Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  The way Nadia bossed us around, Maya said, which made him smile. The way the bamboo floors felt underfoot. And do you remember the time she screamed at the alchemists? Why no! he said. On and on it went, until it seemed that the private Underhills they inhabited were separate universes, Riemannian spaces that intersected each other only at the plane at infinity, each of them meanwhile wandering in the long reach of his or her own idiocosmos. “I hardly remember any of it,” Maya said at last, darkly. “I can still barely stand to think of John. And Frank too. I try not to: And then something will trigger something, and I’ll be lost to everything else while I remember it. Those kinds of memories are as intense as if what you remember only happened an hour before! Or as if it were happening again.” She shuddered under his hands. “I hate them. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Of course. Memoire involuntaire. But I remember also that the very same thing happened to me when we were living in Underhill. So it isn’t just getting old.”

  “No. It’s life. What we can’t forget. Still, I can .hardly look at Kasei …”

  “I know. Those children are strange. Hiroko is strange.” “She is. But were you happy, then? After you left with her?” “Yes.” Michel thought back on it, working hard to recall. Recollection was certainly the weak link in the chain… “I was, certainly. It was a matter of admitting things I had tried to suppress in Underbill. That we are animals. That we are sexual creatures.” He kneaded her shoulders harder than ever, and she rolled them under his hands.

  “I didn’t need reminding of that,” she said with a short laugh. “And did Hiroko give that back to you?”

  “Yes. But not just Hiroko. Evgenia, Rya — all of them, really. Not directly, you know. Well, sometimes directly. But just in admitting that we had bodies, that we were bodies. Working together, seeing and touching each other. I needed that. I was really having trouble. And they managed to connect it to Mars as well. You never seemed to have trouble with that part either, but I did, I really did. I was sick. Hiroko saved me. For her it was a sensuous matter to make our home and food out of Mars. A kind of making love to it, or impregnating it, or midwifing it — in any case, a sensuous act. It was this that saved me.”

  “This and their bodies, Hiroko’s and Evgenia’s and Rya’s.” She looked over her shoulder at him with a wicked grin, and he laughed. “That you remember well enough, I bet.”

  “Well enough.”

  It was midday, but to the south, up the long throat of Echus Chasma, the sky was darkening. “Maybe the wind is coming at last,” Michel said.

  Clouds topped the Great Escarpment, a tall mass of highly turbulent cumulonimbus clouds, their black bottoms flickering with lightning, striking the top of the cliff. The air in the chasm was hazy, and the tents of Kasei Vallis were defined sharply under this haze, little blisters of clear air standing over the buildings and curiously still trees, like glass paperweights dropped on the windy desert. It was only just past noon. They would have to wait until dark even if the winds did come. Maya stood and paced again, radiating energy, muttering to herself in Russian, ducking down to take looks out of their low windows. Gusts were picking up and striking the car, whistling and keening over the broken rock at the foot of the little mesa behind them.

  Maya’s impatience made Michel nervous. It really was like being trapped with a wild beast. He slumped down in one of the drivers’ seats, looking up at the clouds rolling off the Escarpment. Martian gravity allowed thunderheads to tower tremendous heights into the sky, and these immense white anvil-topped masses, along with the stupendous cliff face under them, made the world seem surrealistically big. They were ants in such a landscape, they were the little red people themselves.

  Certainly they would make the rescue attempt that night; they had had to wait too long as it was. On one of her restless turns Maya stopped behind him again, and took the muscles between his shoulders and neck and squeezed them. The squeezes sent great shocks of sensation down his back and flanks, and then along the insides of his thighs. He flexed in her clutches, and turned in the rotating seat so that he could put his arms around her waist, and his ear against her sternum. She continued to work his shoulders, and he felt his pulse pumping in him, and his breath grow short. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. They worked their way against each other until they were tightly wrapped together, Maya kneading his shoulders all the while. For a long time they stayed like that.

  Then they moved back into the living compartment of the car, and made love. Tight with apprehension as they both were, they fell into it with intensity. No doubt the talk of Underhill had started this; Michel recalled vividly his illicit lusts for Maya in those years, and buried his face in her silvery hair, and tried his best to merge with her, to climb right into her. Such a big feline animal she was, pushing back in an equally wild attempt to take him in, which effort carried him completely away. It was good to be by themselves, to be free to disappear into surprised ravishment, nothing but a series of moans and yelps and electric rushes of sensation.

  Afterward he lay on her, still inside her, and she held his face and stared at him. “In Underhill I loved you,” he said.

  “In Underhill,” she said slowly, “I loved you too. Truly. I never did anything about it because I would have felt foolish, what with John and Frank. But I loved you. That was why I was so angry at you when you left. You were my only friend. You were the only one I could talk with honestly. You were the only one who really listened to me.”

  Michel shook his head, remembering. “I didn’t do a very good job of that.”

  “Maybe not. But you cared about me, didn’t you? It wasn’t just your job?”

  “Oh no! I loved you, yes. It is never just a job with you, Maya. Not for anyone or anything.”

  “Flatterer,” she said, pushing him. “You always did that. You tried to put the best interpretation on all the horrible things I did.” She laughed shortly.

  “Yes. But they weren’t so horrible.”

  “They were.” She pursed her mouth. “But then you disappeared!” She slapped his face lightly. “You left me!”

  “I left, anyway. I had to.”

  Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness — at least that particular happiness — for her. His “optimism by policy” was going to become more of an effort, and he would now have another antinomy to reconcile in his life, as centrifugal as Provence and Mars — which was simply Maya and Maya.

  They lay side by side, each in his or her own thoughts, looking outside and feeling the rover bounce on its shock absorbers. The wind was still rising, the dust now pouring down Echus Chasma and then Kasei Vallis, in a ghostly mimicry of the great outflow that had first carved the channel. Michel pushed up to check the screens. “Up to two hundred kilometers per hour.” Maya grunted. Winds had been far faster in the old days, but with the atmosphere so much thicker, these slower speeds were deceptive; present-day gales were much more forceful than the old insubstantial screamers.

  Clearly they would go in tonight, it was only a matter of getting Coyote’s bursted signal. So they lay back down together and waited, tense and relaxed at the same time, giving each other thorough massages to pass the time and relieve the tension, Michel marveling throughout at the catlike grace of Maya’s long muscular body, ancient by the dates, but in most respects the same as ever. As beautiful as ever.

  Then finally sunset stained the hazy air, and the monumental clouds to the east, clouds which now covered the cliff face. They got up and sponged down, and ate a meal, and dressed and sat in the drivers’ seats, getting nervous again as the quartz sun disappeared and the stormy twilight fell away.

  In file dark the wind was sheer
noise, and an irregular trembling of the rover on its stiff shock absorbers. Gusts buffeted the car so hard.that it was sometimes held down against the full crush of the shocks for seconds at a time, the car struggling to rise on the springs and failing, like an animal fighting to free itself from the bottom of a stream. Then the gust would let off and the car would jerk up wildly. “Are we going to be able to walk in this?” Maya asked.

  “Hmm.” Michel had been out in some hard blows before, but in the dark one couldn’t be sure if this was worse than those or not. It certainly seemed like it, and the rover anemometer was now registering gusts of 230 kilometers per hour, but in the lee of their little mesa it was unclear whether these represented true maxi-mums or not.

  He checked the fines gauge, and was not surprised to find it was now a full-blown dust storm as well. “Let’s drive down closer,” Maya said. “It will get us there quicker, and make it easier to relocate the car as well.”

  “Good idea.”

  They sat in the drivers’ seats and took off. Out of the shelter of the mesa, the wind was ferocious. At one point the bouncing grew so severe it felt as if they might be flipped over, and if they had been side-on to the wind, they might have been; as it was, with the wind behind them, they rolled on at fifteen kilometers per hour when they should have been going ten, and the motor hummed unhappily as it braked the car from going even faster. “This is too much wind, isn’t it?” Maya asked.

  “ I don’t think Coyote has much control over it.”

  “Guerrilla climatology,” Maya said with a snort. “That man is a spy, I’m sure of it.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  The cameras showed nothing but a starless black rush. The car’s AI was guiding them by dead reckoning, and on the screen’s map they were shown within two kilometers from the outer bank’s southernmost tent. “We’d better walk from here,” Michel said.

  “How will we find the car again?”

  “We’ll have to get out the Ariadne thread.”

  They suited up and got in the. lock. When the outer door slid open the air sucked out instantly, pulling them hard. The wind keened across the doorway.

  They stepped out of the lock and were slammed by great blows to the back. One knocked Michel to his hands and knees, and he could just see through the dust to Maya, in the same position beside him. He reached back into the lock and took the thread reel in one hand, Maya’s hand in the other. He clipped the reel to his forearm.

  By careful experiment they found they could stand if they stayed crouched forward, helmets at waist level and hands up and ready to catch themselves if they were knocked down. They stumbled ahead slowly, crashing down when strong gusts made it impossible to stand. The ground under them was just barely visible, and a knee striking a rock was all too possible. Coyote’s wind had indeed come down too strong. But there was nothing to be done about it. And clearly the inhabitants of the Kasei tents were not going to be out wandering around.

  A gust knocked them down again, and Michel let the wind pour over him. It was hard to keep from being rolled. His wristpad was connected to Maya’s by a phone cord, and he said, “Maya, are you all right?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Though there seemed to be a small tear in his glove, over the ball of his thumb. He bunched his fist, felt the cold seeping up his wrist. Well, it wouldn’t be instant frostbite the way it used to be, nor pressure bruising. He took a suit patch from his wristpad compartment, stuck it on. “I think we’d better stay down like this.”

  “We can’t crawl two kilometers!”

  “We can if we have to.”

  “But I don’t think we do. Just stay low, and be ready to go down.”

  “Okay.”

  They stood again, bent double, and shuffled cautiously forward. Black dust flew past them with amazing rapidity. Michel’s navigation display lit his faceplate, down in front of his mouth: the first bubble tent was still a kilometer away, and to his astonishment the green numbers of the clock showed 11:15:16 — they had been out an hour. The howl of the wind made it hard to hear Maya, even with his intercom right against his ear. Over on the inner bank Coyote and the others, and the Red groups as well, were presumably making their raid on the living quarters — but there was no way of telling. They had to take it on faith that the shocking wind had not halted that part of the action, or slowed it down too much.

  It was hard work to shuffle forward doubled over, connected by the telephone cord. On and on it went, until Michel’s thighs burned and his lower back hurt. Finally his navigation display indicated they were very close to the southernmost tent. They could see nothing of it. The wind became stronger than ever, and they crawled the final few hundred meters, over painfully hard bedrock. The clock numerals froze at 12:00:00. Sometime soon thereafter they banged into the concrete coping of the tent’s foundation. “Swiss timing,” Michel whispered. Spencer was expecting them in the timeslip, and they had thought they would have to wait at the wall until it came. He reached up and put a hand gently on the tent’s outermost layer. It was very taut, pulsing in time with the onslaught of air. “Ready?”

  “Yes,” Maya said, her voice tight.

  Michel took a small air gun from his thigh pocket. He could feel Maya doing the same. The guns were used with a variety of attachments, for everything from driving nails to giving inoculations; now they hoped to use them to break the tough and elastic fabrics of the tent.

  They disconnected the phone cord between them, and put their two guns against the taut vibrating invisible wall. With a tap of the elbows they shot together.

  Nothing happened. Maya plugged the phone cord back into her wrist. “Maybe we’ll have to slash it.”

  “Maybe. Let’s put the two guns together, and try again. This material is strong, but still, with the wind …”

  They disconnected, got set, tried it again — their arms were jerked over the coping, and they slammed into the concrete wall. A loud boom was followed by a lesser one, then a cascading roar, and a series of explosions. All four layers of the tent were peeling away, between two of the buttresses and maybe all across the south side, which would surely explode the whole thing. Dust was flying among the dimly lit buildings ahead of them. Windows were going dark as buildings lost lights; some appeared to be losing their windows to the sudden depressurization, although this was nowhere near as severe as it once would have been.

  “You okay?” Michel said over the intercom. He could heard Maya’s breath sucking through her teeth. “Hurt my arm,” she said. Over the roar of the wind they could hear the high ringing of alarms. “Let’s find Spencer,” she said harshly. She pushed up and was blown violently over the coping, and Michel quickly followed, falling hard inside and rolling into her. “Come on,” she said. They stumbled into the prison city of Mars.

  Inside the tent it was chaos. Dust made the air into a kind of black gel, pouring through the street in a fantastically fast torrent, shrieking so that Michel and Maya could just barely hear each other, even when they reconnected their phone line. Decompression had blown out some windows and even a wall, so that the streets were littered with shards of glass and chunks of concrete. They moved side by side, kicking ahead cautiously with every step, hands often touching to confirm positions. “Try your 1R heads-up display,” Maya recommended. .

  Michel turned his on. The infrared display was nightmarish, the blown buildings glowing like green fires.

  They came to the large central building that Spencer had said would contain Sax, and found it too was bright green all along one wall. Hopefully there were bulkheads protecting the underground clinic where Spencer had said Sax was being taken; if not their rescue attempt might already have killed their friend. All too possible, Michel judged; the surface floors of the building were wrecked.

  And getting down onto the lower floors was going to be a problem. There was presumably a stairwell that functioned as an emergency lock, but it wasn’t going to be easy to
locate it. Michel switched to the common band, and eavesdropped on a frantic discussion of trouble across the valley; the tent over the smaller of the two craters on the inner bank had blown away, and there were calls for help. Over the phone Maya said, “Let’s hide and see if someone comes out.”

  They lay down behind a wall and waited, protected somewhat from the wind. Then before them a door banged open, and suited figures rushed down the street and disappeared. When they were gone Maya and Michel went to the door, and entered.

  It was a hallway, still depressurized; but its lights were on, and a panel in one wall was lit up with red lights. It was an emergency lock, and quickly they closed the outer door and got the little space repressurized. They stood before the inner door, looking at each other through dusty faceplates. Michel wiped his clear with a glove and shrugged. Back in the rover they had discussed this moment, the crux of the operation; but there hadn’t been all that much they could foresee or plan, and now the moment was here, and the blood was flying in Michel’s veins as if impelled by the wind outside.

  They disconnected the phone cord between them, took laser pistols that Coyote had given them from their thigh pockets. Michel hit the door pad, and it opened with a hiss. They were met by three men in suits but without helmets, looking scared. MicheJ and Maya shot them and they went down, twitching. Thunderbolts from the fingertips indeed.

  They dragged the three men into a side room, and shut them in. Michel wondered if they had shot them too many times; cardiac arrhythmias were common when that happened. His body seemed to have expanded until it was constricted by his walker, and he was very hot, and breathing hard, and ferociously jumpy. Maya apparently felt the same, and she led the way down a hall, almost running. The hallway suddenly went dark. Maya turned on her headlamp, and they followed its dusty cone of light to the third door on the right, where Spencer had said Sax would be. It was locked.