The Reds took off north for their refuge in Mareotis. Coyote drove south hard, to the rendezvous with Maya-and Michel. They met in a dim chocolate dawn, far up Echus Chasma. The group from the inner-bank car hurried over into Michel and Maya’s car, ready to renew the celebration. Nirgal tumbled through the lock and shook hands with Spencer, a short round-faced drawn-looking man, whose hands were trembling. Nevertheless he inspected Nirgal closely. “Good to meet you,” he said. “I’ve heard about you.”
“It went really well,” Coyote was saying, to a chorus of shouted protest from Kasei and Art and Nirgal. In fact they had barely escaped with their lives, crawling around on the inner bank trying to survive the typhoon and the panicked police inside the tent, trying to find the car while Art tried to find them…
Maya’s glare cut short their merriment. In fact with the initial joy of the rendezvous over, it was becoming clear that things were not right in her car. Sax had been saved, but a bit too late. He had been tortured, Maya told them curtly. It was not clear how much damage had been done to him, as he was unconscious.
Nirgal went to the back of the compartment to see him. He lay on the couch senselessly, his smashed face a shocking sight. Michel came back and sat down, woozy from a blow to the head. And Maya and Spencer appeared to be having some kind of disagreement, they weren’t explaining but they did not look at each other, or speak to each other. Maya was clearly in a foul mood, Nirgal recognized the look from childhood, although this one was worse, her face hard and her mouth set in a downturned sickle.
“I killed Phyllis,” she told Coyote.
There was silence. Nirgal’s hands went cold. Suddenly, looking around at the others, he saw that they all felt awkward. It was the sole woman among them who was the killer, and for a second there was something strange in that which they all felt, including Maya — who drew herself up, scornful of their cowardice. None of this was rational or even conscious in them, Nirgal saw as he read their faces, but rather something primal, instinctive, biological. And so Maya only stared them down the more, contemptuous of their horror, glaring at them with an eagle’s alien hostility.
Coyote stepped to her side and went on his toes to peck her on the cheek with a kiss, meeting her glare foursquare. “You did good,” he said, putting a hand to her arm. “You saved Sax.”
Maya shrugged him off and said, “We blew up the machine they had Sax hooked into. I don’t know if we managed to wreck any records. Probably not. And they know they had him, and that someone took him back. So there’s no reason to celebrate. They’ll come after us now with everything they’ve got.”
“I don’t think they’re that well organized,” Art offered.
“You shut up,” Maya told him.
“Well, okay, but look, now that they know about you, you won’t have to hide so much, right?”
“Back in business,” Coyote muttered.
They drove south together through that day, as the dust torn up by the katabatic storm was enough to hide them from satellite cameras. Tension remained high; Maya was in a black fury, and could not be spoken to. Michel handled her like an unexploded bomb, trying always to get her focused on the practical matters of the moment, so that she might forget their terrible night out. But with Sax lying on a couch in the living compartment of their car, unconscious and looking like a racoon with all his bruises, this was no easy thing to forget. Nirgal sat beside Sax for hours on end, a hand placed flat on his ribs, or the top of his head. Other than that there was nothing to be done. Even without the black eyes he wouldn’t have looked much like the Sax Russell whom Nirgal had known as a child. It was a visceral shock to see the signs of physical abuse on him, proof positive that they had deadly enemies in the world. This was something Nirgal had been wondering about in recent years, so that the sight of Sax was an ugly, sickening thing — not just that they had enemies, but that there were people who would do this kind of thing, had always been doing it all through history, just as the unbelievable accounts had it. They were real after all. And Sax only one of millions of victims.
As Sax slept, his head rolled from side to side. “I’m going to give him a shot of pandorph,” Michel said. “Him and then me.”
“There’s something wrong with his lungs,” Nirgal said.
“Is there?” Michel put his ear to Sax’s chest, listened for a time, hissed. “Some fluid in there, you’re right.”
“What were they doing to him?” Nirgal asked Spencer.
“They were talking to him while they had him under. You know, they have located several memory centers in the hippocampus very precisely, and with drugs and a very minute ultrasound stimulation, and fast MRI to track what they’re doing … well, people just answer whatever questions they are asked, often at great length. They were doing that to Sax when the wind hit and they lost power. The emergency generator kicked in right away, but—” He gestured at Sax. “Then, or when we took him out of the apparatus …”
This was why Maya had killed Phyllis Boyle, then. The end of the collaborator. Murder among the First Hundred…
Well, Kasei muttered under his breath in the other car, it wouldn’t be the first time. There were people who suspected Maya of arranging the assassination of John Boone, and Nirgal had heard of people who suspected that Frank Chalmers’s disappearance might also have been her doing. The Black Widow, they called her. Nirgal had discounted these stories as malicious gossip, spread by people who obviously hated Maya, like Jackie. But certainly Maya now looked poisonously dangerous, sitting in her car glaring at the radio, as if considering breaking their silence to send word to the south: white-haired, hawk-nosed, mouth like a wound … it made Nirgal nervous just to get in the same car with her, though he fought against the sensation. She was one of his most important teachers after all, he had spent hours and hours absorbing her impatient instruction in math and history and Russian, learning her more than any of the subject material; and he knew very well that she did not want to be a murderer, that under her moods both bold and bleak (both manic and depressive) there writhed a lonely soul, proud and hungry. So that in yet another way this affair had become a disaster, despite their ostensible success.
Maya was adamant that they should all get down immediately into the southern polar region, to tell the underground what had happened.
“It is not so easy,” Coyote said. “They know we were in Kasei Vallis, and since they had time to get Sax to talk, they probably know we’ll be trying to get back south. They can look at a map as well as we can, and see that the equator is basically blocked, from west Tharsis all the way to the east of the chaoses.”
“There’s the gap between Pavonis and Noctis,” Maya said.
“Yes, but there’s several pistes and pipelines crossing that, and two wraps of the elevator. I’ve got tunnels built under all those, but if they’re looking they might find some of them, or see our cars.”
“So what are you saying?”
“I think we have to go around, north of Tharsis and Olympus Mons, and then down Amazonis, and cross the equator there.”
Maya shook her head. “We need to get south fast, to let them know they’ve been found out.”
Coyote thought about it. “We can split up,” he said. “I’ve got a little ultralight plane stashed in a hideout near the foot of Echus Overlook. Kasei can lead you and Michel to it, and fly you back south. We’ll follow by way of Amazonis.”
“What about Sax?”
“We’ll take him straight to Tharsis Tholus, there’s a Bogdanovist med clinic there. That’s only two nights away.”
Maya talked it over with Michel and Kasei, never even glancing at Spencer. Michel and Kasei were agreeable, and finally she nodded. “All right. We’re off south. Come down as quickly as you
They drove by night and slept by day, in their old pattern, and in two nights made their way across Echus Chasma to Tharsis Tholus, a volcanic cone on the northern edge of the Tharsis bulge.
There a Nicosia-class tent town called T
harsis Tholus was located on the black flank of its namesake. The town was part of the demimonde: most of its citizens were living ordinary lives in the surface net, but many of them were Bogdanovists, who helped support Bogdanovist refuges in the area, as well as Red sanctuaries in Mareotis and on the Great Escarpment; and they helped other people in the town who had left the net, or been off it since birth. The biggest med clinic in town was Bogdanovist, and served many of the underground.
So they drove right up to the tent, and plugged into its garage, and got out. And soon a little ambulance car came and rushed Sax to the clinic, near the center of town. The rest of them walked down the grassy main street after him, feeling the roominess after all those days in the cars. Art goggled at their open behavior, and Nirgal briefly explained the demimonde to him as they walked to a cafe with some safe rooms upstairs, across from the clinic.
At the clinic itself they were already at work on Sax. A few hours after their arrival, Nirgal was allowed to clean up and change into sterile clothes, and then to go in to sit with him.
They had him on a ventilator, which was circulating a liquid through his lungs. One could see it in the clear tubes and the mask covering his face, looking like clouded water. It was an awful thing to see, as if they were drowning him. But the liquid was a perfluo-rocarbon-based mixture, and it transferred to Sax three times as much oxygen as air would have, and flushed out the gunk that had been accumulating in his lungs, and reinflated collapsed airways, and was spiked with a variety of drugs and medicines. The med tech working on Sax explained all this to Nirgal as she worked. “He had a bit of edema, so it’s kind of a paradoxical treatment, but it works.”
And so Nirgal sat, his hand on Sax’s arm, watching the fluid inside the mask that was taped to Sax’s lower face, swirling in and out of him. “It’s like he’s back in an ectogene tank,” Nirgal said.
“Or,” the med tech said, looking at him curiously, “in the womb.”
“Yes. Being reborn. He doesn’t even look the same.”
“Keep that hand on him,” the tech advised, and went away. Nirgal sat and tried to feel how Sax was doing, tried to feel that vitality struggling in its own processes, swimming back up into the world. Sax’s temperature fluctuated in alarming little swoops and dives. Other medical people came in and held instruments against Sax’s head and face, talking among themselves in low voices. “Some damage. Anterior, left side. We’ll see.”
The same tech came in a few nights later when Nirgal was there, and said, “Hold his head, Nirgal. Left side, around the ear. Just above it, yeah. Hold it there and … yeah, like that. Now do what you do.”
“What?”
“You know. Send heat into him.” And she left hastily, as if embarrassed to have made such a suggestion, or frightened.
Nirgal sat and collected himself. He located the fire within, and tried running some of it into his hand, and across into Sax. Heat, heat, a tentative jolt of whiteness, sent into the injured green … then feeling again, trying to read the heat of Sax’s head.
Days passed, and Nirgal spent most of them at the clinic. One night he was coming back from the kitchens when the young tech came running down the hall to him, grabbing him by the arm and saying, “Come on, come on,” and the next thing he knew he was down in the room, holding Sax’s head, his breath short and all his muscles like wires. There were three doctors in there and some more techs. One doctor put out an arm toward Nirgal, and the young tech stepped in between them.
He felt something inside Sax stir, as if going away, or coming back — some passage. He poured into Sax every bit of viriditas he could muster, suddenly terrified, stricken with memories of the clinic in Zygote, of sitting with Simon. That look on Simon’s face, the night he died. The perfluorocarbon liquid swirled in and out of Sax, a quick shallow tide. Nirgal watched it, thinking about Simon. His hand lost its heat, and he couldn’t bring it back. Sax would know who it was with hands so warm. If it mattered. But as it was all he could do … he exerted himself, pushed as if the world were freezing, as if he could pull back not only Sax but also Simon, if he pushed hard enough. “Why, Sax?” he said softly into the ear by his hand. “But why? Why, Sax? But why? Why, Sax? But why? Why, Sax? But why?”
The perfluorocarbon swirled. The overlit room hummed. The doctors worked at the machines and over Sax’s body, glancing at each other, at Nirgal. The word why became nothing but a sound, a kind of prayer. An hour passed and then more hours, slow and anxious, until they fell into a kind of timeless state, and Nirgal couldn’t have said whether it was day or night. Payment for our bodies, he thought. We pay.
* * *
One evening, about a week after their arrival, they pumped Sax’s lungs clear, and took the ventilator off. Sax gasped loudly, then breathed. He was an air-breather again, a mammal. They had repaired his nose, although it was now a different shape, almost as flat as it had been before his cosmetic surgery. His bruises were still spectacular.
About an hour after they took the ventilator off, he regained consciousness. He blinked and blinked. He looked around the room, then looked very closely at Nirgal, clutching his hand hard. But he did not speak. And soon he was asleep.
Nirgal went out into the green streets of the small town, dominated by the cone of Tharsis Tholus, rising in black and rust majesty to the north, like a squat Fuji. He ran in his rhythmic way, around and around the tent wall as he burned off some of his excess energy. Sax and his great unexplainable …
In rooms over the cafe across the street, he found Coyote hobbling restlessly from window to window, muttering and singing wordless calypso tunes. “What’s wrong?” Nirgal said.
Coyote waggled both hands. “Now that Sax is stabilized, we should get out of here. You and Spencer can tend to Sax in the car, while we drive west around Olympus.”
“Okay,” Nirgal said. “When they say Sax is ready.”
Coyote stared at him. “They say you saved him. That you brought him back from the dead.”
Nirgal shook his head, frightened at the very thought. “He never died.”
“I figured. But that’s what they’re saying.” Coyote regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll have to be careful.
They drove all night, contouring around the slope of north Tharsis, Sax propped on the couch in the compartment behind the drivers. Within hours of their departure Coyote said, “I want to hit one of the mining camps run by Subarashii in Ceraunius.” He looked at Sax. “It’s okay with you?”
Sax nodded. His raccoon bruises were now green and purple.
“Why can’t you talk?” Art asked him.
Sax shrugged, croaked once or twice.
They rolled on.
From the bottom of the northern side of the Tharsis bulge there extends an array of parallel canyons called the Ceraunius Fossae. There are as many as forty of these fractures, depending on how you count them, as some of the indentations are canyons, while others are only isolated ridges, or deep cracks, or simply corrugations in the plain — all running north and south, and all cutting into a metallogenic province of great richness, a basalt mass rifted with all kinds of ore intrusions’ from below. So there were a lot of mining settlements and mobile rigs in these canyons, and now, as he contemplated them on his maps, Coyote rubbed his hands together. “Your capture set me free, Sax. Since they know we’re out here anyway, there’s no reason we shouldn’t put some of them out of business, and grab some uranium while we’re at it.”
So he stopped one night at the southern end of Tractus Catena, the longest and deepest of the canyons. Its beginning was a strange sight — the relatively smooth plain was disrupted by what looked like a ramp that cut into the ground, making a trench about three kilometers wide, and eventually about three hundred meters deep, running right over the horizon to the north in a perfectly straight line.
They slept through the morning, and then spent the afternoon sitting in the living compartment nervously, looking at satellite photos and listening to Coyote’s instruct
ions.
“Is there a chance we’ll kill these miners?” Art asked, pulling at his big whiskery jaw.
Coyote shrugged. “It might happen.”
Sax shook his head back and forth vehemently.
“Not so rough with your head,” Nirgal said to him.
“I agree with Sax,” Art said quickly. “I mean, even setting aside moral considerations, which I don’t, it’s still stupid just as a practical matter. It’s stupid because it makes the assumption that your enemies are weaker than you, and will do what you want if you murder a few of them. But people aren’t like that. I mean, think about how it will fall out. You go down that canyon and kill a bunch of people doing their jobs, and later other people come along and find the bodies. They’ll hate you forever. Even if you do take over Mars someday they’ll still hate you, and do anything they can to screw things up. And that’s all you will have accomplished, because they’ll replace those miners quick as that.”
Art glanced at Sax, who was sitting up on the couch, watching him closely. “On the other hand, say you go down there and do something that causes those miners to run into their emergency shelter and then you lock them in the shelter and wreck their machines. They call for help, they hang out there, and in a day or two somebody comes to rescue them. They’re mad but also they’re thinking we could be dead, those Reds wrecked our stuff and were gone in a flash, we never even saw them. They could have killed us but they didn’t. And the people who rescued them will be thinking the same. And then later on, when you’ve taken over Mars or when you’re trying to, they remember and they all dive off into hostage syndrome and start rooting for you. Or working with you.”
Sax was nodding. Spencer was looking at Nirgal. And then they all were, all but Coyote, who was looking down at the palms of his hands, as if reading them. And then he looked up, and he too was looking at Nirgal.
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