After that he found it extremely hard to concentrate. He felt as if he was always at a remove from things, as if he had slipped into the white world and could not quite touch the green one.
Hiroko noticed this problem, and suggested he go with Coyote on one of his trips out. Nirgal was shocked by the idea, having never been more than a walk away from Zygote. But Hiroko insisted. He was seven years old, she said, and about to become a man. Time he saw a bit of the surface world.
A few weeks later Coyote dropped by, and when he left again Nirgal was with him, seated in the copilot"s seat of his boulder car, and goggling out the low windshield at the purple arch of evening sky. Coyote turned the car around to give him a view of the great glowing pink wall of the polar cap, which arced across the horizon like an enormous rising moon.
"It"s hard to believe something that big could ever melt," Nirgal said.
"It will take a while."
They drove north at a sedate pace. The boulder car was stealthed, covered by a hollowed-out rock sh.e.l.l that was thermally regulated to stay the same temperature as its surroundings, and it had a no-track device on the front axle to read the terrain and pa.s.s the information to the back axle, where sc.r.a.per-shapers plowed their wheel tracks, returning the sand and rock to whatever shape they had had before their pa.s.sing. So they could not race along.
For a long time they traveled in silence, though Coyote"s silence was not the same as Simon"s had been. He hummed, he muttered, he talked in a low singsong voice to his AI, in a language that sounded like English but was not comprehensible. Nirgal tried to concentrate on the limited view out the window, feeling awkward and shy. The region around the south polar cap was a series of broad flat terraces, and they descended from one to the next by routes that seemed programmed into the car, down terrace after terrace until it seemed the polar cap must be sitting on a kind of huge pedestal. Nirgal stared into the dark, impressed by the size of things, but happy too that it was not absolutely overwhelming, as his first walk out had been. That had happened a long time ago, but he could still remember the staggering astonishment of it perfectly.
This was not like that. "It doesn"t seem as big as I thought it would," he said. "I guess it"s the curvature of the land, it being such a small planet and all." As the lectern said. "The horizon isn"t any farther away than one side of Zygote to the other!"
"Uh huh," Coyote said, giving him a look. "You better not let Big Man hear you say such a thing, he kick your a.s.s for that." Then-"Who"s your father, boy?"
"I don"t know. Hiroko is my mother."
Coyote snorted. "Hiroko takes the matriarchy too far, if you ask me."
"Have you told her that?"
"You bet I have, but Hiroko only listens to me when I say things she wants to hear." He cackled. "Same as with everyone, right?"
Nirgal nodded, a grin splitting his attempt to be impa.s.sive.
"You want to find out who your father is?"
"Sure." Actually he was not sure. The concept of father meant little to him; and he was afraid it would turn out to be Simon. Peter was like an older brother to him, after all.
"They"ve got the equipment in Vishniac. We can try there if you want." Coyote shook his head. "Hiroko is so strange. When I met her you would never have guessed it would come to this. Of course we were young then- almost as young as you are, though you will find that hard to credit."
Which was true.
"When I met her she was just a young eco-engineering student, smart as a whip and s.e.xy as a cat. None of this mother G.o.ddess of the world stuff. But by and by she started to read books that were not her technical manuals, and it went on and on and by the time she got to Mars she was crazy. Before, actually. Which is lucky for me as that is why I"m here. But Hiroko, oh my. She was convinced that all human history had gone wrong at the start. At the dawn of civilization, she would say to me very seriously, there was Crete and Sumeria, and Crete had a peaceful trading culture, run by women and filled with art and beauty- a utopia in fact, where the men were acrobats who jumped bulls all day, and women all night, and got the women pregnant and worshipped them, and everyone was happy. It sounds good except for the bulls. While Sumeria on the other hand was ruled by men, who invented war and conquered everything in sight and started all the slave empires that have come since. And no one knew, Hiroko said, what might have happened if these two civilizations had had a chance to contest the rule of the world, because a volcano blew Crete to kingdom come, and the world pa.s.sed into Sumeria"s hands and has never left it to this day. If only that volcano had been in Sumeria, she used to tell me, everything would be different. And maybe it"s true. Because history could hardly get any blacker than it has been."
Nirgal was surprised at this characterization. "But now," he ventured, "we"re starting again."
"That"s right, boy! We are the primitives of an unknown civilization. Living in our own little techno-Minoan matriarchy. Ha! I like it fine, myself. Seems to me the power that our women have taken on was never that interesting to begin with. Power is one half of the yoke, don"t you remember that from the stuff I made you kids read? Master and slave wear the yoke together. Anarchy is the only true freedom. So, well, whatever women do it seems to go against them. If they"re men"s cows, then they work till they drop. But if they"re our queens and G.o.ddesses then they only work the harder, because they still have to do the cow work and then the paperwork too! No way. Just be thankful you"re a man, and as free as the sky."
It was a peculiar way to think of things, Nirgal thought. But clearly it was one way to deal with the fact of Jackie"s beauty, of her immense power over his mind. And so Nirgal ducked low in his seat and stared out the window at the white stars in the black, thinking Free as the sky! Free as the sky!
Mars South Polar Region [image]
It was Ls 4, 2 March the 22nd, M-year 32, and the southern days were getting shorter. Coyote drove their car hard every night, over intricate and invisible paths, through terrain that got more and more rugged the farther they got from the polar cap. They stopped to rest during the daylight, and drove the rest of the time. Nirgal tried to stay awake, but inevitably slept through part of every drive, and through part of every day"s stop as well, until he became thoroughly confused in both time and s.p.a.ce.
But when he was awake he was almost always looking out the window, at the ever-changing surface of Mars. He couldn"t get enough of it. In the layered terrain there was an infinite array of patterns, the stratified stacks of sand fluted by the wind until each dune was cut like a bird"s wing. When the layered terrain finally ran out onto exposed bedrock, the laminate dunes became individual sand islands, scattered over a jumbled plain of outcroppings and cl.u.s.ters of rock. It was redrock everywhere he looked, rock sized from gravel to immense boulders that sat like buildings on the land. The sand islands were tucked into every dip and hollow in this rockscape, and they also cl.u.s.tered around the feet of big knots of boulders, and on the lee sides of low scarps, and in the interiors of craters.
And there were craters everywhere. They first appeared as two b.u.mps rolling over the skysill, which quickly proved to be the connected outer points of a low ridge. They pa.s.sed scores of these flat-topped hills, some steep and sharp, others low and nearly buried, still others with their rims broken by smaller later impacts, so that one could see right in to the sand drifts filling them.
One night just before dawn Coyote stopped the car.
"Something wrong?"
"No. We"ve reached Ray"s Lookout, and I want you to see it. Sun"ll be up in an hour."
So they sat in the pilots" seats and watched the dawn.
"How old are you, boy?"
"Seven."
"What"s that, thirteen Earth years? Fourteen?"
"I guess."
"Wow. You"re already taller than me."
"Uh huh." Nirgal refrained from pointing out that this did not imply any great height. "How old are you?"
"One hundred and nine. Ah ha ha! You best shut your eyes or they"ll pop out of your head. Don"t you look at me like that. I was old the day I was born and I"ll be young the day I die."
They drowsed as the sky on the eastern skyline turned a deep purply blue. Coyote hummed a little tune to himself, sounding as if he had eaten a tab of omegendorph, as he often did in the evenings at Zygote. Gradually it became clear that the skysill was very far away, and also very high; Nirgal had never seen land so far away, and it seemed to curve around them as well, a black curving wall that lay an immense distance off, over a black rocky plain. "Hey, Coyote!" he exclaimed. "What is is this?" this?"
"Ha!" Coyote said, sounding deeply satisfied.
The sky lightened and the sun suddenly cracked the upper edge of the distant wall, blasting Nirgal"s vision for a while. But as the sun rose the shadows on the huge semicircular cliff gave way in wedges of light that revealed sharp ragged embayments, scalloping the larger curve of the wall, which was so big that Nirgal simply gasped, his nose pressed right against the windshield- it was almost frightening, it was so big! "Coyote, what is is it?" it?"
Coyote let out one of his alarming laughs, the animal cackle filling the car. "So you see it isn"t such a small world after all, eh, boy? This is the floor of Promethei Basin. It"s an impact basin, one of the biggest on Mars, almost as big as Argyre, but it hit down here near the South Pole, so about half of its rim has since been buried under the polar cap and the layered terrain. The other half is this curved escarpment here." He waved a hand expansively. "Kind of like a super-big caldera, but only half there, so you can drive right into it. This little rise is the best place I know for seeing it." He called up a map of the region, and pointed. "We"re on the ap.r.o.n of this little crater here, Vt, and looking northwest. The cliff is Promethei Rupes, there. It"s about a kilometer high. Of course the Echus cliff is three kilometers high, and the Olympus Mons cliff is six six kilometers high, do you hear that Mister Small Planet? But this baby will have to do for this morning." kilometers high, do you hear that Mister Small Planet? But this baby will have to do for this morning."
The sun rose higher, illuminating the great curve of the cliff from above. It was deeply cut by ravines and smaller craters. "Prometheus Sanctuary is in the side of that big indentation there," Coyote said, and pointed to the left side of the curve. "Crater Wj."
As they waited through the long day Nirgal looked at the gigantic cliff almost continuously, and each time it looked different, as the shadows shortened and shifted, revealing new features and obscuring others. It would have taken years of looking to see it all, and he found he could not overcome the feeling that the wall was unnaturally or even impossibly huge. Coyote was right- the tight horizons had fooled him- he had not imagined the world could be be so big. so big.
That night they drove into Crater Wj, one of the biggest embayments in the giant wall. And then they reached the curving cliff of Promethei Rupes. The cliff towered over them like the vertical side of the universe itself; the polar cap was nothing compared to this rock ma.s.s. Which meant that the Olympus Mons cliff that Coyote had mentioned would have to be.... He didn"t know how to think it.
Down at the foot of the cliff, at a spot where unbroken rock dropped almost vertically into flat sand, there was a recessed lock door. Inside was the sanctuary called Prometheus, a collection of wide chambers stacked like the rooms of a bamboo house, with incurving filtered windows overlooking Crater Wj and the larger basin beyond. The inhabitants of the sanctuary spoke French, and so did Coyote when talking to them. They were not as old as Coyote or the other issei, but they were pretty old, and of Terran height, which meant they mostly looked up to Nirgal, while speaking very hospitably to him, in fluent but accented English. "So you are Nirgal! Enchante! Enchante! We have heard of you, we are happy to meet you!" We have heard of you, we are happy to meet you!"
A group of them showed him around while Coyote did other things. Their sanctuary was very unlike Zygote; it was, to put it plainly, nothing but rooms. There were several large ones stacked by the wall, with smaller ones at the back of these. Three of the window rooms were greenhouses, and all the rooms throughout the refuge were kept very warm, and filled with plants and wall hangings and statuary and fountains; to Nirgal it seemed confining, and much too hot, and utterly fascinating.
But they only stayed a day, and then they drove Coyote"s car into a big elevator, and sat in it for an hour. When Coyote drove out the opposite door they were on top of the rugged plateau that lay behind Promethei Rupes. And here Nirgal was once again shocked. When they had been down at Ray"s Lookout, the great cliff had formed a limit to what they could see, and he had been able to comprehend it. But on top of the cliff, looking back down, the distances were so great that Nirgal could not grasp what he saw. It was nothing but a blurry vertiginous ma.s.s of blobs and patches of color- white, purple, brown, tan, rust, white; it made him queasy. "Storm coming in," Coyote said, and suddenly Nirgal saw that the colors above them were a fleet of tall solid clouds, sailing through a violet sky with the sun well to the west- the clouds whitish above and infinitely lobed, but dark gray on their bottoms. These cloud bottoms were closer to their heads than the ground of the basin, and they were level, as if rolling over a transparent floor. The world below was nothing so even, mottled tan and chocolate- ah, those were the shadows of the clouds, visibly moving. And that white crescent out in the middle of things was the polar cap! They could see all the way home! Recognizing the ice gave him the final bit of perspective needed to make sense of things, and the blobs of color stabilized into a b.u.mpy uneven ringed landscape, mottled by moving cloud shadows.
This dizzying act of cognition had only taken Nirgal a few seconds, but when he finished he saw that Coyote was watching him with a big grin.
"Just how far can we see, Coyote? How many kilometers?"
Coyote only cackled. "Ask Big Man, boy. Or figure it out for yourself! What, three hundred k? Something like that. A hop and a jump for the big one. A thousand empires for the little ones."
"I want to run it."
"I"m sure you do. Oh, look, look! There- from the clouds over the ice cap. Lightning, see it? Those little flickers are lightning."
And there they were, bright threads of light, appearing and disappearing soundlessly, one or two every few seconds, connecting black clouds with white ground. He was seeing lightning at last, with his own eyes. The white world sparking into the green, jolting it. "There"s nothing like a big storm," Coyote was saying. "Nothing like it. Oh to be out in the wind! We made that storm, boy. Although I think I could make an even bigger one."
But a bigger one was beyond Nirgal"s ability to imagine; what lay below them was cosmically vast- electric, shot with color, windy with s.p.a.ciousness. He was actually a bit relieved when Coyote turned their car around and drove off, and the blurry view disappeared, the edge of the cliff becoming a new skysill behind them.
"Just what is lightning again?"
"Well, lightning... s.h.i.t. I must confess that lightning is one of the phenomena in this world that I cannot hold the explanation for in my head. People have told me, but it always slips away. Electricity, of course, something about electrons or ions, positive and negative, charges building up in thunderheads, discharging to the ground, or both up and down at once, I seem to recall. Who knows. Ka boom! That"s lightning, eh?"
The white world and the green, rubbing together, snapping with the friction. Of course.
There were several sanctuaries on the plateau north of Promethei Rupes, some hidden in escarpment walls and crater rims, like Nadia"s tunneling project outside Zygote; but others simply sitting in craters under clear tent domes, there for any sky police to see. The first time Coyote drove up to the rim of one of these and they looked down through the clear tent dome onto a village under the stars, Nirgal had been once again amazed, though it was amazement of a lesser order than that engendered by the landscape. Buildings like the school, and the bathhouse and the kitchen, trees, greenhouses- it was all basically familiar, but how could they get away with it, out in the open like this? It was disconcerting.
And so full of people, of strangers. Nirgal had known in theory that there were a lot of people in the southern sanctuaries, five thousand as they said, all defeated rebels of the 2061 war- but it was something else again to meet so many of them so fast, and see that it was really true. And staying in the unhidden settlements made him extremely nervous. "How can they do it?" he asked Coyote. "Why aren"t they arrested and taken away?"
"You got me, boy. It"s possible they could be. But they haven"t been yet, and so they don"t think it"s worth the trouble to hide. You know it takes a tremendous effort to hide- you got to do all that thermal disposal engineering, and electronic hardening, and you got to keep out of sight all the time- it"s a pain in the a.s.s. And some people down here just don"t want to do it. They call themselves the demimonde. They have plans for if they"re ever investigated or invaded- most of them have escape tunnels like ours, and some even have some weapons stashed away. But they figure that if they"re out on the surface, there"s no reason to be checked out in the first place. The folks in Christianopolis just told the UN straight out that they came down here to get out of the net. But... I agree with Hiroko on this one. That some of us have to be a little more careful than that. The UN is out to get the First Hundred, if you ask me. And its family too, unfortunately for you kids. Anyway, now the resistance includes the underground and the demimonde, and having the open towns is a big help to the hidden sanctuaries, so I"m glad they"re here. At this point we depend on them."
Coyote was welcomed effusively in this town as he was everywhere, whether the settlement was hidden or exposed. He settled into a corner of a big garage on the crater rim, and conducted a continuous brisk exchange of goods, including seed stocks, software, light bulbs, spare parts, and small machines. These he gave out after long consultations with their hosts, in bargaining sessions that Nirgal couldn"t understand. And then, after a brief tour of the crater floor, where the village looked surprisingly like Zygote under a brilliant purple dome, they were off again.
On the drives between sanctuaries Coyote did not explain his bargaining sessions very effectively. "I"m saving these people from their own ridiculous notion of economics, that"s what I"m doing! A gift economy is all very well, but it isn"t organized enough for our situation. There are critical items that everyone has to have, so people have have to give, which is a contradiction, right? So I am trying to work out a rational system. Actually Vlad and Marina are working it out, and I am trying to implement it, which means I get all the grief." to give, which is a contradiction, right? So I am trying to work out a rational system. Actually Vlad and Marina are working it out, and I am trying to implement it, which means I get all the grief."
"And this system..."
"Well, it"s a sort of two-track thing, where they can still give all they want, but the necessities are given values and distributed properly. And good G.o.d you wouldn"t believe some of the arguments I get in. People can be such fools. I try to make sure it all adds up to a stable ecology, like one of Hiroko"s systems, with every sanctuary filling its niche and providing its specialty, and what do I get for it? Abuse, that"s what I get! Radical Radical abuse. I try to stop potlatching and they call me a robber baron, I try to stop h.o.a.rding and they call me a fascist. The fools! What are they going to do, when none of them are self-sufficient, and half of them are crazy paranoid?" He sighed theatrically. "So, anyway. We"re making progress. Christianopolis makes light bulbs, and Mauss Hyde grows new kinds of plants, as you saw, and Bogdanov Vishniac makes everything big and difficult, like reactor rods and stealth vehicles and most of the big robots, and your Zygote makes scientific instrumentation, and so on. And I spread them around." abuse. I try to stop potlatching and they call me a robber baron, I try to stop h.o.a.rding and they call me a fascist. The fools! What are they going to do, when none of them are self-sufficient, and half of them are crazy paranoid?" He sighed theatrically. "So, anyway. We"re making progress. Christianopolis makes light bulbs, and Mauss Hyde grows new kinds of plants, as you saw, and Bogdanov Vishniac makes everything big and difficult, like reactor rods and stealth vehicles and most of the big robots, and your Zygote makes scientific instrumentation, and so on. And I spread them around."
"Are you the only one doing that?"
"Almost. They"re mostly self-sufficient, actually, except for these few criticalities. They all got programs and seeds, that"s the basic necessities. And besides, it"s important that not too many people know where all the hidden sanctuaries are."
Nirgal digested the implications of this as they drove through the night. Coyote went on about the hydrogen peroxide standard and the nitrogen standard, a new system of Vlad and Marina"s, and Nirgal did his best to follow but found it hard going, either because the concepts were difficult or else because Coyote spent most of his explanations fulminating over the difficulties he encountered in certain sanctuaries. Nirgal decided to ask Sax or Nadia about it when he got home, and stopped listening.
The land they were crossing now was dominated by crater rings, the newer ones overlapping and even burying older ones. "This is called saturation cratering. Very ancient ground." A lot of the craters had no raised rims at all, but were simply shallow flat-bottomed round holes in the ground. "What happened to the rims?"
"Worn away."
"By what?"
"Ann says ice, and wind. She says as much as a kilometer was stripped off the southern highlands over time."
"That would take away everything!"
"But then more came back. This is old land."
In between craters the land was covered with loose rock, and it was unbelievably uneven; there were dips, rises, hollows, knolls, trenches, grabens, uplifts, hills and dales; never even a moment"s flatness, except on crater rims and occasional low ridges, both of which Coyote used as roads when he could. But the track he followed over this lumpy landscape was still tortuous, and Nirgal could not believe it was memorized. He said as much, and Coyote laughed. "What do you mean memorized? We"re lost!"
But not really, or not for long. A mohole plume appeared over the horizon, and Coyote drove for it.
"Knew it all along," he muttered. "This is Vishniac mohole. It"s a vertical shaft a kilometer across, dug straight down into the bedrock. There were four moholes started around the seventy-five-degree lat.i.tude line, and two of them are no longer occupied, even by robots. Vishniac is one of the two, and it"s been taken over by a bunch of Bogdanovists who live down inside it." He laughed. "It"s a wonderful idea, because they can dig into the side wall along the road to the bottom, and down there they can put out as much heat as they want and no one can tell that it"s not just more mohole outga.s.sing. So they can build anything they like, even process uranium for reactor fuel rods. It"s an entire little industrial city now. Also one of my favorite places, very big on partying."
He drove them into one of the many small trenches cutting the land, then braked and tapped at his screen, and a big rock swung out from the side of the trench, revealing a black tunnel. Coyote drove into the tunnel and the rock door closed behind them. Nirgal had thought he was beyond surprise at this point, but he watched round-eyed as they drove down the tunnel, its rough rock walls just outside the edges of the boulder car. It seemed to go on forever. "They"ve dug a number of approach tunnels, so that the mohole itself can look completely unvisited. We have about twenty kilometers to go."
Eventually Coyote turned off the headlights. Their car rolled out into the dim eggplant black of night; they were on a steep road, apparently spiraling down the wall of the mohole. Their instrument-panel lights were like tiny lanterns, and looking through his reflected image Nirgal could see that the road was four or five times as wide as the car. The full extent of the mohole itself was impossible to see, but by the curve of the road he could tell that it was immense. "Are you sure we"re turning at the right speed?" he said anxiously.
"I am trusting the automatic pilot," Coyote said, irritated. "It"s bad luck to discuss it."
The car rolled down the road. After more than an hour"s descent there was a beep from the instrument panel, and the car turned into the curving wall of rock to their left. And there was a garage tube, clanking against their outer lock door.
Inside the garage a group of twenty or so people greeted them, and took them past a line of tall rooms to a cavernlike chamber. The rooms that the Bogdanovists had excavated into the side of the mohole were big, much bigger than those at Prometheus. The back rooms were ten meters high as a rule, and in some cases two hundred meters deep; and the main cavern rivaled Zygote itself, with big windows facing out onto the hole. Looking sideways through the window, Nirgal saw that the gla.s.s seen from the outside looked like the rock face; the filtered coatings must have been clever indeed, because as the morning arrived, its light poured in very brightly. The windows" view was limited to the far wall of the mohole, and a gibbous patch of sky above- but they gave the rooms a wonderful sense of s.p.a.ciousness and light, a feeling of being under the sky that Zygote could not match.
Through that first day Nirgal was taken in hand by a small dark-skinned man named Hilali, who led him through rooms and interrupted people at their work to introduce him. People were friendly-"You must be one of Hiroko"s kids, eh? Oh, you"re Nirgal! Very nice to meet you! Hey John, Coyote"s here, party tonight!"- and they showed him what they were doing, leading him back into smaller rooms behind the ones fronting the mohole, where there were farms under bright light, and manufactories that seemed to extend back into the rock forever; and all of it very warm, as in a bathhouse, so that Nirgal was constantly sweating. "Where did you put all the excavated rock?" he asked Hilali, for one of the convenient things about cutting a dome under the polar cap, Hiroko had said, was that the excavated dry ice had simply been ga.s.sed off.
"It"s lining the road near the bottom of the mohole," Hilali told him, pleased at the question. He seemed pleased with all Nirgal"s questions, as did everyone else; people in Vishniac seemed happy in general, a rowdy crowd who always partied to celebrate Coyote"s arrival- one excuse among many, Nirgal gathered.
Hilali took a call on the wrist from Coyote, and led Nirgal into a lab, where they took a bit of skin from his finger. Then they made their way slowly back to the big cavern, and joined the crowd lining up by the kitchen windows at the back.
After eating a big spicy meal of beans and potatoes, they began to party in the cavern room. A huge undisciplined steel-drum band with a fluctuating membership played rhythmic staccato melodies, and people danced to them for hours, pausing from time to time to drink an atrocious liquor called kavajava, or join a variety of games on one side of the room. After trying the kavajava, and swallowing a tab of an omegendorph given to him by Coyote, Nirgal ran in place while playing a ba.s.s drum with the band, then sat on top of a small gra.s.sy mound in the center of the chamber, feeling too drunk to stand. Coyote had been drinking steadily but had no such problem; he was dancing wildly, hopping high off his toes and laughing. "You"ll never know the joy of your own g, boy!" he shouted at Nirgal. "You"ll never know!"
People came by and introduced themselves, sometimes asking Nirgal to exhibit his warming touch- a group of girls his age put his hands to their cheeks, which they had chilled with their drinks, and when he warmed them up they laughed round-eyed, and invited him to warm other parts of them; he got up and danced with them instead, feeling loose and dizzy, running in little circles to discharge some of the energy in him. When he returned to the knoll, buzzing, Coyote came weaving over and sat heavily beside him. "So fine to dance in this g, I never get over it." He regarded Nirgal with a cross-eyed glare, his gray dreadlocks falling all over his head, and Nirgal noticed again that his face seemed to have cracked somehow, perhaps been broken at the jaw, so that one side was broader than the other. Something like that. Nirgal gulped at the sight. fine to dance in this g, I never get over it." He regarded Nirgal with a cross-eyed glare, his gray dreadlocks falling all over his head, and Nirgal noticed again that his face seemed to have cracked somehow, perhaps been broken at the jaw, so that one side was broader than the other. Something like that. Nirgal gulped at the sight.
Coyote took him by the shoulder and shook him hard. "It seems that I am your father, boy!" he exclaimed.
"You"re kidding!" An electric flush ran down Nirgal"s spine and out his face as the two of them stared at each other, and he marveled at how the white world could shock the green one so thoroughly, like lightning pulsing through flesh. They clutched each other.
"I am not kidding!" Coyote said.
They stared at each other. "No wonder you"re so smart," Coyote said, and laughed hilariously. "Ah ha ha ha! Ka wow! I hope it"s okay with you!"
"Sure," Nirgal said, grinning but uncomfortable. He didn"t know Coyote well, and the concept of father was even vaguer to him than that of mother, so he wasn"t really sure what he felt. Genetic inheritance, sure, but what was that? They all got their genes somewhere, and the genes of ectogenes were transgenic anyway, or so they said.
But Coyote, though he cursed Hiroko in a hundred different ways, seemed to be pleased. "That vixen, that tyrant! Matriarchy my a.s.s- she"s crazy! It amazes me the things she does! Although this has a certain justice to it. Yes it does, because Hiroko and I were an item back in the dawn of time, when we were young in England. That"s the reason I"m here on Mars at all. A stowaway in her closet, my whole f.u.c.king life long." He laughed and clapped Nirgal on the shoulder again. "Well, boy, you will know better how you like the idea later on."
He went back out to dance, leaving Nirgal to think it over. Watching Coyote"s gyrations, Nirgal could only shake his head; he didn"t know what to think, and at the moment thinking anything at all was remarkably difficult. Better to dance, or seek out the baths.
But they had no public baths. He ran around in circles on the dance floor, making his running a kind of dance, and later he returned to the same mound, and a group of the locals gathered around him and Coyote. "Like being the father of the Dalai Lama, eh? Don"t you get a name for that?"
"To h.e.l.l with you, man! Like I was saying, Ann says they stopped digging these seventy-five-degree moholes because the lithosphere is thinner down here." Coyote nodded portentously. "I want to go to one of the decommissioned moholes and start up its robots again, and see if they dig down far enough to start a volcano."
Everyone laughed. But one woman shook her head. "If you do that they"ll come down here to check it out. If you"re going to do it, you should go north and hit one of the sixty-degree moholes. They"re decommissioned too."