Blue Mars (43 page)

Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man’s
voice, and surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him
understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them
that never went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just
these recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch
John Boone negotiate Mars’s wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that
role, among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy
voice. And that did not solve his problem.

Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs
and restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on
terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views,
over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating
and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among
them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they
did not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was
distracted to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall
into reveries and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in
the steamy streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the
torrential monsoon. How often he found himself there again; everything that had
happened since was so pale by comparison!

But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice
say “Hiroko.”

“What’s that?” he said.

“Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope.”

It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge
of who he was.

“You saw her yourself?” he said sharply.

“Yes. She’s not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier.”

“I don’t know,” an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant
from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked
like leather. Voice hoarse: “I heard she was down in the chaos where the first
hidden colony used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay.”

Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen
there, had been confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had seen her there on
Earth—

“This here’s Nirgal,” one said to the last comment, pointing and
grinning. “He should be able to confirm or deny that one!”

Nirgal, taken aback, nodded. “I didn’t see her on Earth,” he said.
“There were rumors only.”

“Same as here, then.”

Nirgal shrugged.

The young woman, flushed now that she knew who Nirgal was,
insisted she had met Hiroko herself. Nirgal watched her closely. This was
different; no one had ever made such a direct claim to him (except in
Switzerland). She looked worried, defensive, but was holding her ground. “I
talked with her, I say!”

Why lie about something like that? And how would it be possible
for someone to get fooled about it? Impersonators? But why do that?

Despite himself Nirgal’s pulse had quickened, and he was warmer.
The thing was, it was possible Hiroko would do something like this; hide but
not hide; live somewhere without bothering to contact the family left behind.
There was no obvious motive for it, it would be weird, inhumane, inhuman; and
perfectly within Hiroko’s range of possibilities. His mother was a kind of
insane person, he had understood that for years—a charismatic who led people
effortlessly, but was mad. Capable of almost anything.

If she was alive.

He did not want to hope again. He did not want to go chasing off
after the mere mention of her name! But he was watching this girl’s face as if
he could read the truth from it, as if he could catch the very image of Hiroko
still there in her pupils! Others were asking the questions he would have
asked, so he could stay silent and listen, he did not have to make her
overselfconscious. Slowly she told the whole story; she and some friends had
been flying clockwise around Elysium, and when they stopped for the night up on
the new peninsula made by the Phlegra Montes, they had walked down to the icy
edge of the North Sea where they had spotted a new settlement, and there in the
crowd of construction workers was Hiroko; and several of the construction crew
were her old associates, Gene, and Rya, and Iwao, and the rest of the First
Hundred who had followed Hiroko ever since the days of the lost colony. The
flying group had been amazed, but the lost colonists had been faintly perplexed
at their amazement. “No one hides anymore,” Hiroko had told the young woman,
after complimenting her flier. “We spend most of our time near Dorsa Brevia,
but we’ve been up here for months now.”

And there it was. The woman seemed perfectly sincere, there was no
reason to believe she were lying, or subject to hallucination.

Nirgal didn’t want to have to think about this. But he had been
considering leaving Shining Mesa anyway, and having a look around at other
places. So he could. And—well—he was going to have to at least have a look.
Shigata ga nail.

The next day the conversation seemed much less compelling. Nirgal
didn’t know what to think. He called Sax on the wrist, told him what he had
heard. “Is it possible, Sax? Is it possible?”

A strange look passed over Sax’s face. “It’s possible,” he said.
“Yes, of course. I told you—when you were sick, and unconscious—that she. . .
.” He was picking his words, as he so often did, with a squint of
concentration. “—that I saw her myself. In that storm I was caught out in. She
led me to my car.”

Nirgal stared at the little blinking image. “I don’t remember
that.”

“Ah. I’m not surprised.”

“So you ... you think she escaped from Sabishii.”

“Yes.”

“But how likely was that?”

“I don’t know the—the likelihood. That would be difficult to
judge.”

“But could they have slipped away?”

“The Sabishii mohole mound is a maze.”

“So you think they escaped.”

Sax hesitated. “I saw her. She—she grabbed my wrist. I have to
believe.” Suddenly his face twisted. “Yes, she’s out there! She’s out there! I
have no doubt! No doubt! No doubt she’s expecting us to come to her.”

And Nirgal knew he had to look.

He left Candor Mesa without a goodbye
to anyone. His acquaintances there would
understand; they often flew away themselves for a time. They would all be back
someday, to soar over the canyons and then spend their evenings together on
Shining Mesa. And so he left. Down into the immensity of Melas Chasma, then
downcanyon again, east into Co-prates. For many hours he floated in that world,
over the 61 glacier, past embayment after embayment, buttress after buttress,
until he was through the Dover Gate and out over the broadening divergence of
Capri and Eos chasmas. Then above the ice-filled chaoses, the crackled ice
smoother by far than the drowned land below it had been. Then across the rough
jumble of Margaritifer Terra, and north, following the piste toward Burroughs;
then, as the piste approached Libya Station, he banked off to the northeast,
toward Elysium.

The Elysium massif was now a continent in the northern sea. The
narrow strait separating it from the southern mainland was a flat stretch of
black water and white tabular bergs, punctuated by the stack islands which had
been the Aeolis Mensa. The North Sea hydrologists wanted this strait liquid, so
that currents could make their way through it from Isidis Bay to Amazonis Bay.
To help achieve this liquidity they had placed a nuclear-reactor complex at the
west end of the strait, and pumped most of its energy into the water there,
creating an artificial polynya where the surface stayed liquid year-round, and
a temperate mesoclimate on the slopes on each side of the strait. The reactors’
steam plumes were visible to Nirgal from far up the Great Escarpment, and as he
floated down the slope he crossed over thickening forests of fir and ginkgo.
There was a cable across the western entrance to the strait, emplaced to snag
icebergs floating in on the current. He flew directly over the bergjam west of
the cable, and looked down on chunks of ice like floating driftglass. Then over
the black open water of the strait—the biggest stretch of open water he had
ever seen on Mars. For twenty kilometers he floated over the open water,
exclaiming out loud at the sight. Then ahead an immense airy bridge arced over
the strait. The black-violet plate of water below it was dotted with sailboats,
ferries, long barges, all trailing the white Vs of their wakes. Nirgal floated
over them, circling the bridge twice to marvel at the sight—like nothing he had
ever seen on Mars before: water, the sea, a whole future world.

He continued north, rising over the plains of Cerberus, past the
volcano Albor Tholus, a steep ash cone on the side of Elysium Mons. The much
bigger Elysium Mons was steep as well, with a Fuji-esque profile that served as
the label illustration for many agricultural co-ops in the region. Sprawled
over the plain under the volcano were farms, mostly ragged at the edges, often
terraced, and usually divided by strips or patches of forest. Young immature
orchards dotted the higher parts of the plain, each tree in a pot; closer to
the sea were great fields of wheat and corn, cut by windbreaks of olive and
eucalyptus. Just ten degrees north of the equator, blessed with rainy mild
winters, and then lots of hot sunny days: the people there called it the
Mediterranean of Mars.

Farther north Nirgal followed the west coast as it rose up out of
a line of foundered icebergs embroidering the edge of the ice sea. As he looked
down at the expanse of land below, he had to agree with the general wisdom:
Elysium was beautiful. This western coastal strip was the most populated
region, he had heard. The coast was fractured by a number of fossae, and square
harbors were being built where these canyons plunged into the ice—Tyre, Sidon,
Pyriphlegethon, Hertzka, Morris. Often stone breakwaters stopped the ice, and
marinas were in place behind the breakwaters, filled with fleets of small
boats, all waiting for open passage.

At Hertzka Nirgal turned east and inland, and flew up the gentle
slope of the Elysian massif, passing over garden belts banding the land. Here
the majority of Elysium’s thousands lived, in intensively cultivated
agricultural-residential zones, sloping up into the higher country between
Elysium Mons and its northern spur cone, Hecates Tholus. Between the great
volcano and its daughter peak, Nirgal flew through the bare rock saddle of the
pass, flung like a little cloud by the pass wind.

Elysium’s east slope looked nothing like the west; it was bare
rough torn rock, heavily sand-drifted, maintained in nearly its primordial
condition by the rain shadow of the massif. Only near the eastern coast did
Nirgal see greenery below him again, no doubt nourished by trade winds and
winter fogs. The towns on the east side were like oases, strung on the thread
of an island-circling piste.

At the far northeast end of the island, the ragged old hills of
the Phlegra Montes ran far out into the ice, forming a spiny peninsula.
Somewhere around here was where that young woman had seen Hiroko. As Nirgal
flew up the western side of the Phlegras, it struck him as a likely place to
find her; it was a wild and Martian place. The Phlegras, like many of the great
mountain ranges of Mars, was the only remaining arc of an ancient impact basin’s
rim. Every other aspect of that basin had long since disappeared. But the
Phlegras still stood as witness to a minute of inconceivable violence—impact of
a hundred-kilometer asteroid, big pieces of the lithosphere melted and shoved
sideways, other pieces tossed into the air to fall in concentric rings around
the impact point, with much of the rock metamorphosed instantly into minerals
much harder than their originals. After that trauma the wind had cut away at
things, leaving behind only these hard hills.

There were settlements out here, of course, as there were
everywhere, in the sinkholes and dead-end valleys and on the passes overlooking
the sea. Isolated farms, villages often or twenty or a hundred. It looked like
Iceland. There were always people who liked such remote land. One village
perched on a flat knob a hundred meters over the sea was called Nuannaarpoq,
which was Inuit for “taking extravagant pleasure in being alive.” These
villagers and all the others in the Phlegras could float to the rest of Elysium
on blimps, or walk down to the circum-Elysian piste and catch a ride. For this
coast in particular, the nearest town would be a shapely harbor called
Firewater, on the west side of the Phlegras where they first became a
peninsula. The town stood on a bench at the end of a squarish bay, and when
Nirgal spotted it, he descended onto the tiny airstrip at the upper end of
town, and then checked into a boardinghouse on the main square, behind the
docks standing over the ice-sheeted marina.

In the days that followed, he flew out along the coast in both
directions, visiting farm after farm. He met a lot of interesting people, but
none of them was Hiroko, or anyone from the Zygote crowd—not even any of their
associates. It was even a little suspicious; a fair number of issei lived in
the region, but every one of them denied ever having met Hiroko or any of her
group. Yet all of them were farming with great success, in rocky wilderness
that did not look easy to farm—cultivating exquisite little oases of agricultural
productivity—living the lives of believers in viriditas—but no, never met her.
Barely remembered who she was. One ancient geezer of an American laughed in his
face. “Whachall think, we got a guru? We gonna lead ya to our guru?”

After three weeks Nirgal had found no sign of her at all. He had
to give up on the Phlegra Montes. There was no other choice.

Ceaseless wandering. It did not make sense to search for a single
person over the vast surface of a world. It was an impossible project. But in
some villages there were rumors, and sometimes sightings. Always one more
rumor, sometimes one good sighting. She was everywhere and nowhere. Many
descriptions but never a photo, many stories but never a wrist message. Sax was
convinced she was out there, Coyote was sure she wasn’t. It didn’t matter; if
she was out there, she was hiding. Or leading him on a wild-goose chase. It
made him angry when he thought of it that way. He would not search for her.

Yet he could not stop moving. If he stayed in one place for more
than a week, he began to feel nervous and fretful in a way he had never felt in
his life. It was like an illness, with tension everywhere in his muscles, but
concentrated in his stomach; an elevated temperature; inability to focus on his
thoughts; an urge to fly. And so he would fly, from village to town to station
to caravanserai. Some days he let the wind carry him where it would. He had
always been a nomad, no reason to stop now. A change in the form of government,
why should that make a difference in the way he lived? The winds of Mars were
amazing. Strong, irregular, loud, ceaseless live beings, at play.

Sometimes the wind carried him out over the northern sea, and he
flew all day and never saw anything but ice and water, as if Mars were an ocean
planet. That was Vastitas Borealis—the Vast North, now ice. The ice was in some
places flat, in others shattered; sometimes white, sometimes discolored; the
red of dust, or the black of snow algae, or the jade of ice algae, or the warm
blue of clear ice. In some places big dust storms had stalled and dropped their
loads, and then the wind had carved the detritus so that little dune fields
were created, looking just like old Vastitas. In some places ice carried on
currents had crashed over crater-rim reefs, making circular pressure ridges; in
other places ice from different currents had crashed together, creating
straight pressure ridges, like dragon backs.

Open water was black, or the various purples of the sky. There was
a lot of it—polynyas, leads, cracks, patches—perhaps a third of the sea’s
surface now. Even more common were melt lakes lying on the surface of the ice,
their water white and sky-colored both, which at times looked a brilliant light
violet but other times separated out into the two colors; yes, it was another
version of the green and the white, the infolded world, two in one. As always
he found the sight of a double color disturbing, fascinating. The secret of the
world.

Many of the big drilling platforms in Vastitas had been seized by
Reds and blown up: black wreckage scattered over white ice. Other platforms
were defended by greens, and being used now to melt the ice: large polynyas
stretched to the east of these platforms, and the open water steamed, as if
clouds were pouring up out of a submarine sky.

In the clouds, in the wind. The southern shore of the northern sea
was a succession of gulfs and headlands, bays and peninsulas, fjords and capes,
seastacks and low archipelagoes. Nirgal followed it for day after day, landing
in the late afternoons at little new seaside settlements. He saw crater islands
with interiors lower than the ice and water outside the rim. He saw some places
where the ice seemed to be receding, so that bordering the ice were black
strands, raked by parallel lines running down to ragged drift errata of jumbled
rock and ice. Would these strands flood again, or would they grow wider still?
No one in these seaside towns knew. No one knew where the coastline would
stabilize. The settlements here were made to be moved. Diked polders showed
that some people were apparently testing the newly exposed land’s fertility.
Fringing the white ice, green crop rows.

North of Utopia he passed over a low peninsula that extended from
the Great Escarpment all the way to the north polar island, the only break in
the world-wrapping ocean. A big settlement on this low land, called Boone’s
Neck, was half-tented and half in the open. The settlement’s occupants were
engaged in cutting a canal through the peninsula.

A wind blew north and Nirgal followed it. The winds hummed,
whooshed, keened. On some days they shrieked. Live beings, at war. In the sea
on both sides of the long low peninsula were tabular ice shelfs. Tall mountains
of jade ice broke through these white sheets. No one lived up here, but Nirgal
was not searching anymore—he had given up, very near despair, and was just
floating, letting the winds take him like a dandelion seed: over the ice sea,
shattered white; over open purple water, lined by sun-bright waves. Then the
peninsula widened to become the polar island, a white bumpy land in the sea
ice. No sign of the primeval swirl pattern of melt valleys. That world was
gone.

Over the other side of the world and the North Sea, over Orcas
Island on the east flank of Elysium, down over Cim-meria again. Floating like a
seed. Some days the world went black and white: icebergs on the sea, looking
into the sun; tundra swans against black cliffs; black guillemots flying over
the ice; snow geese. And nothing else in all the day.

Ceaseless wandering. He flew around the northern parts of the
world two or three times, looking down at the land and the ice, at all the
changes taking place everywhere, at all the little settlements huddling in
their tents, or out braving the cold winds. But all the looking in the world
couldn’t make the sorrow go away.

One day he came on a new harbor town at the entry to the long
skinny fjord of Marwth Vallis, and found his Zy-gote creche mates Rachel and
Tiu had moved there. Nirgal hugged them, and over a dinner and afterward he
stared at their oh-so-familiar faces with intense pleasure. Hiroko was gone but
his brothers and sisters remained, and that was something; proof that his
childhood was real. And despite all the years they looked just like they had
when they were children; there was no real difference. Rachel and he had been
friends, she had had a crush on him in the early years, and they had kissed in
the baths; he recalled with a little shiver a time when she had kissed him in
one ear, Jackie in the other. And, though he had almost forgotten it, he had
lost his virginity with Rachel, one afternoon in the baths, shortly before
Jackie had taken him out into the dunes by the lake. Yes, one afternoon, almost
accidentally, when their kissing had suddenly become urgent and exploratory, a
matter of their bodies moving outside their own volition.