Green mars (75 page)

“This is another one you’ll remember,” Maya said.

They shared brief stories about the coldest they had ever been. The two Russian women could list ten incidents colder than the very coldest experiences Sax or Art could come up with. “How about the hottest?” Art said. “I can win that one. One time I was in a log-cutting contest, in the chainsaw division, and that just conies down to who has the most powerful saw, so I replaced my saw’s engine with one off a Harley-Davidson, and cut the log in under ten seconds. But motorcycle engines are air-cooled, you know, and did my hands get hot!”

They laughed. “Doesn’t count,” Maya declared. “It wasn’t your whole body.”

Fewer stars were visible than before. At first Nadia put it down to the fines in the air, or the trouble with her sanded eyes. But then she looked at her wristpad, and saw it was almost five A.M. Dawn soon. And Libya Station was only a few kilometers away. It was 256° Kelvin.

They came in at sunrise. People were passing around cups of hot tea that smelled like ambrosia. The station was too crowded to enter, and there were several thousand people waiting outside. But the evacuation had been proceeding smoothly for several hours, organized and run by Vlad and Ursula and a whole crowd of Bog-danovists. Trains were still coming in on all three pistes, from east south and west, and loading up and leaving soon thereafter. And dirigibles were floating in over the horizon. The population of Burroughs was going to be split up immediately—some taken to Elysium, some to Hellas, and farther south to Hiranyagarbha, and Christianopolis—others to the small towns on the way to Sheffield, including Underbill.

So they waited their turn. In the dawn light they could see that everyone’s eyes were extremely bloodshot, which, along with the dust-caked masks still over their mouths, gave people a wild and bloody look. Clearly goggles were in order for walks out.

Finally Zeyk and Marina escorted the last group into the station. At this point quite a few of the First Hundred had found each other and clustered against one wall, drawn by the magnetism that always pulled them together in a crisis. Now, with the final group in, there were several of them: Maya and Michel, Nadia and Sax and Ann, Vlad, Ursula, Marina, Spencer, Ivana, the Coyote... .

Over by the pistes Jackie and Nirgal were directing people into trains, waving their arms like symphony conductors, and steadying those whose legs were giving out at the last minute. The First Hundred walked out to the platform together. Maya ignored Jackie as she walked past her onto a train. Nadia followed Maya on board, and then came the rest of them. They walked down the central aisle, past all the happy two-toned faces^ brown with dust above, clean around the mouth. There were some dirty facemasks on the floor, but most people were holding theirs clutched in their hands.

Screens at the front of each car relayed film that a dirigible was showing of Burroughs, which this morning was a sea of ice-coated water, the ice predominant, although black polynyas were everywhere. Above this new sea stood the nine mesas of the city, now nine cliff-walled islands, not very tall, their top gardens and remaining rows of windows truly strange-looking above the dirty brash ice.

Nadia and the rest of the First Hundred followed Maya through the cars to the last one. Maya turned around and saw them all, filling the final little compartment of the train, and said, “What, is this one going to Underbill?”

“Odessa,” Sax told her.

She smiled.

People were getting up and moving forward, so that the old ones could sit together in the final compartment, and they did not decline the courtesy. They thanked them and sat. Soon after that, the compartments ahead of them were full. The aisles began to fill.

Vlad said something about the captain being the last to leave a sinking ship.

Nadia found the remark depressing. She was truly weary now, she couldn’t remember when she had last slept. She had liked Burroughs, and a huge number of construction hours had been poured into it. ... She remembered what Nanao had said about Sabishii. Burroughs too was in their minds. Perhaps when the shoreline of the new ocean stabilized, they could build another one, somewhere else.

As for now, Ann was sitting on the other side of the car, and Coyote was coming down the aisle to them, stopping to press his face to the window glass, and give a thumbs-up to Nirgal and Jackie, still outside. Those two got on board the train, several cars ahead of the last one. Michel was laughing at something Maya had said, and Ursula, Marina, Vlad, Spencer—these members of Na-dia’s family were around her and safe, at least for the moment. And as the moment was all they ever had ... she felt herself melting into her seat. She would be asleep in minutes, she could feel it in her dry burning eyes. The train began to move.

Sax was inspecting his wristpad, and Nadia said to him drowsily, “What’s happening on Earth?”

“Sea level is still rising. It’s gone up four meters. It looks like the metanationals have stopped fighting, for the time being. The World Court has brokered a cease-fire. Praxis has put all its resources into flood relief. Some of the other metanats look like they might go the same way. The UN General Assembly has convened in Mexico City. India has agreed that it has a treaty with an independent Martian government.”

“That’s a devil’s bargain,” Coyote said from across the compartment. “India and China, they’re too big for us to handle. You wait and see.”

“So the fighting down there has ended?” Nadia said.

“It’s not clear if that’s permanent or not,” Sax said.

Maya snorted. “No way it’s permanent.”

Sax shrugged.

“We need to set up a government,” Maya said. “We have to set it up fast, and present Earth with a united front. The more established we seem, the less likely they’ll be to come hard to root us out.”

“They’ll come,” Coyote said from the window.

“Not if we prove to them that they’ll get everything from us they would have gotten on their own,” May a said, irritated at Coyote. “That will slow them down.”

“They’ll come anyway.”

Sax said, “We will never be out of danger until Earth is calm. Is stabilized.”

“Earth will never be stabilized,” Coyote said.

Sax shrugged.

“It’s we who have to stabilize it!” Maya exclaimed, shaking a finger at Coyote. “For our own sakes!”

“Areoforming Earth,” Michel said with his ironic smile.

“Sure, why not?” Maya said. “If that’s what it takes.”

Michel leaned over and gave Maya a kiss on her dusty cheek.

Coyote was shaking his head. “It’s moving the world without a fulcrum,” he said.

“The fulcrum is in our minds,” Maya said, startling Nadia.

Marina also was watching her wrist, and now she said, “Security still has Clarke, and the cable. Peter says they’ve left all of Sheffield but the Socket. And someone—hey—someone has reported seeing Hiroko in Hiranyagarbha.”

They went silent at this, thinking their own thoughts.

“I got into the UNTA records of that first takeover of Sabishii,” Coyote said after a while, “and there was no mention at all of Hiroko, or any of her group. I don’t think they got them.”

Maya said darkly, “What’s written down has nothing to do with what happened.”

“In Sanskrit,” Marina said, “Hiranyagarbha means ‘The Golden Embryo.’“

Nadia’s heart squeezed. Come out, Hiroko, she thought. Come out, damn you, please, please, damn you, come out. The look on Michel’s face was painful to see. His whole family, disappeared... .

“We can’t be sure we’ve got Mars together yet,” Nadia said, to distract him. She caught his eye. “We couldn’t agree in Dorsa Brevia— why should we now?”

“Because we are free,” Michel replied, rallying. “It’s real now. We are free to try. And you only put your full effort into a thing when there is no going back.”

The train slowed to cross the equatorial piste, and they rocked back and forth with it.

“There are Reds blowing up all the pumping stations on Vastitas,” Coyote said. “I don’t think you’re going to get any easy consensus on the terraforming.”

“That’s for sure,” Ann said hoarsely. She cleared her throat. “We want the soletta gone too.”

She glared at Sax, but he only shrugged.

“Ecopoesis,” he said. “We already have a biosphere. It’s all we need. A beautiful world.”

Outside the broken landscape flashed by in the cool morning light. The slopes of Tyrrhena were tinted khaki by the presence of millions of small patches of grass and moss and lichen, tucked between the rocks. They looked out at it silently. Nadia felt stunned, trying to think about all of it, trying to keep it from all mixing together, blurring like the rust-and-khakiflow outside. ...

She looked at the people around her, and some key inside her turned. Her eyes were still dry and raw, but she was no longer sleepy. The tautness in her stomach eased, for the first time since the revolt had begun. She breathed freely. She looked at the faces of her friends—Ann still angry at her, Maya still angry at Coyote, all of them beat, dirty, as red-eyed as the little red people, their irises like round chips of semiprecious stone, vivid in their bloodshot settings. She heard herself say, “Arkady would be pleased.”

The others looked surprised. She never talked about him, she realized.

“Simon too,” Ann said.

“And Alex.”

“And Sasha.” “And Tatiana—”

“And all our lost ones,” Michel said quickly, before the length of the list grew too great.

“But not Frank,” Maya said. “Frank would be thoroughly pissed off ‘ at something.”

They laughed, and Coyote said, “And we have you to carry on the tradition, eh?” And they laughed some more as she shook an angry finger at him.

“And John?” Michel asked, pulling Maya’s arm down, directing the question at her.

Maya freed her arm, kept shaking a finger at Coyote. “John wouldn’t be crying doom and gloom and kissing off Earth as if we could get by without it! John Boone would be ecstatic at this moment!”

“We should remember that,” Michel said quickly. “We should think what he would do.”

Coyote grinned. “He would be running up and down this train getting high. Being high. It would be a party all the way to Odessa. Music and dance and everything.” They looked at each other.

“Well?” Michel said.

Coyote gestured forward. “It does not sound as if they are actually needing our help.”

“Nevertheless,” Michel said.

And they went forward up the train.

KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
is the author of the Nebula and Hugo Award-winning Mars trilogy—Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars—as well as Antarctica, The Wild Shore, The Gold Coast, Pacific Edge, A Short, Sharp Shock, and other novels. He lives in Davis, California.