Green mars (40 page)

“What we need is equality without conformity,” Zeyk said at one point, squinting seriously as he chose his words. This was close enough to what Nadia had been saying on the drive there that it caught Nirgal’s attention even more than it otherwise would have. “This is not an easy thing to establish, but clearly we have to try, to avoid fighting. I’ll spread the word through the Arab community. Or at least the Bedu. I must say, there are Arabs in the north who are very much involved with the transnational, with Amexx especially. All the African Arab countries are falling into Amexx, one after the next. A very odd pairing. But money ...” He rubbed his fingers together. “You know. Anyway, we will contact our friends. And the Sufis will help us. They are becoming the mullahs down here, and the mullahs don’t like it, but I do.”

Other developments worried him. “Armscor has taken on the Black Sea Group, and that’s a very bad combination—old Afrikaa-ner leadership, and security from all the member states, most of them police states—Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Romania.” He ticked them off on his fingers, wrinkling his nose. “Think about those histories for a while! And they have been building bases on the Great Escarpment, a band around Mars, in effect. And they’re in tight with the Transitional Authority.” He shook his head. “They will crush us if they can.

Nadia nodded her agreement, and Art, looking surprised at this assessment, pumped Zeyk with a hundred questions. “But you don’t hide,” he noted at one point.

“We have sanctuaries if we need them,” Zeyk said. “And we are ready to fight.”

“Do you think it will come to that?” Art asked.

“I am sure of it.”

Much later, after several more tiny cups of mudlike coffee, Zeyk and Nazik and Nadia talked to each other about Frank Chalmers, all three of them smiling peculiar fond smiles. Nirgal and Art listened, but it was hard to get a sense of that man, dead long before Nirgal had been born. In fact it was a shocking reminder of just how old the issei were, that they had known such a figure from the videotapes. Finally Art blurted out, “But what was he like!”

The three old ones thought it over.

Slowly Zeyk said, “He was an angry man. He listened to Arabs, though, and respected us. He lived with us for a time and learned our language, and truthfully there are few Americans who have ever done that. And so we loved him. But he was no very easy man to know. And he was angry. I don’t know why. Something in his years on Earth, I suppose. He never spoke of them. In fact he never spoke about himself at all. But there was a gyroscope in him, spinning like a pulsar. And he had black moods. Very black. We sent him out in scouting rovers, to see if he could help himself. It didn’t always work. He would rip us from time to time, even though he was our guest.” Zeyk smiled, remembering. “Once he called us all slaveowners, right to our faces over coffee.”

“Slaveowners?”

Zeyk waved a hand. “He was angry.”

“He saved us, there at the end,” Nadia told Zeyk, stirring from deep in her own thoughts. “In sixty-one.” She told them of a long drive down Valles Marineris, accomplished at the very same time that the Compton Aquifer outbreak was flooding the great canyon; and how when they were almost clear of it, the flood had caught Frank and swept him away. “He was out getting the car off a rock, and if he hadn’t acted so quickly, the whole car would have gone.”

“Ah,” said Zeyk. “A happy death.”

“I don’t think he thought so.”

The issei all laughed, briefly, then reached together for their empty cups, and made a small toast to their late friend. “I miss him,” Nadia said as she put her cup down. “I never thought I would say that.”

She went silent, and watching her Nirgal felt the night cosseting them, hiding them. He had never heard her speak of Frank Chal-mers. A lot of her friends had died in the revolt. And her partner too, Bogdanov, whom so many people still followed.

“Angry to the last,” Zeyk said. “For Frank, a happy death.”

From Lyell they continued counterclockwise around the South Pole, stopping at sanctuaries or tent towns, and exchanging news and goods. Christianopolis was the largest tent town in the region, center of trade for all the smaller settlements south of Argyre. The sanctuaries in the area were mostly occupied by Reds. Nadia asked all the Reds they met to convey news of the congress to Ann Clay-borne. “We’re supposed to have a phone link, but she’s not answering me.” A lot of the Reds clearly thought a meeting was a bad idea, or at least a waste of time. South of Schmidt Crater they stopped at a settlement of Bologna communists who lived in a hollowed-out hill, lost in one of the wildest zones of the southern highlands, a region very hard to travel in because of the many wandering scarps and dikes, which rovers could not negotiate. The Bolognese gave them a map marking some tunnels and elevators they had installed in the area, to allow passage through dikes, and up or down scarps. “If we didn’t have them our trips would be nothing but detours.”

Located next to one of their hidden dike tunnels was a small colony of Polynesians, living in a short lava tunnel, which they had floored with water and three islands. The dike was piled high with ice and snow on its southern flank, but the Polynesians, most of whom were from the island of Vanuatu, kept the interior of their refuge at homey temperatures, and Nirgal found the air so hot and humid that it was hard to breathe, even when just sitting on a sand beach, between a black lake and a line of tilting palm trees. Clearly, he thought as he looked around, the Polynesians could be counted among those trying to build a culture incorporating some aspects of their archaic ancestors. They also proved to be scholars of primitive government everywhere in Earth’s history, and they were excited at the idea of sharing what they had learned in these studies at the congress, so it was no problem getting them to agree to come.

To celebrate the idea of the congress they had gathered for a feast on the beach. Art, seated between Jackie and a Polynesian beauty named Tanna, beamed blissfully as he sipped from a half coconut shell filled with kava. Nirgal lay stretched out on the sand before them, listening as Jackie and Tanna talked animatedly about the indigenous movement, as Tanna called it. This was not any simple back-to-the-past nostalgia, she -said, but rather an attempt to invent new cultures, which incorporated aspects of early civilizations into high-tech Martian forms. “The underground itself is a kind of Polynesia,” Tanna said. “Little islands in a great stone ocean, some on the maps, some not. And someday it will be a real ocean, and we’ll be out on the islands, flourishing under the sky.”

“I’ll drink to that,” Art said, and did. Clearly one part of the archaic Polynesian culture that Art hoped they were incorporating was their renowned sexual friendliness. But Jackie was mischievously complicating things by leaning on Art’s arm, either to tease him or to compete with Tanna. Art was looking happy but concerned; he had drunk his cup of the noxious kava fairly quickly, and between that and the women, appeared lost in a blissful confusion. Nirgal nearly laughed out loud. It seemed possible that some of the other young women at the feast might also be interested in sharing the archaic wisdom, judging by their glances his way. On the other hand Jackie might leave off teasing Art. It did not matter; it was going to be a long night, and’New Vanuatu’s little tunnel ocean was kept as warm as the old Zygote baths. Nadia was already out there, swimming in the shallows with some men a quarter her age. Nirgal stood and pulled off his clothes, walked out into the water.

It was getting to be late enough in the winter that even at 80° latitude the sun rose for an hour or two around noon, and during these brief intervals the shifting fogs glowed in tones pastel or metallic—on some days violet and rose and pink, on others copper and bronze and gold. And in all cases the delicate shades of color were captured and reflected by the frost on the ground, so that it looked sometimes as if they traversed a world made entirely of jewels, of amethysts, rubies, sapphires.

On other days the wind would roar, throwing a weight of frost that coated the rover, and gave the world a flowing, underwater look. In the brief hours of sunlight they worked at clearing the rover’s wheels, the sun in the fog like a patch of yellow lichen.

Once, after one of these windstorms had cleared, the fog hood was gone as well, and the land to every horizon was a spectacular complexity of ice flowers. And over the northern horizon of this rumpled diamond field stood a tall dark cloud, pouring up into the sky from some source that appeared to be not far over the horizon.

They stopped and dug out one of Nadia’s little shelters. Nirgal stared out at the dark cloud and looked at the map. “I think it might be the Rayleigh mohole,” he said. “Coyote started up the robot excavators in that one, during that first trip I took with him. I wonder if something’s come of it.”

“I’ve got a little scout rover stashed in the garage here,” Nadia said. “You can take that over and have a look if you want. I’d go too but I need to get back to Gamete. I’m supposed to meet Ann there day after tomorrow. Apparently she’s heard about the congress, and wants to ask me some questions.”

Art expressed an interest in meeting Ann Clayborne; he had been impressed by a video about her he had seen on the flight to Mars. “It would be like meeting Jeremiah.”

Jackie said to Nirgal, “I’ll come with you.”

So they agreed to meet in Gamete, and Art and Nadia headed there directly in the big rover, while Nirgal took off with Jackie in Nadia’s scout car. The tall cloud still stood over the icescape ahead of them, a dense pillar of dark gray lobes, torn flat in the stratosphere, in different directions at different times. As they got closer, it seemed more and more certain that the cloud was pouring up out of the silent planet. And then as they rolled to the edge of one low scarp, they saw that the land in the distance was clear of ice, the ground as rocky as it would be in high summer, but blacker, a nearly pure black rock that was smoking from long orange fissures in its bulbous, pillowy surface. And just beyond the horizon, which here was six or seven kilometers off, the dark cloud was roiling up, like a mohole thermal cloud gone nova, the hot gaseous smoke exploding outward and then tumbling up hastily.

Jackie drove their car to the top of the highest hill in the region. From there they could see all the way to the source of the cloud, and it was just as Nirgal had guessed the moment he had seen it: the Rayleigh mohole was now a low hill, black except for its pattern of angry orange cracks. The cloud poured out of a hole in this hill, the smoke dark and dense and roiling. A tongue of rough black rock stretched downhill to the south, in their direction and then off to their right.

As they sat in the car, silently watching, a big part of the low black hill covering the mohole tipped over and broke apart, and liquid orange rock ran quickly between the black chunks, sparking and splashing yellow. The intense yellow quickly turned orange, and then darkened further.

After that nothing moved but the column of smoke. Over the ventilator and engine hums they could hear a rumbling basso continue, punctuated by booms that were timed to sudden explosions of smoke from the vent. The car trembled slightly on its shock absorbers.

They stayed on the hill watching, Nirgal rapt, Jackie excited and talkative, commenting at length, then going silent as chunks of lava broke away from the hill, releasing more spills of melted rock. When they looked through the car’s IR viewer the hill was a brilliant emerald with blazing white cracks in it, and the tongue of lava licking the plain was bright green. It took about an hour for orange rock to turn black in visible light, but through the IR the emerald went dark green in about ten minutes. Green pouring up into the world, with the white bursting through it.

They ate a meal, and as they cleaned their plates Jackie moved Nirgal around the cramped kitchen with her hands, friendly in the way she had been in New Vanuatu, her eyes bright, a small smile on her lips. Nirgal knew these signs, and he caressed her as she passed in the small space behind the drivers’ seats, happy at the renewed intimacy, so rare and so precious: “I’ll bet it’s warm outside,” he said.

And her head snapped around as she looked at him, her eyes wide.

Without another word they dressed and got into the lock, and held gloved hands as they waited for it to suck and open. When it did they stepped out of the car, and walked across the dry rust* rubble, holding hands and squeezing hard, winding around bumps and hollows and chest-high boulders toward the new lava. They carried thinsulate pads in their outside hands. They could have talked but they didn’t. The air pushed at them from time to time, and even through the layers of his walker Nirgal could feel that it was warm. The ground trembled slightly underfoot, and the rumble was distinct, vibrating in his stomach; it was punctuated every few seconds by a dull boom, or a sharper cracking noise. No doubt it was dangerous to be out here. There was a small rounded hill, very like the one their car was parked on, overlooking the tongue of hot lava from a somewhat closer distance, and without consultation they headed for it, climbing its final slope with big steps, always holding hands, gripping hard.

From the top of the little hill they could see far over the new black flow and its shifting network of fiery orange cracks. The noise was considerable. It seemed clear that any new lava would run off the other side of the black mass, the downhill side. They were on a high point in the bank of a stream, with an obvious watercourse running left to right as they looked down on it. Of course a sudden great flood might overwhelm them, but it seemed unlikely, and in, any case they were in no more danger here than they had been in the car.