1
Nirgal got in a rhythm and kept it all day. Lung-gom-pa. The religion of running, running as meditation or prayer. Zazen, ka zen. Part of the areophany, as Martian gravity was integral to it; what the human body could achieve in two fifths the pull it had evolved for was a euphoria of effort. One ran as a pilgrim, half worshiper half god.
A religion with quite a few adherents these days, loners out running around. Sometimes there were organized runs, races: Thread the Labyrinth, Chaos Crawl, the Transmarineris, the Round-the-Worlder. And in between those, the daily discipline. Purposeless activity; art for art’s sake. For Nirgal it was worship, or meditation, or oblivion. His mind wandered, or focused on his body, or on the trail; or went blank. At this moment he was running to music, Bach then Bruckner then Bonnie Tyndall, an Elysian neoclassicist whose music poured along like the day itself, tall chords shifting in steady internal modulation, somewhat like Bach or Bruckner in fact but slower and steadier, more inexorable and grand. Fine music to run by, even though for hours at a time he didn’t consciously hear it. He only ran.
It was coming time for the Round-the-Worlder, which began every other perihelion. Starting from Sheffield the contestants could run east or west around the world, without wristpad or any other navigational aid, shorn of everything but the information of their senses, and small bags of food and drink and gear. They were allowed to choose any route that stayed within twenty degrees of the equator (they were tracked by satellite, and disqualified if they left the equatorial zone), and all bridges were allowed, including the Ganges Strait Bridge, which made routes both north and south of Marineris competitive, and created almost as many viable routes as contestants. Nirgal had won the race in five of the nine previous runnings, because of his route-finding ability rather than his speed; the “Nirgalweg” was considered by many fell runners to be in the nature of a mystical achievement, full of counterintuitive extravagance, and in the last couple races he had had trackers following him with the plan of passing him at the end. But each year he took a different route, and often he made choices that looked so bad that some of his trackers gave up and took off in more promising directions. Others couldn’t keep up the pace over the two hundred days of the circumnavigation, crossing some 21,000 kilometers— it required truly long-distance endurance, one had to be able to sustain it as a way of life. Running every day.
Nirgal liked it. He wanted to win the next Round-the-Worlder, to have won a majority of the first ten. He was out researching the route, checking new trails. Many new paths were being built every year, there had been a craze recently to inlay staircase trails in the sides of the canyon cliffs and dorsa and escarpments that everywhere seamed the outback. The trail he was on now had been constructed since he had last been in this area; it dropped down the steep cliff wall of a sink in the Aromatum Chaos, and there was a matching trail on the opposite wall of the sink. Going straight through Aromatum would add a fair bit of verticality to a run, but all flatter routes had to swing far to north or south, and Nirgal thought that if all the trails were as good as this one, the cost in elevation might turn out to be worth it.
The new trail occupied angled cracks in the blocky cliff wall, the steps fitted like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and very regular, so that it was like running down a staircase in the ruined wall of some giant’s castle. Cliffside trailmaking was an art, a lovely form of work that Nirgal had joined from time to time, helping to move cut rocks with a crane, to wedge them into position on top of the step below— hours in a belay harness, pulling on the thin green lines with gloved hands, guiding big polygons of basalt into place. The first trail builder Nirgal had met had been a woman constructing a trail along the finback of the Geryon Montes, the long ridge on the floor of Ius Chasma. He had helped her all of one summer, down most of the ridge. She was still in Marineris somewhere, constructing trails with her hand tools and high-powered rock saws, and pulley systems with superstrong line, and glue bolts stronger than the rock itself— painstakingly assembling a sidewalk or staircase from the surrounding rock, some trails like miraculously helpful natural features, others like Roman roads, others still with a pharaonic or Incan massiveness, huge blocks fitted with hairline precision across boulder slopes or large-grained chaos.
Down three hundred steps, counting, then across the sink floor in the hour before sunset, the strip of sky a velvet violet glowing over dark cliff walls. No trail here on the shadowed sand of the sink floor, and he focused on the rocks and plants scattered over it, running between things, his glance caught by light-colored flowers on top of round-barreled cacti, glowing like the sky. His body was also glowing, with the end of the day’s run, and the prospect of dinner, his hunger a gnawing from within, a faintness, getting more unpleasant by the minute.
He found the staircase trail on the western cliff wall, up and up, changing gears into the uphill push stride, smooth and regular, turning left and right with the switchbacks, admiring the elegant placement of the trail in the crack system of the cliff, a placement that usually had him running with a waist-high wall of rock on the air side, except during the ascent of one bare sheer patch of rock, where the builders had been forced to the extremity of bolting in a solid magnesium ladder. He hurried up it, feeling his quadriceps like giant rubber bands; he was tired.
On a plinth to the left of the staircase there was a flat patch with a great view of the long narrow canyon below. He turned off the trail and stopped running. He sat down on a rock like a chair. It was windy; he popped his little mushroom tent, and it stood before him transparent in the dusk. Bedding, lamp, lectern, all pulled hastily from his fanny pack in the search for food, all burnished by years of use, and as light as feathers— his gear kit altogether weighed less than three kilos. And there they were in their place at the back, battery-powered stove and food bag and water bottle.
The twilight passed in Himalayan majesty as he cooked a pot of powdered soup, sitting cross-legged on his sleeping pad, leaning back against the tent’s clear wall. Tired muscles feeling the luxury of sitting down. Another beautiful day.
• • •
He slept poorly that night, and got up in the predawn cold wind, and packed up quickly, shivering, and ran west again. Out of the last Aromatum jumbles he came to the northern shore of Ganges Bay. The dark blue plate of the bay lay to his left as he ran. Here the long beaches were backed by wide sand dunes, covered by short grass that made for easy running. Nirgal flowed on, in his rhythm, glancing at the sea or into the taiga forest off to the right. Millions of trees had been planted along this coastline in order to stabilize the ground and cut down on dust storms. The great forest of Ophir was one of the least populated regions on Mars; it had been rarely visited in the earlier years of its existence, and had never been host to a tent town; deep deposits of dust and fines had discouraged travel. Now these deposits were somewhat fixed by the forest, but bordering the streams were swamps and quicksand lakes, and unstable loess bluffs that caused breaks in the lattice roof of branches and leaves. Nirgal kept to the border of forest and sea, on the dunes or among stands of smaller trees. He crossed several small bridges spanning river mouths. He spent a night on the beach, lulled to sleep by the sound of breaking waves.
The next day at dawn he followed the trail under the canopy of green leaves, the coast having stopped at the Ganges Chasma dam. The light was dim and cool. Everything at this hour looked like a shadow of itself. Faint trails branched off uphill to the left. The forest here was conifer for the most part: redwoods in tall groves, surrounded by smaller pines and junipers. The forest floor was covered by dry needles. In wet places ferns broke through this brown mat, adding their archaic fractals to the sun-dappled floor. A stream braided among narrow grassy islands. He could rarely see more than a hundred meters ahead. Green and brown were the dominant colors; the only red visible was the tint of the redwoods’ hairy bark. Shafts of sunlight like slender living beings danced over the forest floor. Nirgal ran outside himself, mesmerized as he passed among these pencils of light. He skipped on rocks across a shallow creek, in a fern-floored glade. It was like crossing a room, with hallways extending to similar rooms upstream and down. A short waterfall gurgled to his left.
He stopped for a drink from the far side of the creek. Then as he straightened up he saw a marmot, waddling over moss under the waterfall. He felt a quick stab to the heart. The marmot drank and then washed its paws and face. It did not see Nirgal.
Then there was a rustle and the marmot ran, was buried in a flurry of spotted fur— white teeth— a big lynx, pinning the marmot’s throat in powerful jaws, shaking the little creature hard, then pressing it still under a big paw.
Nirgal had jumped at the moment of attack, and now as the lynx stood over its prey it looked in Nirgal’s direction, as if just now registering the movement. Its eyes glittered in the dim light, its mouth was bloody; Nirgal shuddered, and when the cat saw him and their gazes locked, he saw it running at him and jumping on him, its pointed teeth bright even in the dim light—
But no. It disappeared with its prey, leaving only a bobbing fern.
Nirgal ran on. The day was darker than the cloud shadow could explain, a malign dimness. He had to focus on the trail. Light flickered through the shadows, white piercing green. Hunter and hunted. Ice-rimmed ponds in the gloom. Moss on bark, fern patterns in his peripheral vision. Here a gnarly pile of bristlecone pines, there a pit of quicksand. The day was chill, the night would be frigid.
He ran all day. His pack bounced against his back, nearly empty of food. He was glad he was nearing his next cache. Sometimes on runs he took only a few handfuls of cereal and lived off the land as best he could, gathering pine nuts and fishing; but on trips of that kind half of every day had to be spent in the search for food, and there wasn’t much to be found. When the fish were biting a lake was an incredible cornucopia. Lake people. But on this run he was going full tilt from cache to cache, eating seven or eight thousand calories a day, and still ravenous every evening. So when he came to the little arroyo containing his next cache, and found the arroyo’s side wall collapsed in a landslide over it, he shouted with dismay and anger. He even dug for a while at the pile of loose rock; it was a small slide; but a couple of tons would have to be removed. No chance. He would have to run hard across Ophir to the next cache, and go hungry. He took off in the very moment of realization, thinking to save time.
Now he looked for edible things as he ran, pine nuts, meadow onions, anything. He ate the food left in his pack very slowly, chewing it for as long as he could, trying to imagine it to some higher level of nutrient value. Savoring every bite. Hunger kept him awake part of every night, though he slept heavily through the hours before dawn.
On the third day of this unexpected hunger run he emerged from the forest just south of Juventa Chasma, in land broken by the ancient Juventa aquifer outbreak. It was a lot of work to make his way through this land on a clean line, and he was hungrier than he could ever remember being; and his next cache still two days away. His body had eaten all its fat reserves, or so it felt, and was now feeding on the muscles themselves. This autocannibalism gave every object a sharp edge, tinged with glories— the whiteness shining out of things, as if reality itself were going translucent. Soon after this stage, as he knew from similar past experiences, the lung-gom-pa state would give way to hallucinations. Already there were lots of crawling worms in his eyes, and black dots, and circles of little blue mushrooms, and then green lizardlike things scurrying along in the sand, right before the blurs of his feet, for hours at a time.
It took all the thought he could muster to navigate the broken land. He watched the rock underfoot and the land ahead equally, head up and down and up and down, in a bobbing motion that had little to do with his thinking, which browsed over near and far in an entirely different rhythm. The Juventa Chaos, downhill to his right, was a shallow jumbled depression, over which he could see to a distant horizon; it was like looking into a big shattered bowl. Ahead the land was rumpled and uneven, pits and hillocks covered with boulders and sand drifts, the shadows too dark, the sunlit highlights too bright. Dark yet glary; it was near sunset again, and his pupils were pinched by the light. Up and down, up and down; he came on an ancient dune side, and glissaded down the sand and scree, a dreamy descent, left, right, left, each step carrying him down a few meters, feet cushioned by sand and gravel shoved off the angle of repose. All too easy to get used to that; once on flat ground again it was hard work to return to honest jogging, and the next little uphill was devastating. He would have to look for a campsite soon, perhaps in the next hollow, or on the next sandy flat next to a rock bench. He was starving, faint with lack of food, and nothing in his pack but some meadow onions pulled earlier; but it would help to be so tired, he would fall asleep no matter what. Exhaustion beat hunger every time.
He stumbled across a shallow depression, over a knob, between two house-sized boulders. Then in a flash of white a naked woman was standing before him, waving a green sash; he stopped abruptly, he reeled, stunned at the sight of her, then concerned that the hallucinations had gotten so out of hand. But there she stood, as vivid as a flame, blood streaks spattering her breasts and legs, waving the green scarf silently. Then other human figures ran past her and over the next little knob, going where she pointed, or so it seemed. She looked at Nirgal, gestured to the south as if directing him as well, then took off running, her lean white body flowing like something visible in more than three dimensions, strong back, long legs, round bottom, already distant, the green scarf flying this way and that as she used it to point.
Suddenly he saw three antelope ahead, moving over a hillock to the west, silhouetted by the low sun. Ah; hunters. The antelope were being herded west by the humans, who were scattered in an arc behind them, waving scarves at them from behind rocks. All in silence, as if sound had disappeared from the world: no wind, no cries. For a moment, as the antelope stopped on the hillock, everyone stopped moving, everyone alert but still; hunters and hunted all frozen together, in a tableau that transfixed Nirgal. He was afraid to blink for fear the whole scene would wink away to nothing.
The antelope buck moved, breaking the tableau. He rocked forward cautiously, step-by-step. The woman with the green sash walked after him, upright and in the open. The other hunters popped in and out of view, moving like finches from one frozen position to the next. They were barefoot, and wore loincloths or singlets. Some of their faces and backs were painted red or black or ochre.
Nirgal followed them. They swerved, and he found himself on their left wing as they moved west. This turned out to be lucky, as the antelope buck tried to make a break around his side, and Nirgal was in position to jump in its path, waving his hands wildly. The three antelope then turned as one, dashed west again. The troop of hunters followed, running faster than Nirgal at his fastest, maintaining their arc. Nirgal had to work hard just to keep them in sight; they were very fast, barefoot or not. It was hard to see them in the long shadows, and they stayed silent; on the other wing of the arc someone yipped once, and that was their only sound, except for the squeak and clatter of sand and gravel, the harsh breath in their throats. In and out of sight they ran, the antelope keeping their distance in short bursts of flowing speed. No human would ever catch them. Still Nirgal ran, panting hard, following the hunt. Ahead he spotted their prey again. Ah— the antelope had stopped. They had come to the edge of a cliff. A canyon rim— he saw the gap and the opposite rim. A shallow fossa, pine tops sticking out of it. Had the antelope known it was there? Were they familiar with this region? The canyon had not been visible even a few hundred meters back. . . .
But perhaps they did know the place, for in the pure flow of animal grace they half trotted, half pronged south along the cliff edge to a little embayment. This turned out to be the top of a steep ravine, down which rubble siphoned onto the canyon floor. As the antelope disappeared down this slot all the hunters rushed to the rim, where they looked on as the three animals descended the ravine, in an astonishing display of power and balance, clacking from rock to rock in tremendous leaps down. One of the hunters howled, “Owwwwwwwww,” and with that cry all the hunters hurried over to the head of the ravine, yelping and grunting. Nirgal joined the others and dropped over the rim and then they were all in a mad descent, clacking and jumping, and though Nirgal’s legs were rubbery his endless days of lung-gom now served him well, for he dropped past most of the others as he hopped down boulders and glissaded down little rockslides, jumping, holding balance, using his hands, making great desperate leaps, like everyone else utterly locked into the moment, into the striving for a quick descent without a bad fall.
Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look up again, to see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen from above. Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir and pine, and then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of giant sequoias, big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed shallow, though the descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were the treetops that had stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias two hundred meters tall, towering like great silent saints, each one extending its arms in a broad circle over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin patchy snow and the brown needle beds.
The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest, headed south, and with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting past one huge trunk after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark dwarfed everything else— they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing over a snowy forest floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his back and flanks, he was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine, panting and light-headed. It was obvious that they could not catch the antelope, he didn’t understand what they were doing. Nevertheless he raced between the stupendous trees, following the lead hunters. The chase itself was all he wanted.
Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a skyscraper district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the trunks of the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other side of a narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A sheer wall of water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended over them in a smooth transparent mass.
Reservoir dam. Recently they had begun building them out of transparent sheets of diamond lattice, sunk in a concrete foundation; Nirgal could see this one running down both canyon walls and across the canyon floor, a thick white line.
The mass of water stood over them like the side of a great aquarium, turbid near the bottom, weeds floating in dark mud. Above them silver fish as big as the antelope flitted next to the clear wall, then receded into dark crystalline depths.
The three antelope pronged nervously back and forth before this barrier, the doe and fawn following the quick turns of the buck. As the hunters closed on them, the buck suddenly leaped away and crashed its head against the dam with a powerful thrust of its whole body— antlers like bone knives, thwack— Nirgal froze in fear, everyone froze at this violent gesture, so ferocious as to be human; but the buck bounced away, staggered. He turned and charged at them. Bola balls spun through the air and the line wrapped around his legs just above the hocks, and he crashed forward and down. Some of the hunters swarmed on him, others brought down doe and fawn in a hail of rocks and spears. A squeal cut off abruptly. Nirgal saw the doe’s throat cut with an obsidian-bladed dagger, the blood pouring onto the sand next to the foundation of the dam. The big fish flashed by overhead, looking down at them.
The woman with the green scarf was nowhere to be seen. Another hunter, a man wearing only necklaces, tilted his head back and howled, shattering the strange silence of the work; he danced in a circle, then ran at the clear wall of the dam and threw his spear straight at it. The spear bounced away. The exultant hunter ran up and slammed his fist against the clear hard membrane.
A woman hunter with blood on her hands turned her head to give the man a contemptuous look. “Quit fooling around,” she said.
The spear thrower laughed. “You don’t have to worry. These dams are a hundred times stronger than they need to be.”
The woman shook her head, disgusted. “It’s stupid to tempt fate.”
“It’s amazing what superstitions survive in fearful minds.”
“You’re a fool,” the woman said. “Luck is as real as anything else.”
“Luck! Fate! Ka.” The spear thrower picked up his spear and ran and threw it at the dam again; it rebounded and almost hit him, and he laughed wildly. “How lucky,” he said. “Fortune favors the bold, eh?”
“Asshole. Show some respect.”
“All honor to that buck, indeed, crashing the wall like he did.” The man laughed raucously.
The others were ignoring these two, busy butchering the animals. “Many thanks, brother. Many thanks, sister.” Nirgal’s hands shook as he watched; he could smell the blood; he was salivating. Piles of intestines steamed in the chill air. Magnesium poles were pulled from waist bags and telescoped out, and the decapitated antelope bodies were tied over them by the legs. Hunters at the ends of the poles hefted the headless carcasses into the air.
The bloody-handed woman shouted at the spear thrower, “You’d better help carry if you want to eat any of these.”
“Fuck you.” But he helped carry the front end of the buck.
“Come on,” the woman said to Nirgal, and then they were hurrying west across the canyon floor, between the great wall of water and the last of the massive sequoias. Nirgal followed, stomach growling.
The west wall of the canyon was marked with petroglyphs: animals, lingams, yonis, handprints, comets and spaceships, geometric designs, the humpbacked flute player Kokopelli, all scarcely visible in the dusk. There was a staircase trail inlaid in the cliff, following a nearly perfect Z of ledges. The hunters hiked up it and Nirgal followed. Shift into the uphill rhythm one more time, his stomach eating him from within, his head swimming. A black antelope splayed across the rock beside him.
Above, a few giant sequoias stood isolated on the canyon rim. When they reached the rim, returning to the sunset’s last light, he saw that these trees formed a circle, nine trees in a rough woodhenge, with a big firepit at their center.
The band entered the circle and got to work starting a fire, skinning the antelope, cutting big venison steaks out of the haunches. Nirgal stood watching, legs in a sewing-machine tremble, mouth salivating like a fountain; he swallowed again and again as he sniffed the steak juices lofting in the smoke through the early stars. Firelight pushed like a bubble at the dusk’s gloom, turning the circle of trees into a flickering roofless room. The light flickering against the needles was like seeing your own capillaries. Some of the trees had wooden staircases spiraling around their trunks, up into their branches. High above them lamps were being lit, voices like skylarks among the stars.
Three or four of the hunters bunched around him, offering him flatcakes of what tasted like barley, then a fiery liquor out of clay jars. They told him they had found the sequoia henge a few years before.
“What happened to the, the leader of the hunt?” Nirgal asked, looking around.
“Oh, the diana can’t sleep with us tonight.”
“Besides she fucked up, she don’t want to.”
“Yes she does. You know Zo, she always has a reason.”
They laughed and moved nearer to the fire. A woman poked out a charred steak, waved it on its stick until it cooled. “I eat all of you, little sister.” And bit into the steak.
Nirgal ate with them, lost in the wet hot taste of the meat, chewing hard but still bolting the food, his body all abuzz with trembling light-headed hunger. Food, food!
He ate his second steak more slowly, watching the others. His stomach was filling quickly. He recalled the scramble down the ravine: it was amazing what the body could do in such a situation, it had been an out-of-body experience— or rather an experience so far into the body that it was like unconsciousness— diving deep into the cerebellum, presumably, into that ancient undermind that knew how to do things. A state of grace.
A resiny branch spit flames out of the blaze. His sight had not yet settled down, things jumped and blurred with afterimages. The spear thrower and another man came up to him, “Here, drink this,” and tilted a skin’s spigot against his lips and laughed, some bitter milky drink in his mouth. “Have some of the white brother, brother.” A group of them picked up some stones and began to hit them together in rhythm, all their different patterns meshing bass to treble. The rest of them began to dance around the bonfire, hooting or singing or chanting. “Auqakuh, Qahira, Harmakhis, Kasei. Auqakuh, Mangala, Ma’adim, Bahram.” Nirgal danced with them, exhaustion banished. It was a cold night and one could move in or away from the heat of the fire, feel its radiance against cold bare skin, move back out into the chill. When everyone was hot and sweaty they took off into the night, stumbling back toward the canyon, south along the rim. A hand clutched at Nirgal’s arm and it looked like the diana was there beside him again, light in the dark, but it was too dark to see, and then they were crashing into the water of the reservoir, shockingly frigid, dive under, waist-deep silt and sand, heart-stopping cold, stand up, wade back out all the senses pulsating wildly, gasps, laughter, a hand at his ankle and down he went again, into the shallows face first, laughing. Through the dark wet, freezing, toes banging “ow! ow!” and back into the henge, into the heat. Soaking they danced again, pressed to the heat of the fire, arms extended, hugging its radiance. All the bodies ruddy in the firelight, the sequoia needles flashing against pinwheel stars, bouncing in rhythm to the rock percussion.
When they warmed back up and the fire died down, they led him up one of the sequoia staircases. On the massive upper limbs of the tree were perched small flat sleeping platforms, low-walled and open to the sky. The floors swayed very slightly underfoot, on a cold breeze that had roused the trees’ deep airy choral voices. Nirgal was left alone on what appeared to be the highest platform. He unpacked his bedding and lay down. To the chorus of wind in sequoia needles he fell fast asleep.