3

To avoid the aureoles of shattered terrain clustered north of Olympus Mons, they had to circle far to the north. They drove by night, and slept by day.

Art and Nirgal spent many hours of these nights driving the car and talking. Art asked questions by the hundred, and Nirgal asked just as many back, as fascinated by Earth as Art was by Mars. They were a matched pair, each very interested in the other, which as always made a fertile ground for friendship.

Nirgal had been frightened by the idea of contacting Terrans on his own, when it first occurred to him in his student years. It was clearly a dangerous notion, which had come to him one night in Sabishii and never let go. He had spent many hours over many months thinking about the idea, and doing research to figure out who he should contact, if he decided to act on the thought. The more he learned, the stronger grew his sense that it was a good idea, that having an alliance with a Terran power was critical to their hopes. And yet he was sure that all the members of the First Hundred he knew would not want to risk contact. If he did it, he would have to do it on his own. The risk, the stakes. . . .

He tried Praxis because of what he had read about it. It was a shot in the dark, as most critical acts are. An instinctive act: the trip to Burroughs, the walk into the Praxis offices in Hunt Mesa, the repeated requests for a line to William Fort.

He got the line, although that in itself meant nothing. But later, in the first moment he had approached Art on the street in Sheffield, he knew that he had done well. That Praxis had done well. There had been, just in the look of the big man, some quality that Nirgal had found instantly reassuring— some openness, an easy, friendly ability. To use his childhood vocabulary, a balance of the two worlds. A man he trusted.

One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable. Now, as the long rolling nights of their journey passed in the light of the IR imagers, the two men spoke to each other as if they too saw each other in the infrared. Their dialogue went on and on and on, and they got to know each other— to become friends. Nirgal’s impulsive reach to Earth was going to work out, he could see it right there in front of him hour after hour, just in the look on Art’s face, the curiosity, the interest.

They talked about everything, in the way people will. Their pasts, their opinions, their hopes. Nirgal spent most of his time trying to explain Zygote, and Sabishii. “I spent some years in Sabishii. The issei there run an open university. There’s no records kept. You just attend the classes you want, and deal with your teacher and no one else. A lot of Sabishii operates off the record. It’s the capital of the demimonde, like Tharsis Tholus only much bigger. A great city. I met a lot of people there, from all over Mars.”

The romance of Sabishii poured through his mind, memories flooding speech in all their profusion of incident, of feeling— all the individual emotions of that time, contradictory and incompatible though they were, experienced again simultaneously, in a dense polyphonic chord.

“That must have been quite an experience,” Art remarked, “after growing up in a place like Zygote.”

“Oh it was. It was wonderful.”

“Tell me about it.”

Nirgal crouched forward in his chair, shivering a bit, and tried to convey some of what it had been like.

• • •

At first it had been so strange. The issei had done incredible things; while the First Hundred had squabbled, fought, fissioned all over the planet, started a war, and were now dead or in hiding, the first group of Japanese settlers, the 240 who had founded Sabishii just seven years after the First Hundred had arrived, had stayed right next to their landing site, and built a city. They had absorbed all the changes that had followed, including the location of a mohole right next to their town; they had simply taken over the dig, and used the tailings for construction materials. When the thickening atmsophere made it possible they had gardened the surrounding terrain, which was rocky and high, not at all easy land, until they lived in the midst of a diffuse dwarfish forest, a bonsai krummholz, with alpine basins in the highlands above it. In the catastrophes of 2061 they had never moved, and, considered neutral, had been left alone by the transnats. In that solitude they had taken the excavated rock from their mohole and built it into long snaking mounds, all shot through with tunnels and rooms, ready to hide people from the south.

Thus they had invented the demimonde, the most sophisticated and complex society on Mars, full of people who passed each other on the street like strangers but met at night in rooms, to talk, and make music, and make love. And even the people not part of the underworld were interesting, because the issei had started a university, the University of Mars, where many of the students, perhaps a third of the total, were young and Martian-born. And whether these young natives were surface-world or underground in origin, they recognized each other without the slightest difficulty, as people at home in a million subtle ways, in ways no Terran-born ever could be. And so they talked, and made music, and made love, and naturally quite a few of the surface natives were thus initiated into knowledge of the underground, until it began to seem as if all the natives knew all, and were natural allies.

The professors included many of the Sabishiian issei and nisei, as well as distinguished visitors from all over Mars, and even from Terra. The students came from everywhere as well. There in the large handsome town they lived and studied and played, in streets and gardens and open pavilions, by ponds and in cafés, and on broad streetgrass boulevards, in a kind of Martian Kyoto.

Nirgal had first seen the city on a brief visit with Coyote. He had found it too big, too crowded, too many strangers. But months later, tired of wandering the south with Coyote, so solitary for so much of the time, he had recalled the place as if it were the only destination possible. Sabishii!

He had gone there and moved into a room under a roof, smaller than his bamboo room in Zygote, barely bigger than his bed. He joined classes, runs, calypso bands, café groups. He learned just how much his lectern held. He found out just how incredibly provincial and ignorant he was. Coyote gave him blocks of hydrogen peroxide, which he sold to the issei for what money he needed. Every day was an adventure, almost entirely unscheduled, just a tumble of encounters from hour to hour, on and on until he dropped, often wherever he was. During the days he studied areology and ecological engineering, giving these disciplines he had begun to learn in Zygote a mathematical underpinning, and finding in the tutorials with Etsu, and in the work itself, that he had inherited some of his mother’s gift for seeing clearly the interplay of all the components of a system. The days were devoted to this extraordinarily fascinating work. So many human lives, given over to the gaining of this body of knowledge! So varied, the powers this knowledge gave them in the world!

Then at night he might crash on the floor at a friend’s, after talking to a 140-year-old Bedouin about the Transcaucasus War, and the next night be playing bass steel drum or marimbas till dawn with twenty other kavajavaed Latin Americans and Polynesians, the next after that be in bed with one of the dusky beauties from the band, women as cheerful as Jackie at her best, and much less complicated. The following night he might go with friends to a performance of Shakespeare’s King John, and observe the great X that the play’s structure made, with John’s fortunes starting high and ending low, and the bastard’s starting low and ending high— and sit shaking as he watched the critical scene at the crossing of the X, in which John orders the death of young Arthur. And afterward walk with his friends all through the night city, talking about the play and what it said about the fortunes of certain of the issei, or about the various forces on Mars, or the Mars-Earth situation itself. And then the night after that, after some of them had spent the day out fell running, exploring high basins in his quest to see as much of the land as he could, they might stay out to sleep in a little survival tent, camping in one of the high cirques east of the city, heating a meal in the dusk as stars popped out everywhere in the purple sky, and the alpine flowers faded away into the basin of rock that held them all, as if in the palm of a giant hand.

Day after day of this ceaseless interaction with strangers taught him at least as much as he learned in the classes. Not that Zygote had left him completely ignorant; its inhabitants had included such a great variety of human behavior as to have left few surprises for Nirgal on that score. In fact, as he began to understand, he had been raised in something like an asylum of eccentrics, people bent hard by those first overpressured years on Mars.

But there still were some surprises, nevertheless. The natives from the northern cities, for instance— and not only them, but almost everyone not from Zygote— were much less physical with each other than Nirgal was used to being. They did not touch or hug or caress each other as much, or shove or strike— nor did they bathe together, although some learned to in Sabishii’s public baths. So Nirgal was always surprising people by his touch. He said odd things; he liked to run all day; whatever the reasons, as the months passed and he got involved in endlessly connected groups, bands, cells, and gangs, he was aware that he stuck out somehow, that he was the focal point of some groups— that a party was following him from café to café, from day to day. That there was such a thing as “Nirgal’s crowd.” Quickly he learned to deflect this attention if he didn’t want it. But sometimes he found he did.

Often it was when Jackie was there.

“Jackie again!” Art observed. It was not the first time she had come up, or the tenth.

Nirgal nodded, feeling his pulse jump.

Jackie too had moved to Sabishii, soon after Nirgal. She had taken rooms nearby, and attended some of the same classes. And in the fluctuating group of their peers, they sometimes showed off to each other— especially in the very common situation in which one or the other of them was involved in seducing someone or in being seduced.

But they soon learned that they could not indulge themselves in that, if they did not want to drive away other partners. Which neither did. So they left each other alone, except if one actively disliked the other’s choice of partner. So that in a way they were judging each other’s partners, and acquiescing to each other’s influence. And all this without a word, with this rare behavior the only visible sign of their power over each other. They were both fooling around with a lot of other people, making new relationships, friendships, having affairs. Sometimes they didn’t see each other for weeks. And yet at some deeper level (Nirgal shook his head unhappily as he tried to express this to Art) they “belonged to each other.”

If one of them ever needed to confirm that bond, the other responded to the seduction in a blaze of excitement, and off they went. That had only happened three times in the three years they were in Sabishii, and yet Nirgal knew by those meetings that the two of them were linked— by their shared childhood and all that had happened in it, certainly, but also by something more. Everything they did together was different than when they did it with other people, more intense.

With the rest of his acquaintances, there was nothing so fraught with significance, or danger. He had friends— a score, a hundred, five hundred. He always said yes. He asked questions and listened, and rarely slept. He went to the meetings of fifty different political organizations, and agreed with them all, and spent many a night talking, deciding the fate of Mars, and then of the human race. Some people he hit it off with better than others. He might talk to a native from the north and feel an immediate empathy, starting a friendship that would endure forever. Much of the time it happened that way. But then once in a while he would be utterly surprised by some action totally foreign to his understanding, and be reminded yet again what a cloistered, even claustrophobic upbringing he had had in Zygote— leaving him as innocent, in some ways, as a fairy brought up under an abalone shell.

“No, it’s not Zygote that made me,” he said to Art, looking behind them to make sure that Coyote was really sleeping. “You can’t choose your childhood, it’s just what happens to you. But after that you choose. I chose Sabishii. And that’s really what made me.”

“Maybe,” Art said, rubbing his jaw. “But childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.”

• • •

One dawn the deep plum color of the sky illuminated the spectacular fin ridge of Acheron to the north, looming like a Manhattan of solid rock, as yet uncut into individual skyscrapers. The canyonland underneath the fin was particolored, giving the fractured land a painted look. “That’s a lot of lichen,” Coyote said. Sax climbed into the seat beside him and leaned almost nose to windshield, showing as much animation as he had since the rescue.

Under the very top of the Acheron fin, there was a line of mirror windows like a diamond necklace, and on top of the ridge itself, a long tuft of green, under the ephemeral glint of tenting. Coyote exclaimed, “It looks like it’s been reoccupied!”

Sax nodded.

Spencer, looking over their shoulders, said, “I wonder who’s in there.”

“No one is,” Art said. They stared at him, and he went on: “I heard about it in my orientation in Sheffield. It’s a Praxis project. They rebuilt it, and got everything ready. And now they’re just waiting.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For Sax Russell, basically. For Taneev, Kohl, Tokareva, Russell . . .” He looked at Sax, shrugging almost apologetically.

Sax croaked something wordlike.

“Hey!” Coyote said.

Sax cleared his throat hard, tried again. His mouth pursed to a little O, and a horrible noise started deep in his throat: “W-w-w-w-w-” He looked over at Nirgal, gestured as if Nirgal would know.

“Why?” Nirgal said.

Sax nodded.

Nirgal felt his cheeks burn as an electric flush of acute relief ran through his skin, and he leaped up and gave the little man a hard hug. “You do understand!”

“Well,” Art was saying, “they did it as a kind of gesture. It was Fort’s idea, the guy who founded Praxis. ‘Maybe they’ll come back,’ he supposedly said to the Praxis people in Sheffield. I don’t know if he thought out the practicalities or not.”

“This Fort is strange,” Coyote said, and Sax nodded again.

“True,” Art said. “But I wish you could meet him. He reminds me of the stories you tell about Hiroko.”

“Does he know we’re out here?” Spencer asked.

Nirgal’s pulse leapt, but Art showed no sign of discomfort. “I don’t know. He suspects. He wants you to be out here.”

“Where does he live?” Nirgal asked.

“I don’t know.” Art described his visit to Fort. “So I don’t know exactly where he is. Somewhere on the Pacific. But if I could get word to him . . .”

No one responded.

“Well, maybe later,” Art said.

Sax was looking out the rover’s low windshield at the distant rock fin, at the tiny line of lit windows marking the labs behind them, empty and silent. Coyote reached out and squeezed his neck. “You want it back, don’t you.”

Sax croaked something.

• • •

On the empty plain of Amazonis there were few settlements of any kind. This was the back country, and they rolled rapidly south through it, night after night, and slept in the darkened cabin of the car through the days. Their biggest problem was finding adequate hiding places. On flat open plains the boulder car stood out like a glacial erratic, and Amazonis was almost nothing but flat open plain. They usually tucked into the apron of ejecta around one of the few craters they passed. After the dawn meals Sax sometimes exercised his voice, croaking incomprehensible words, trying to communicate with them and failing. This upset Nirgal even more than it seemed to bother Sax himself, who, though clearly frustrated, did not seem pained. But then he had not tried to talk to Simon in those last weeks. . . .

Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. “Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. “I’m afraid his interrogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”

“There’s such a thing as fluent aphasia?” Coyote said.

“Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can’t read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”

Sax nodded, as if to confirm the description.

“In fluent aphasia the subjects talk at great length, but are unaware that what they’re saying makes no sense.”

Art said, “I know a lot of people with that problem.”

Spencer ignored him. “We’ve got to get Sax down to Vlad and Ursula and Michel.”

“That’s what we’re doing.” Coyote gave Sax a squeeze on the arm before retiring to his mat.

• • •

On the fifth night after leaving the Bogdanovists, they approached the equator, and the double barrier of the fallen elevator cable. Coyote had passed the barrier in this region before, using a glacier formed by one of the aquifer outbursts of 2061, in Mangala Vallis. During the unrest water and ice had poured down the old arroyo for a hundred and fifty kilometers, and the glacier left behind when the flood froze had buried both passes of the fallen cable, at 152° longitude. Coyote had located a route over an unusually smooth stretch of this glacier, which had taken him across the two passes of the cable.

Unfortunately, when they approached Mangala Glacier— a long tumbled mass of gravel-covered brown ice, filling the bottom of a narrow valley— they found that it had changed since Coyote had last been there. “Where’s that rampway?” he kept demanding. “It was right here.”

Sax croaked, then made kneading motions with his hands, staring all the while through the windshield at the glacier.

Nirgal had a difficult time comprehending the glacier’s surface; it was a kind of visual static, all patches of dirty white and gray and black and tan, tumbled together until it was hard to distinguish size, shape, or distance. “Maybe it isn’t the same place,” he suggested.

“I can tell,” Coyote said.

“Are you sure?”

“I left markers. See, there’s one there. That trail duck on the lateral moraine. But beyond it should be a rampway up onto smooth ice, and it’s nothing but a wall of icebergs. Shit. I’ve been using this trail for ten years.”

“You’re lucky you had it that long,” Spencer said. “They’re slower than Terran glaciers, but they still flow downhill.”

Coyote only grunted. Sax croaked, then tapped at the inner lock door. He wanted to go outside.

“Might as well,” Coyote muttered, looking at a map on the screen. “We’ll have to spend the day here anyway.”

So in the predawn light Sax wandered the rubble plowed up by the glacier’s passage: a little upright creature with a light shining out of his helmet, like some deep-sea fish poking about for food. Something in the sight made Nirgal’s throat tighten, and he suited up and went outside to keep the old man company.

He wandered through the lovely chill gray morning, stepping from rock to rock, following Sax in his winding course through the moraine. Illuminated one by one in the cone of Sax’s headlamp were eldritch little worlds, the dunes and boulders interspersed with spiky low plants, filling cracks and hollows under rocks. Everything was gray, but the grays of the plants were shaded olive or khaki or brown, with occasional light spots, which were flowers— no doubt colorful in the sun, but now light luminous grays, glowing among thick furry leaves. Over his intercom Nirgal could hear Sax clearing his throat, and the little figure pointed at a rock. Nirgal crouched to inspect it. In cracks on the rock were growths like dried mushrooms, with black dots all over their shriveled cups, and sprinkled with what looked like a layer of salt. Sax croaked as Nirgal touched one, but he could not say what he wanted. “R-r-r . . .”

They stared at each other. “It’s okay,” Nirgal said, stricken again by the memory of Simon.

They moved to another patch of foliage. The areas that supported plants appeared like little outdoor rooms, separated by zones of dry rock and sand. Sax spent about fifteen minutes in each frosty fellfield, stumbling around awkwardly. There were a lot of different kinds of plants, and only after they had visited several glens did Nirgal begin to see some that appeared again and again. None of them resembled the plants he had grown up with in Zygote, nor were they like anything in the arboretums of Sabishii. Only the first-generation plants, the lichens, mosses, and grasses, looked at all familiar, like the ground cover in the high basins above Sabishii.

Sax didn’t try to speak again, but his headlamp was like a pointed finger, and Nirgal often trained his headlamp on the same area, doubling the illumination. The sky turned rosy, and it began to feel like they were in the planet’s shadow, with sunlight just overhead.

Then Sax said, “Dr—!” and aimed his headlamp at a steep slope of gravel, over which a network of woody branches grew, like a mesh put there to hold the rubble in place. “Dr—!”

“Dryad,” Nirgal said, recognizing it.

Sax nodded emphatically. The rocks under their feet were covered with light green patches of lichen, and he pointed at a patch, and said, “Ap-ple. Red. Map. Moss.”

“Hey,” Nirgal said. “You said that really well.”

The sun rose, throwing their shadows over the gravel slope. Suddenly the dryad’s little flowers were picked out by the light, the ivory petals cupping gold stamens. “Dry-ad,” Sax croaked. Their headlamp beams were now invisible, and the flowers blazed with daylight color. Nirgal heard a sound over the intercom and looked into Sax’s helmet, and saw that the old man was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks.