In the early dawn he woke suddenly. He sat against the wail of his platform, surprised that the whole evening had not turned out to be a dream. He looked over the edge; the ground was far, far below. It was like being in the crow’s nest of an enormous ship; it reminded him of his high bamboo room in Zygote, but everything here was vastly bigger, the starry dome of the sky, the horizon’s distant jagged black line. All the land was a rumpled dark blanket, with the water of the reservoir a squiggle of silver inlaid into it.
He made his way down the stairs; four hundred of them. The tree was perhaps 150 meters tall, standing over the 150-meter drop of the canyon cliff. In the presunrise light he looked down on the wall over which they had tried to drive the antelope, saw the ravine they had crashed down, the clear dam, the mass of water behind it.
He went back to the henge. A few of the hunters were up, coaxing the fire back to life, shivering in the dawn chill. Nirgal asked them if they were moving on that day. They were; north through the Juventa Chaos, then on toward the southwest shore of the Chryse Gulf. After that they didn’t know.
Nirgal asked if he could join them for a while. They looked surprised; surveyed him; spoke among themselves in a language he didn’t recognize. While they talked, Nirgal wondered that he had asked. He wanted to see the diana again, yes. But it was more than that. Nothing in his lung-gom-pa had been like that last half hour of the hunt. Of course the running had set the stage for the experience — the hunger, the weariness — but then it had happened, something new. Snowy forest floor, the pursuit through the primeval trees — the dash down the ravine — the scene under the dam…
The early risers were nodding at him. He could come along.
All that day they hiked north, threading a complicated path through the Juventa Chaos. That evening they came to a small mesa, its whole cap covered by an apple orchard. A ramp road led the way up to this grove. The trees had been pruned to the shape of cocktail glasses, and now new shoots rose straight up from the gnarled older branches. Through the afternoon they pulled ladders around from tree to tree, pruning the thin shoots away and thereby harvesting some hard, tart, unripe little apples, which they saved.
In the center of the grove was a open-walled round-roofed structure. A disk house, they called it. Nirgal walked through it, admiring the design. The foundation was a round slab of concrete, polished to a finish like marble. The roof was also round, held up by a simple T of interior walls, a diameter and a radius. In the open semicircle were kitchen and living space; on the other side, bedrooms and bathroom. The circumference, now open to the air, could be closed off in inclement weather by clear walls of tenting material, drawn around the circle like drapes.
There were disk houses all over Lunae, the woman who had butchered the antelope told Nirgal. Other groups used the same set of houses, tending the orchards when they passed through. They were all part of a loose co-op, working out a nomad life, with some agriculture, some hunting, some gathering. Now one group was cooking down the little apples, making applesauce for preservation; others were grilling antelope steaks over a fire outside, or working in a smokehouse.
Two round baths right next to the disk house were now steaming, and some of the group were shedding their clothes and hopping into the smaller bath, to clean up before supper. They were very dirty; they had been in the back country a long time. Nirgal followed the woman (her hands still spotted with dried blood) and joined them in the bath, the hot water like another world, like the heat of the fire transmuted to liquid that one could touch, in which one could immerse one’s body.
They woke at dawn and lazed around a fire, brewing coffee and kava, talking, stitching clothes, working around the disk house. After a while they gathered their few traveling possessions and killed the fire and moved out. Everyone carried a backpack or waistpack, but most of them traveled as lightly as Nirgal or more so, with nothing but thin sleeping rolls and some food, and a few with spears or bows and arrows slung over a shoulder. They walked hard through the morning, then split into smaller groups to gather pine nuts, acorns, meadow onions, wild corn; or hunt for marmots or rabbits or frogs, or perhaps larger game. They were lean people; their ribs showed, their faces were thin. We like to stay a little hungry, the woman told him. It makes the food taste better. And indeed every night of this extended walk Nirgal bolted his food as during his runs, shaky and ravenous; and everything tasted like ambrosia. They walked a long distance every day, and during their big hunts they often ended up in terrain that would have been a disaster to run in, terrain so rough that it was often four or five days before they all managed to find each other again, at the next disk house in its orchard. Since Nirgal didn’t know where these were, he had to stick close to one or another of the group. Once they had him take the four children in the group on an easier route across Lunae Planum’s cratered terrain, and the children told him what direction to take every time they had to make a choice; and they were the first to reach the next disk house. The kids loved it. Often they were consulted by the larger group as to when they should leave a disk house. “Hey you kids, is it time to go?” They would answer yes or no very firmly within seconds, in concert. Once two adults got in a fight and afterward they had to present their cases to the four kids, who decided against one of them. The butcher woman explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge us. They’re hard but fair.”
They harvested some of the yield of the orchards: peaches, pears, apricots, apples. If a crop was getting overripe they harvested everything and cooked it down and bottled it as sauces or chutneys, leaving it in big pantries under the disk houses for other groups, or for themselves on their next time through. Then they were off again, north over Lunae until it fell down the Great Escarpment, here very dramatically, dropping from Lunae’s high plateau five thousand meters down to the Chryse Gulf, in only just over a hundred horizontal kilometers.
The way was difficult across this tilted country, the land ripped and corrugated by a million small deformations. No trails had been constructed here, and there was no good way through; it was up and down and over and back and up and down again; and nothing much to hunt; and no disk houses nearby; and not much food to be found. And one of the youngsters slipped while they were crossing a line of coral cactus, seaming the land like a living barbed-wire fence, and he fell on one knee into a nest of spines. The magnesium poles served then as a stretcher frame, and on they went north carrying the crying boy, the best hunters out on the flanks of the group with bows and arrows, to see– if they could shoot anything flushed by their passage. Nirgal saw several misses, then one long flight of an arrow that hit a running jackrabbit, which tumbled and flopped until they killed it — a tremendous shot, it had them all leaping around shrieking. They burned more calories celebrating the shot than they ever got back from eating the tiny shreds of rabbit meat that were each person’s share, and the butcher woman was contemptuous. “Ritual cannibalism of our rodent brother,” she scoffed as she ate her shred. “Don’t ever tell me there’s no such thing as luck.” But the hothead spear thrower just laughed at her, and the others seemed cheered by their mouthful of meat.
Then later that same day they came on a young caribou bull, off on his own, looking disoriented. Their food problems were solved, if they could catch him. But he was wary despite his confused air, and he kept beyond the reach of even the longest bow shot, heading away from the group, down the Great Escarpment with all the hunters in view on the slope above.
Eventually everyone got on their hands and knees, and began to crawl laboriously over the hot rock of midday, trying to traverse quick enough to circle the caribou. But the wind blew from behind them, and the caribou moved skittishly downslope or traversed north, grazing as he went, and looking back at his pursuers more and more curiously, as if wondering why they continued with such a charade. Nirgal too began to wonder. And apparently he was not alone; the caribou’s skepticism had infected them. A variety of subtle and not-so-subtle whistles filled the air, in what was e
vidently an argument over strategy. Nirgal understood then that hunting was hard, that the group failed often. That they were perhaps not very good at it. Everyone was baking on the rock, and they had not eaten properly for a couple of days. Part of life for these people; but today too miserable to be fun.
Then as they continued, the horizon below them to the east seemed to double: Chryse Gulf, gleaming blue and flat, still far below. As they continued to follow the caribou downslope, the sea covered more and more of their view of the globe; the Great Escarpment pitched so steeply here that even Mars’s tight curvature did not bend fast enough to hide the long view, and they could see out over Chryse Gulf for many kilometers. The sea, the blue sea!
Perhaps they could trap the caribou against the water. But now he was trending north, traversing the slope of the escarpment. They crawled after him, over a little ridge, and suddenly had a good view down to the coastline: fringe of green forest flanking the water, small whitewashed buildings under the trees. A white lighthouse on a bluff.
As they continued north a turn in the coast hove over the horizon. Just beyond the point of the turn lay a seaside town, banked around a half-moon bay on the southern side of what they now saw was a strait, or more accurately a fjord, for across a narrow passage of water rose a wall even steeper than the slope they were on: three thousand meters of red rock rearing out of the sea, the giant cliff like the edge of a continent, its horizontal bands cut deep by a billion years of wind. Nirgal realized suddenly where they were; that massive cliff was the sea-facing escarpment of the Shar-anov Peninsula, and the fjord therefore Kasei Fjord, and the harbor town therefore Nilokeras. They had come a long way.
The whistles between the hunters got very noisy and expressive. About half the group sat up — a crop of heads, sticking out over a field of stones, looking at each other as if an idea had struck them all at once — and then they stood and walked down the slope toward the town, abandoning the hunt and leaving the caribou heedlessly munching. After a while they skipped and hopped downslope, hooting and laughing, leaving the stretcher bearers and the injured boy behind.
They waited lower down, however, under tall Hokkaido pines on the outskirts of the town. When the stretcher group caught up, they descended through the pines arjd orchards together, into the upper streets of the town. A loud gang, passing fine window-fronted houses overlooking the crowded harbor, straight to a medical clinic, as if they knew where they were going. They dropped off the injured youth and then went to some public baths; and after a quick bath they went to the curve of businesses backing the docks, and invaded three or four adjacent restaurants with tables out under umbrellas, and strings of bare incandescent light-bulbs. Nirgal sat at a table with the youngsters, in a seafood restaurant; after a while the injured boy joined them, knee and calf wrapped, and they all ate and drank in huge quantities — shrimp, clams, mussels, trout, fresh bread, cheeses, peasant salad, liters of water, wine, ouzo — all in such excess that they staggered away when they were done, drunk, their stomachs taut as drums.
Some went immediately to what the butcher woman called their usual hostel, to lie down or throw up. The rest limped on past the building to a nearby park, where a performance of Tyndall’s opera Phyllis Boyle was to be followed by a dance.
Nirgal lay sprawled on the grass with the park contingent, out at the back of the audience. Like the rest he was awed by the facility of the singers, the sheer lushness of orchestral sound as Tyndall used it. When the opera was done some of the group had digested their feast enough to dance, and Nirgal joined them, and after an hour of dancing joined the band as well, with many other audience sit-ins; and he drummed away until his whole body was humming like the magnesium of the pans.
But he had eaten too much, and when some of the group returned to the hostel, he decided to go back with them. On their way back, some passersby said something — “Look at the ferals,” or something like that — and the spear thrower howled, and just like that he and some of the young hunters had pushed the passersby against a wall, shoving them and shouting abuse: “Watch your mouth or we’ll beat the shit out of you,” Spear Thrower shouted happily, “you caged rats, you drug addicts, you sleepwalkers, you fucking earthworms, you think you can take drugs and get what we get, we’ll kick your ass and then you’ll feel some real feeling, you’ll see what we mean,” and then Nirgal was pulling him back, saying “Come on, come on, don’t make trouble,” and the passersby were on them with a roar, hard-fisted and –footed men who were not drunk and were not amused, the young hunters had to retreat, then let themselves be pulled away by Nirgal when the passersby were satisfied at having driven them off; still shouting abuse, staggering up the street, holding their bruises, laughing and snarling, completely full of themselves, “Fucking sleepwalkers, wrapped in your gift boxes, we’ll kick your ass! Kick your ass right out of your dollhouse into the drink! Stupid sheep that you are!”
Nirgal cuffed them along, giggling despite himself. The ranters were very drunk, and Nirgal was not much more sober himself. When they got to their hostel he looked into the bar across the street, saw the butcher woman was sitting in there, and so went in with the rest of the rough boys. He sat back watching them while he drank a glass of cognac, swishing it over his tongue. Ferals, the passersby had called them. The butcher woman was eyeing him, wondering what he thought. Much later he stood, with difficulty, and left the bar with the others, walking unsteadily across the cobbled street, humming along with the others as they bellowed “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” On the obsidian water of Kasei Fjord the stars rode up and down. Mind and body full of feeling, sweet fatigue a state of grace.
The next morning they slept inand woke up late, dopey and hungover. They lay around for a while in their dorm room, slurping kavajava. Then they went downstairs, and even though they claimed to be still stuffed, ate a huge hostel breakfast. While they ate they decided to go flying. The winds that poured down Kasei Fjord were as powerful as any on the planet, and windsurfers and fliers of all kinds had come to Nilokeras to take advantage of them. Of course at any time howlers could take the situation “off scale” and shut down the fun for everyone except the big wind riders; but the average day’s hard blow was glorious.
The fliers’ base of operations was an offshore crater rim island, called Santorini. After breakfast the group went down to the docks together and got on a ferry, and debarked half an hour later on the little arcuate island, and trooped with the other passengers up to the gliderport.
Nirgal had not flown for years, and it was a great joy to strap into a blimpglider’s gondola and rise up the mast, and let loose and soar on the powerful updrafts pushing off San-torini’s steep inner rim. As Nirgal ascended he saw that most of the fliers wore birdsuits of one sort or another; it looked like he was flying in a flock of wide-winged flying creatures, which resembled not birds but something more like flying foxes, or some mythic hybrid like the griffin or Pegasus: bird-humans. The birdsuits were of several different kinds, imitating in some respects the configurations of different species — albatross, eagle, swift, lammergeier. Each suit encased its flier in what was in effect an ever-changing exoskeleton, which responded to interior pressure from the flier’s body, to take and then hold positions, or make certain movements, all reinforced in proportion to the pressure exerted inside them, so that a human’s muscles could flap the big wings, or hold them in place against the great torque of the wind’s onslaughts, meanwhile keeping the streamlined helmets and tail feathers in the proper positions. Suit AIs helped fliers who wanted help, and they could even function as automatic pilots; but most fliers preferred to do the thinking for themselves, and controlled the suit as a waldo, exaggerating many times the strength of their own muscles.
Sitting in his blimpglider Nirgal watched with both pleasure and trepidation as these bird people shot down past him in terrifying stoops toward the sea, then popped their wings and curved away and gyred back up again on the inner-wall updraft. It looked to Nirgal like the suits
took a high level of skill to fly; they were the opposite of the blimp-gliders, a few of which soared with Nirgal over the island, rising and falling in much gentler swoops, taking in the view like agile balloonists.
Then soaring up past him in a rising spiral, Nirgal spotted the face of the diana, the woman who had led the ferals’ hunt. She recognized him too, raised her chin and bared her teeth in a quick smile, then pulled her wings in and tipped over, dropping away with a tearing sound. Nirgal watched her from above with fearful excitement, then a moment of terror as she dove right past the edge of Santo-rini’s cliff; from his vantage point it had looked like she was going to hit. Then she was back up, soaring on the updraft in tight spirals. It looked so graceful he wanted to learn to fly in a birdsuit, even as he felt his pulse still hammering at the sight of her dive. Stoop and soar, stoop and soar; no blimpglider could fly like that, not even close. Birds were the greatest fliers, and the diana flew like a bird. Now, along with everything else, people were birds.
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