her thighs— he closed his eyes, he had to. The ground trembled under them, moving with Jackie so that it felt as if he were plunging into the planet itself, a wild muscular female body—he could lie perfectly still, they both lay perfectly still, and still the world vibrated them, in a gentle but intense seismic ravishment. This living rock. As his nerves and skin began to thrum and sing he turned his head to look out at the flowing magma and then everything was coming together.

They left the Rayleigh volcano, and rolled back down into the fog hood’s darkness. On the second night after leaving Rayleigh they approached Gamete. In the dark gray of an especially thick noon twilight they came up and under the great overhang of ice, and suddenly Jackie leaned forward with a cry and slapped off the autopilot, then kicked down the brake.

Nirgal had been dozing, and he caught himself on his steering wheel, staring out to see what the trouble was.

The cliff where the garage had been was shattered—a great ice fall spilled away from the cliff, covering where the garage had been. The ice at the top of the break was heavily starred, as by explosion. “Oh,” Jackie cried, “they’ve blown it up! They’ve killed them all!”

Nirgal felt as if he had been punched in the stomach; he was amazed to find what a physical blow fear could wield. In his mind he was numb, and seemed to feel nothing—no anguish, no despair, nothing. He reached out and squeezed Jackie’s shoulder—she was shaking—and peered anxiously through the thick blowing mist.

“There’s the bolt-hole,” he said. “They wouldn’t have been caught unawares.” The tunnel led through an arm of the polar cap to Chasma Australe, where there was a shelter in the ice wall.

 
“But—” Jackie said, and swallowed. “But if they didn’t get any warning!”

“Let’s get around to the shelter in Australe,” Nirgal said, taking over the controls.

He bounced them over the ice flowers at the car’s top speed, concentrating on the terrain and trying not to think. He did not want to get to the other shelter—get there and find it empty, taking away his last hope, the only way he had of staving off this disaster. He wanted never to arrive, to keep driving clockwise around the polar cap forever, no matter the torque of apprehension that was causing Jackie to hiss as she breathed, and to moan from time to time. In Nirgal it was only a numbness, an inability to think. I don’t feel a thing, he thought wonderingly. But unbidden images of Hi-roko kept flashing before him as if projected on the windshield, or standing ghostlike out in the driving mists. There was a chance that the assault had come from space, or by missile from the north, in which case there might not have been any warning. Wiping the green world out of the universe, and leaving only the white world of death. The colors drained from everything, as in this gray-fog winter world.

He pursed his lips and concentrated on the icescape, driving with a ruthless touch he had not known he had. The hours passed and he did his best not to think of Hiroko or Nadia or Art or Sax or Maya or Dao or any of the rest: his family, neighborhood, town, and nation, all under that one small dome. He bent over his twisted stomach and focused on the world of driving, on each little bump and hollow to be dodged in the vain attempt to make it a less rattled ride.

They had to go clockwise for three hundred kilometers, and then most of the way up the length of Chasma Australe, which in late winter narrowed and became so choked with ice blocks that there was only a single route through, marked by weak little directional transponders. There he was forced to slow down, but under the dark mist they could drive at all hours, and they did so until they reached the low wall that marked the refuge. It was just fourteen hours after their departure from the gate of Gamete—an accomplishment, over such jagged frosty terrain—but Nirgal didn’t even note it. If the refuge was empty—

If it was empty ... The numbness in him was eroding fast as they approached the low wall at the head of the chasm; there was no sign of anyone or anything there, and his fear was breaking through the numbness like orange magma out of the cracks in black lava, it gushed out and billowed through him, became an unbearable ripping tension in every cell of him... .

Then a light flickered from low on the wall, and Jackie cried “Ah!” as if stuck with a pin. Nirgal accelerated and the car bounded toward the ice wall, he almost crashed the car right into it; he slammed on the brakes and the big wire wheels of the car skidded very briefly, then ground to a halt. Jackie popped on her helmet and dashed into the lock, and Nirgal followed, and after an agonizing suck and pump they dropped out of. the lock onto the ground, and hurried to the lock door in a shallow recess in the ice. The door opened and four suited figures leaped out holding guns; Jackie cried out over the common band, and in a second the four were hugging them; so far so good, although it was conceivable that they were just comforting them, and Nirgal was still in an agony of suspense, when he saw Nadia’s face behind one of the faceplates. She gave him the thumbs-up sign, and he realized that he had been holding his breath for what seemed like the last fifteen hours entire, though no doubt it was only since he had jumped out of the car. Jackie was crying with relief and Nirgal felt that he wanted to cry too, but the sudden disintegration of the numbness and then the fear had left him merely shattered, exhausted, beyond tears. Nadia led him into the refuge lock by hand, as if she understood this, and when the lock was closed and pumping up Nirgal began to understand the voices on the common band: “I was so -scared, I thought you were dead.” “We got out the escape tunnel, we saw them coming—”

Inside the shelter they took off their helmets and went through a hundred rounds of embracing. Art slapped him on the back, his eyes popping out like eggs: “So glad to see you two!” He pulled Jackie into a rough hug, then held her out at arm’s length and looked at her wet snotty red-eyed girlish face with approval and admiration, as if just this moment accepting that she was human too, and not some feline goddess.

As they staggered down the narrow tunnel to the refuge’s rooms, Nadia told them the story, scowling as she recalled it. “We saw them coming and got way up the back tunnel, and then brought down both domes, and all the tunnels. So we may have killed a good number of them, but I don’t know—I don’t know how many they sent in, or how far they got. Coyote’s out shadowing them to see if he can tell. Anyway, it’s done.”

 
At the end of the tunnel was a crowded refuge of several little chambers, roughly walled, floored and ceilinged by insulation panels, set right against cavities in the ice. Every room radiated from a larger central chamber that served as kitchen and dining hall. Jackie hugged everyone in there but Maya, ending with Nirgal. They held each other hard, and Nirgal felt her trembling, and realized he was trembling as well, in a kind of synchronic vibration. The silent, desperate, fearful drive would strengthen the bond as much as their lovemaking by the volcano, or more—it was hard to tell—he was too tired to be able to read the powerful vague emotions sloshing through him. He disengaged from Jackie and sat, feeling suddenly exhausted to tears. Hiroko sat beside him, and he listened to her as she told him what had happened in more detail. The attack had started with the sudden appearance of several space planes, dropping onto the flat outside the hangar in a group. So they had had very little warning inside, and the people at the hangar had reacted in confusion, telephoning in to warn the others, but failing to activate Coyote’s defense system, which apparently they had simply forgotten. Coyote was disgusted about this, Hiroko said, and Nirgal could well believe it. “You have to stop paratrooper attacks at the very moment of landing,” he said. Instead the people at the hangar had retreated into the dome. After some confusion they had gotten everyone up into the escape tunnel, and once they were past the blast point Hiroko had ordered them to use the Swiss defense and bring down the dome, and Kasei and Dao had obeyed her, and so the whole dome had been blown down, killing whatever part of the attack force was inside, burying them in million of tons of dry ice. Radiation readings seemed to indicate that the Rick-over had not suffered a meltdown, although it certainly had been crushed along with everything else. Coyote had disappeared down a side tunnel with Peter, out a bolt-hole of his own, and Hiroko didn’t know exactly where they had gone. “But I think those space planes may be in trouble.”

So Gamete was gone, and the shell of Zygote too. In some future age the polar cap would sublime away and reveal their flattened remnants, Nirgal thought absently; but for now it was buried, utterly unreachable.

And here they were. They had gotten out with only some AIs, and the walkers on their backs. And now they were at war with the Transitional Authority (presumably), with some part of the force that had assaulted them still out there.

“Who were they?” Nirgal asked.

Hiroko shook her head. “We don’t know. Transitional Authority, Coyote said. But there are a lot of different units in UNTA security, and we need to find out if this is the full Transitional Authority’s new policy, or if some unit has gone on a rampage.”

“What will we do?” Art asked.

At first no one answered.

Finally Hiroko said, “We’ll have to ask for shelter. I think Dorsa Brevia has the most room.”

“What about the congress?” Art asked, reminded of it by the mention of Dorsa Brevia.

“I think we need it now more than ever,” Hiroko said.

Maya was frowning. “It could be dangerous to congregate,” she pointed out. “You’ve told a lot of people about this.”

“We had to,” Hiroko said. “That’s the point of it.” She looked around at them all, and even Maya did not dare contradict her. “Now we have to take the risk.”

PART 7

What Is to Be

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Done?

               
  
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The few big buildings in Sabishii were faced with polished stone, picked for colors that were unusual on Mars: alabaster, jade, malachite, yellow jasper, turquoise, onyx, lapis lazuli. The smaller buildings were wooden. After traveling by night and hiding by day, the visitors found it a pleasure to walk in the sunlight between low wooden buildings, under plane trees and fire maples, through stone gardens and across wide boulevards of streetgrass, past canals lined by cypress, which occasionally widened into lily-covered ponds, crossed by high arching bridges. They were almost on the equator here, and winter meant nothing; even at aphelion hibiscus and rhododendron were flowering, and pine trees and many varieties of bamboo shot high into the warm breezy air.

The ancient Japanese greeted their visitors as old and valued friends. The Sabishii issei dressed in copper jumpsuits, went barefoot, and wore long ponytails, and many earrings and necklaces. One of them, bald, with a wispy white beard and a deeply wrinkled face, took the visitors on a walk, to stretch their legs after their long drives. His name was Kenji, and he had been the first Japanese to step on Mars, though no one remembered that anymore.

At the city wall they looked out at enormous boulders balancing on nearby hilltops, carved into one fantastic .shape after another.

“Have you ever been to the Medusae Fossae?”

Kenji only smiled and shook his head. The kami stones on the hills were honeycombed with rooms and storage spaces, he told them, and along with the mohole mound maze they now could house a very great number of people, as many as twenty thousand, for as long as a year. The visitors nodded. It seemed possible it might become necessary.

Kenji took them back to the oldest part of town, where the visitors had been given rooms in the original compound. The rooms were smaller and more spare than most of the town’s student apartments, and had a patina of age and use that made them more like nests than rooms. The issei still slept in some of them.

As the visitors walked through these rooms, they did not look at each other. The contrast between their history and those of the Sabishiians was too stark. They stared at the furniture, disturbed, distracted, withdrawn. And after that evening’s meal, after a lot of sake had gone down the hatches, one said, “If only we had done something like this.”

Nanao began to play a bamboo flute.

“It was easier for us,” Kenji said. “We were all Japanese together. We had a model.”

“It doesn’t seem much like the Japan I remember.”

“No. But that isn’t the true Japan.”

They took their cups and a few bottles, and climbed up stairs to a pavilion on top of a wooden tower next to their compound. Up there they could see the trees and rooftops of the city, and the jagged array of boulders standing on the black skysill It was the last hour of twilight, and except for a wedge of lavender in the west the sky was a rich midnight blue, liberally flecked with stars. A string of paper lanterns hung in a grove of fire maples below.

“We are the true Japanese. What you see in Tokyo today is transnational. There is another Japan. We can never go back to that, of course. It was a feudal culture in any case, and had features we cannot accept. But what we do here has its roots in that culture. We are trying to find a new way, a way which rediscovers the old one, or reinvents it, for this new place.”

“Kasei Nippon.”

“Yes, but not just for Mars! For Japan also. As a model for them, you see? An example of what they can become.”

And so they drank rice wine under the stars. Nanao played his flute, and down in the park under the paper lanterns someone laughed. The visitors sat leaning against each other, thinking. They talked for a while about all the sanctuaries, how different they were and yet hew much they had in common.

“This congress is a good idea.”

The visitors nodded, in various degrees of assent.

“It’s just what we need. I mean, we have been getting together to celebrate John’s jestival for how many years now? And it’s been good. Very pleasant. Very important. We have needed it, for our own sakes. But now things are changing fast. We can’t pretend to be a cabal. We have to deal with the rest of them.”

They talhed specifics for a while: attendants at the congress, security measures, problem issues.

“Who attacked the egg—the egg?”

“A security team from Burroughs. Subarashii and Armscor have organized what they call a sabotage investigation unit, and they’ve gotten the Transitional Authority to bless the operation. They’ll be coming south again, no doubt of that. We have almost waited too long.”

“They got the institution—the information—-from me?”

A snort. “You should resist thinking you are so important.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s the return of the elevator driving all this.”

“And they are building one for Earth as well And so ...”

“We had better act.”

Then as the stone sake bottles kept going around, and emptying, they gave up on such seriousness, and talked about the past year, things they had seen in the outback, gossip about mutual acquaintances, new jokes heard. Nanao got out a packet of balloons, and they filled them and tossed them out into the city’s night breeze, and watched them float down onto the trees and the old habitats. They passed around a canister of nitrous oxide, took breaths and laughed. The stars made a thick net overhead. One told stories of space, of the asteroid belt. They tried to nick exposed bits of wood with their pocket knives and failed. “This congress will be what we call nema-washi. Preparing the ground.”

Two stood, arms around each other, and swayed until they had caught their balance, then held out their little cups in a toast.

“Next year on Olympus.”

“Next year on Olympus,” the others repeated, and drank.