Green Mars m-2

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Every day they woke to an alarm set for an hour before sunset, and spent the last light of day eating a spare breakfast, and watching the garish alpenglow colors spread with the shadows over the rugged landscape. Then every night they drove, without ever being able to use the autopilot, navigating the broken terrain kilometer by kilometer. Nirgal and Art took the graveyard shift together on most nights, and continued their long conversations. Then as the stars faded, and dawn’s pure violet light stained the eastern sky, they found places where the boulder car would be inconspicuous — in this latitude the work of a moment, almost just a matter of stopping, as Art said — and ate a leisurely supper, watching the sharp blast of sunrise and its sudden creation of great fields of shadow. A couple of hours later, after a planning session, and occasional trips out, they would darken the windshield, and sleep through the day.

  At the end of another long night’s conversation about their respective childhoods, Nirgal said, “I suppose it wasn’t until Sabishii that I realized that Zygote was …”

  “Unusual?” Coyote said from his sleeping mat behind them. “Unique? Bizarre? Hirokolike?”

  Nirgal was not surprised to discover that Coyote was awake; the old man slept poorly, and often muttered a dreamy commentary to Nirgal and Art’s narrative, which they generally ignored, as he was mostly asleep. But now Nirgal said, “Zygote reflects Hiroko, I think. She’s very inward.”

  “Ha,” Coyote said. “She didn’t use to be.”

  “When was that?” Art pounced, swiveling in his chair to include Coyote in their little circle of talk.

  “Oh, back before the beginning,” Coyote said. “In prehistoric times, back on Earth.”

  “Is that when you met her?”

  Coyote grunted affirmatively.

  This was where he always stopped, when he was talking to Nirgal. But now with Art there, with just the three of them awake in all the world, in a little circle lit by the infrared imager, Coyote’s thin crooked face had a different expression than its usual mulish dismissal, and Art leaned over him and said firmly, “So just how did you get to Mars, anyway?”

  “Oh God,” Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “It’s hard to remember something that long ago. It’s almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anyniore.”

  He glanced up at them, then closed his eyes, as if recalling the opening lines. The two younger men stared down at him, waiting.

  “It was all due to Hiroko, of course. She and I were friends. We met young, when we were students at Cambridge. We were both cold in England, so we warmed each other. This was before she met Iwao, and long before she became the great mother goddess of the world. And back theft we shared a lot of things. We were outsiders at Cambridge, and we were good at the work. And so we lived together for a couple of years there. Very much like what Nirgal has been saying about Sabishii. Even what he said about Jackie. Although Hiroko …”

  He closed his eyes, as if trying to see it in his mind.

  “You stayed together?” Art asked.

  “No. She went back to Japan, and I went with her for a while, but I had to go back to Tobago when my father died. So things changed. But she and I stayed in touch, and met at scientific conferences, and when we met we fought, or promised to love each other forever. Or both. We didn’t know what we wanted. Or how we could get it, if we admitted what we wanted. And then the selection of the First Hundred began. But I was in jail in Trinidad, for objecting to the flag-of-convenience laws. And even if I had been free, I wouldn’t have had a chance of being selected anyway. I’m not even sure I wanted to go. But Hiroko either remembered our promises, or thought I would be useful to her, I have never decided which. So she contacted me, and told me that if I wanted she would hide me in the farm on the Ares, and then in the colony on Mars. She has always been a bold thinker, I give her that.”

  “Didn’t it strike you as a crazy plan?” Art asked, his eyes round.

  “Yes it did!” Coyote laughed. “But all the good plans are crazy, aren’t they. And at that time my prospects were dim. And if I hadn’t gone for it, I would never have seen Hiroko again.” He looked at Nirgal, smiled crookedly. “So I agreed to try it. I was still in prison, but Hiroko had some unusual friends in Japan, and one night I found myself being led out of my cell by a trio of masked men, and every guard in the jail sedated. We took a helicopter to a tanker ship, and I sailed on that to Japan. The Japanese were building the space station that the Russians and Americans were using for the construction of the Ares, and I was flown up in one of the new Earth-to-space planes, and slipped into the Ares just as construction was ending. They popped me in with some of the farm equipment Hiroko had ordered, and after that it was up to me. I lived by my wits from that moment on, all the way to this very moment! Which meant I was pretty hungry at times, until the Ares began its flight. After that, Hiroko took care of me. I slept in a storage compartment behind the pigs, and stayed out of sight. It was easier than you might think, because the Ares was big. And when Hiroko got confident in the farm crew, she introduced me to them, and it was easier yet. Where it got hard was on the ground, in those first weeks after we landed. I went down in a lander filled with only the farm crew, and they helped me get settled in a closet in one of the trailers. Hiroko got the greenhouses built fast mostly to get me out of that closet, or so she would tell me.”

  “You lived in a closet?”

  “For a couple of months. It was worse than jail. But after that I lived in the greenhouse, and started work on stockpiling the materials we needed to take off on our own. Iwao had hidden the contents of a couple of freight boxes, right from the start. And after we built a rover out of spare parts I spent most of my time away from Underbill, exploring the chaotic terrain and finding a good place for our hidden shelter, and moving stuff out there. I was out on the surface more than anyone, even Ann. By the time the farm team moved out there to it, I was used to spending a lot of time on my own. Just me and Big Man, out wandering the planet. I tell you, it was like heaven. No, not heaven — it was Mars, pure Mars. I guess I lost my mind in a way. But I loved it so … I can’t really talk about it.”

  “You must have taken a lot of radiation.”

  Coyote laughed. “Oh yes! Between those journeys and the solar storm on the Ares, I took on more rems than anyone in the First Hundred, except maybe for John. Maybe that’s what did it. Anyway” — he shrugged, looked up at Art and Nirgal — “here I am. The stowaway.”

  “Amazing,” Art said.

  Nirgal nodded; he had never gotten his father to reveal even a tenth as much information about his past, and now he looked from Art to Coyote and back again, wondering how Art had done it. And done it to him as well — for Nirgal had tried to tell not only what had happened to him, but what it had meant, which was much more difficult. Apparently this was a talent Art had, though it was very hard to pin down what it consisted of; just the look on his face, somehow, that cross-eyed intensity of interest, those bald bold questions, trampling on the niceties and going right to the heart of things — assuming that every person wanted to talk, to shape the meaning of their life. Even secretive weird old hermits like Coyote.

  “Well, it was not that hard,” Coyote was saying now. “Concealment is never as hard as people think, you must understand that. It’s action while hiding that is the hard part.”

  At that thought he frowned, then pointed a finger at Nirgal. “This is why we will have to come out eventually, and fight in the open. This is why I got you to go to Sabishii.”

  “What? You told me I shouldn’t go! You said it would ruin me!”

  “That was how I got you to go.”

  They kept up this nocturnal, conversational life for the better part of a week, and at the end of it they approached a small settled region surrounding the mohole that had been dug in the midst of craters Hipparchus, Eudoxus, Ptolemaeus, and Li Fan. There were some uranium mines on the aprons of these craters, but Coyote did n
ot suggest any sabotage attempts, and they drove hard past the Ptolemaic mohole, getting away from the region as quickly as possible. Soon they came to the Thaumasia Fossae, the fifth or sixth big fracture system they had encountered on their trip. Art found this curious, but Spencer explained to him that the Tharsis bulge was surrounded by fracture systems caused by its uplift, and as they were in effect circumnavigating the bulge, they kept running into them. Thaumasia was one of the biggest of these systems, and the location of the large town of Senzeni Na, which had been founded next to another of the 40° latitude moholes, one of the first moholes to be dug, and still one of the deepest. At this point they had been traveling for over two weeks, and they needed to restock at one of Coyote’s caches.

  They drove south of Senzeni Na, and near dawn were weaving between rocky ancient hillocks. But when they came to the bottom end of a landslide coming off a low broken scarp, Coyote started cursing. The ground was marked by rover tracks, and a scattering of crushed gas cylinders, food boxes and fuel containers.

  They stared at the sight. “Your cache?” Art asked, which provoked another outburst of swearing.

  “Who were they?” Art asked. “Police?”

  No one answered immediately. Sax went to one of the drivers’ seats to check supply gauges. Coyote continued cursing furiously, plopping meanwhile into the other driver’s seat. Finally he said to Art, “It wasn’t police. Not unless they’ve started using Vishniac rovers. No. These thieves were from the underground, damn them. Probably an outfit I know based in Argyre. I can’t think of anyone else who would do it. But this crowd knows where some of my old caches were, and they’ve been mad at me ever since I sabotaged a mining settlement in the Charitums, because it closed down after that, and they lost their main source of supplies.”

  “You folks should try to stay on the same side,” Art said.

  “Fuck off,” Coyote advised him.

  Coyote started up the boulder car and drove away. “It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”

  He went on in that vein for quite some time. Finally Sax tapped at one of the gauges, and Coyote said roughly, “I know!”

  It was full daylight, and he stopped the car in a cleft between two of the ancient hillocks, and they blacked the windows, and lay in the dark on their narrow mattresses.

  “So how many underground groups are there?” Art asked.

  “No one knows,” Coyote said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Nirgal answered before Coyote started in again. “There’s about forty in the southern hemisphere. And some long-standing disagreements among them are getting nasty. There are some tough groups out there. Radical Reds, Schnelling splinter groups, different kinds of fundamentalists … it’s causing trouble.”

  “But aren’t you all working for the same thing?”

  “I don’t know.” Nirgal recalled all-night arguments in Sabishii, sometimes quite violent, among students who were basically friends. “Maybe not.”

  “But haven’t you talked it over?”

  “Not in any formal way, no.”

  Art looked surprised. “You should do that,” he said.

  “Do what?” Nirgal asked.

  “You should convene some kind of meeting of all the underground groups, and see if you can’t agree about what you’re all trying to do. How to settle disputes, and like that.”

  Aside from a skeptical snort from Coyote, there was no response to this. After a long time Nirgal said, “My impression is that some of these groups are wary of Gamete, because of the First Hundred in it. No one wants to give up any autonomy to what’s already perceived as the most powerful sanctuary.”

  “But they could work on that at a meeting,” Art said. “That’s part of what it would be for. Among other things. You all need to work together, especially if the transnat police get more active after what they found out from Sax.”

  Sax nodded at this. The rest of them considered it in silence. Somewhere in the consideration Art started to snore, but Nirgal was awake for hours, thinking about it.

  They approached Senzeni Na in some need. Their food supplies were adequate if they rationed them, and the car’s water and gases were recycling so efficiently that there was little loss there. But they were simply short of fuel to run the car. “We need around fifty kilos of hydrogen peroxide,” Coyote said.

  He drove up to the rim of Thaumasia’s biggest canyon; and there in the far wall was Senzeni Na, behind great sheets of glass, the arcades all full of tall trees. The canyon floor in front of it was covered with walktubes, small tents, the great factory apparatus of the mo hole, the mohole itself, which was a giant black hole at the south end of the complex, and the tailings mound, which ran up the canyon far to the north. This was reputed to be the deepest mohole on Mars, so deep that the rock was getting a bit plastic at the bottom, “squishing in,” as Coyote put it — eighteen kilometers deep, with the lithosphere in the area about twenty-five.

  The mohole operation was almost completely automated, and the majority of the town’s population never went near it. And many of the robot trucks hauling rock out of the hole used hydrogen peroxide for fuel, so the warehouses down on the canyon floor next to the mohole would have what they needed. And security down there dated from before the unrest, and had been designed in part by John Boone himself, so it was woefully inadequate to withstand Coyote’s methods, particularly since he had all of John’s old programs in his AI.

  The canyon was exceptionally long, however, and Coyote’s best way down to the canyon floor from the rim was a climbing trail, some ten kilometers downcanyon from the mohole. “That’s fine,” Nirgal said. “I’ll get it on foot.”

  “Fifty kilos?” Coyote said.

  “I’ll go with him,” said Art. “I may not be able to do mystic levitation, but I can run.”

  Coyote thought it over, nodded. “I’ll lead you down the cliff.”

  So he did that, and in the timeslip Nirgal and Art took off with empty backpacks draped over their air tanks, running along easily over the smooth canyon floor, north to Senzeni Na. It seemed to Nirgal that it was going to be a simple operation. They came up on the mohole complex without a problem, the starlight now augmented by the diffuse light of the town shining out of the glass, and reflecting off the far wall. Coyote’s program got them through a garage lock and into the warehouse area as quickly as if they had every right to be there, with no sign that they had tripped any alarms. But then when they were in the warehouse itself, stuffing small hydrogen peroxide containers in their backpacks, all the lights in the place went on at once, and emergency doors slid shut.

  Art ran immediately to the wall away from the door, and set a charge and moved aside. The charge exploded with a loud bang, blowing a sizable hole in the thin warehouse wall, and then the two of them were outside and skulking between gigantic draglines to the perimeter wall. Suited figures came racing out of the walk-tube lock from the town, and the two intruders had to dive behind one of the draglines, a structure so big that they could stand in the crack between individual tractor treads. Nirgal felt his heart pounding against the metal. The suited figures went into the warehouse, and Art ran out and set another charge; the flash of light from this one blinded Nirgal, and he ducked through the gap in the fence and ran for it without seeing a thing, without feeling the thirty kilograms of fuel packets bouncing on his back and crushing the air tanks into his spine. Art was ahead of him again, badly out of control in the Martian g but nonetheless bounding along with those great surging strides. Nirgal almost laughed as he worked to catch up with him, hitting his rhythm and then, as he drew abreast of him, trying to show him by example how to use his arms properly, in a sort of swimming motion, rather than the rapid pumping that was throwing Art off balance so often. Despite the dark and their speed it se
emed to Nirgal that Art’s arms began to slow down.

  And they ran. Nirgal took the lead, and tried to pick the cleanest route over the canyon floor, the one least littered with rocks. The starlight seemed moje than sufficient to illuminate their way. Art kept pounding up to his right, pressing him to hurry. It almost became a kind of race, and Nirgal ran much faster than he would have on his own, or in any normal circumstances. So much of it was rhythm, and breath, and the dispersal of heat from the torso out into the skin and then the walker. It was surprising to see how well Art could keep up with, him, without the advantage of any of the disciplines. He was a powerful animal.

  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.