Nadia hated that kind of exposure, no matter how brief, and so she continued to hide through the days. They looked out the little windows of her shelters onto swirling clouds, which sometimes caught the light in sparkling arrays, so bright it hurt to look at them. Sunbeams cut through gaps between clouds, striking the long ridges and scarps of the blindingly white land. Once they even experienced a full whiteout, when all shadows disappeared, and everything else: a pure white world, in which it was impossible to make out even the horizon.
On other days icebows threw curves of palé pastel color against the intense whites, and once when the sun broke through, low over the land, it was surrounded by a ring of light as bright as it was. The landscape blazed white under this display, not uniformly but in patches, all shifting rapidly in the ceaseless winds. Art laughed to see it, and he never stopped exclaiming over the ice flowers, now as large as shrubs, and studded with spikes and lacy fans, and growing into each other at their edges, so that in many areas the ground itself completely disappeared, and they drove across a crackling surface of shard blooms, crushing hundreds of them under their wheels. The long dark nights were almost a comfort after days like that.
Days passed, one like the next. Nirgal found it very comfortable to travel with Art and Nadia; they were both even-tempered, calm, funny; Art was 51 and Nadia 120, and Nirgal only 12, which was around 25 Terran years; but despite the discrepancies in age they interacted as equals. Nirgal could test his ideas on them freely, and they never laughed or scoffed, even when they saw problems and pointed them out. And in fact their ideas meshed fairly well, for the most part. They were, in Martian political terms, moderate green assimilationists—Booneans, Nadia called it. And they had similar temperaments, which was something that Nirgal had never felt before about anyone, not for the rest of his family in Gamete or his friends in Sabishii.
As they talked, night after night, they dropped in briefly on some of the big sanctuaries of the south, introducting Art to the people there, and broaching the idea of a meeting or congress. They took him to Bogdanov Vishniac, and amazed him with the giant complex built deep into the mohole, so much bigger than any other sanctuary. Art’s pop-eyed face was as eloquent as a speech, and brought back to Nirgal most acutely the feeling he had had as a child when he first visited it with Coyote.
The Bogdanovists were clearly interested in a meeting, but Mikhail Yangel, one of the only one of Arkady’s associates to survive ’61, asked Art what the long-range purpose of such a meeting would be.
“To retake the surface.”
“I see!” Mikhail’s eyes were wide. “Well, I’m sure you would have our support for that! People have been afraid to even bring that subject up.”
“Very good,” Nadia told Art as they drove on north. “If the Bogdanovists support a meeting, then it will probably happen. Most of the hidden sanctuaries are either Bogdanovist or else heavily influenced by them.”
From Vishniac they visited the sanctuaries around Holmes Crater, known as the “industrial heartland” of the underground. These colonies were also mostly Bogdanovist, with any number of small social variations among them, influenced by early Martian social philosophers such as the prisoner Schnelling, or Hiroko, or Marina, or John Boone. The Francophone Utopians in Prometheus, on the other hand, had structured their settlement on ideas taken from sources ranging from Rousseau and Fourier to Foucault and Nemy, subtleties Nirgal had not been aware of when he had first visited. Currently they were being strongly influenced by the Polynesians who had recently arrived on Mars, and their big warm chambers sported palm trees and shallow pools, so that Art said it seemed more like Tahiti than Paris.
In Prometheus they were joined by Jackie Boone herself, who had been left there by friends traveling through. She wanted to go directly on to Gamete, but she was willing to travel with Nadia rather than wait longer, and Nadia was willing to take her. So when they took off again, they had Jackie with them.
The easy camaraderie of the first part of their journey disappeared. Jackie and Nirgal had parted in Sabishii with their relationship in its usual unsettled undefined state, and Nirgal was displeased to have the growth of his new friendships interrupted. Art was obviously agog at her physical presence—she was actually taller than he was, and heavier than Nirgal, and Art watched her in a way he thought surreptitious, but which the others were all aware of, including Jackie of course. It made Nadia roll her eyes, and she and Jackie quarreled over little things like sisters. Once after they did, and Jackie and Nadia were elsewhere in one of Nadia’s shelters, Art whispered to Nirgal, “She’s just like Maya! Doesn’t she remind you? The voice, the mannerisms—”
Nirgal laughed. “Tell her that and she’ll kill you.”
“Ah,” Art said. He regarded Nirgal with a sidelong glance. “So you two are still . . . ?”
Nirgal shrugged. In a way it was interesting; he had told Art enough about his relationship with Jackie that the older man knew there was something fundamental between the two. Now Jackie was almost certain to come on to Art, to add him to her minions as she routinely did with men she liked or thought important. At this point she had not figured out how important Art was, but when she did she would act in her usual way, and then what would Art do?
So their voyage was no longer the same, Jackie imparting her usual spin to things. She argued with Nirgal and Nadia; she casually rubbed up to Art, charming him at the same time she judged him, just as an automatic part of acquaintanceship. She would pull off her shirt to sponge down in Nadia’s shelters, or put a hand to his arm when asking questions about Terra—then at other times ignore him completely, veering off into worlds of her own. It was like living with a big cat in the rover, a panther that might purr in your lap or bat you across the compartment, but either way stalk about in a perfect nervous grace.
Ah, but that was Jackie. And there was her laugh, ringing through the car at things Art or Nadia said; and her beauty; and her intense enthusiasm for discussing the Martian situation, so that when she discovered what they were doing on this trip, she immediately fell into it. Life was heightened with her around, no doubt about it. And Art, though he goggled at her when she bathed, had what Nirgal suspected was a sly edge to his smile as he enjoyed her mesmerizing attentions; and once Nirgal caught him giving a look to Nadia that was positively amused. So though he liked her well enough, and liked looking at her, he did not seem hopelessly smitten. This was possibly a matter of his friendship with Nirgal; Nirgal couldn’t be sure, but he liked the idea, which had not been a common one in either Zygote or Sabishii.
For her part, Jackie seemed inclined to dismiss Art as a factor in the organizing of a general meeting, as if she would take it over herself. But then they visited a small neomarxist sanctuary in the Mountains of Mitchel (which were no more mountainous than the rest of the southern highlands, the name being an artifact of the telescope era) and these neomarxists proved to be in communication with the city of Bologna in Italy, and with the Indian province of Kerala—and with Praxis offices in both these places. So they had a lot to talk about with Art, and they obviously enjoyed it, and at the end of the visit one of them said to him, “It’s wonderful what you’re doing, you’re just like John Boone.”
Jackie jerked her head around to stare at Art, who was sheepishly shaking his head. “No he’s not,” she said automatically.
But after that she treated him more seriously. Nirgal could only laugh. Any mention of the name John Boone was like a magic spell to Jackie. When she and Nadia discussed John’s theories, he could understand a little why she felt that way; much of what Boone had wanted for Mars made excellent sense, and it seemed to him that Sabishii in particular was a kind of Boonean space. For Jackie, however, it went beyond a rational response—it had to do with Kasei and Esther, and Hiroko, even Peter—with some complex of feelings that touched her on a level that nothing else did.
They continued north, into lands even more violently disarranged than those they had left behind. This wa
s volcanic country, where the harsh sublimity of the southern highland was augmented by the ancient craggy peaks of Australis Tholus and Amphitrites Patera. The two volcanoes bracketed a region of lava flows, where the blackish rock of the land was frozen in weird lumps, waves, and rivers. Once these flows had poured over the surface in streams of white-hot fluid, and even now, hard and black and shattered by the ages, and covered with dust and ice flowers, the liquid origins were completely evident.
The most prominent of these lava remnants were long low ridges, like dragon tails now fossilized to solid black rock. These ridges snaked across the land for many kilometers, often disappearing over the horizon in both directions, forcing the travelers to make long detours. These dorsa were ancient lava channels; the rock they were made of had proved harder than the countryside they had originally flowed over, and in the eons since, the countryside had been worn away, leaving the black mounds lying on the surface somewhat like the fallen elevator cable only very much larger.
One of the dorsa, in the Dorsa Brevia region, had recently been turned into a hidden sanctuary. So Nadia drove their rover on a tortuous path through outlying lava ridges, and then into a capacious garage in the side of the largest black mound they had seen. They got out of their car, and were greeted by a small group of friendly strangers, several of whom Jackie had met before. There was no indication in the garage that the chamber beyond it was going to be any different from any other they had visited, and so when they walked into a big cylindrical lock and out the other door, it was a great shock to find before them an open space that clearly occupied the whole interior of the ridge. The ridge was hollow; the empty space inside it was roughly cylindrical, a tube perhaps two hundred meters floor to ceiling, three hundred meters wall to wall, and extending for as far as they could see in both directions. Art’s mouth was like a cross-section model of the tunnel: “Wow!” he kept exclaiming. “Wow, look at this! Wow!”
Quite a few dorsa were hollow, their hosts told them. Lava tunnels. There were many of them on Terra, but the usual two-magnitude scale jump obtained, and this tube was in fact a hundred times bigger than the biggest Terran tube. When the lava streams had flowed, a young woman named Ariadne explained to Art, they had cooled and hardened at their edges, and then on their surfaces—after which hot lava had continued to run through the sleeve, until the flows had stopped, and the remaining lava had emptied out onto some lake of fire, leaving behind cylindrical caves that were sometimes fifty kilometers long.
The floor of this particular tunnel was approximately flat, and now it was covered by rooftops and grassy parks, ponds, and hundreds of young trees, planted in groves of mixed bamboo and pine. Long cracks in the roof of the tunnel had served as the basis for filtered skylights, made of layered materials which gave off the same visual and thermal signals as the rest of the ridge, but let into the tunnel long curtains of sunny brown air, so that even the dimmest sections of the tunnel were only as dim as a cloudy day.
Dorsa Brevia’s tunnel was forty kilometers long, Ariadne informed them as they walked down a staircase, although there were places where the roof had caved in, or plugs of lava almost filled the cavity. “We haven’t closed off the whole thing, of course. It’s more than we need, and more than we could keep warm and pumped anyway. But we’ve closed off about twelve kilometers now, in kilometer-long segments, with tent-fabric bulkheads between them.”
“Wow,” Art said again. Nirgal felt just as impressed, and Nadia was clearly delighted. Even Vishniac was nothing compared to this.
Jackie was already near the bottom of the long staircase that led from the garage lock to a park below them. As they followed her Art said, “Every colony you’ve taken me to I’ve figured has to be the biggest one, and I’m always wrong. Why don’t you just tell me now if the next one is going to be like all of Hellas Basin or something.”
Nadia laughed. “This is the biggest one I know of. Bigger!”
“So why do you all stay in Gamete, when it’s so cold and small and dim? Couldn’t the people from all the sanctuaries fit into this space?”
“We don’t want to all be in one place,” she replied. “As for this one, it wasn’t even here a few years ago.”
Down on the floor of the tunnel they appeared to be in a forest, under a black stone sky rent by long jagged bright cracks. The four travelers followed a group of their hosts to a complex of buildings with thin wooden walls and steep roofs upturned at the corners. In one of these they were introduced to a group of elderly women and men in colorful baggy clothing, and invited to share a meal.
As they ate they learned more about the sanctuary, mostly from Ariadne, who sat beside them. It had been built and occupied by the descendants of people who had come to Mars and joined the disappeared in the 2050s, leaving the cities and occupying small refuges in this region, aided in their efforts by the Sabishiians. They had been heavily influenced by Hiroko’s areophany, and their society was described by some as a matriarchy. They had studied some ancient matriarchal cultures, and based some of their customs on the ancient Minoan civilization and the Hopi of North America. Thus they worshipped a goddess who represented life on Mars, something like a personification of Hiroko’s viriditas, or a deification of Hiroko herself. And in daily life the women owned the households, and would pass them on to their youngest daughters: ultimogeniture, Ariadne called it, a custom of the Hopi. And as with the Hopi, men moved into their wives’ houses on marriage.
“Do the men like it?” Art asked curiously.
Ariadne laughed at his expression. “There’s nothing like happy women for making happy men, that’s what we say.” And she gave Art a look that seemed to pull him right over the bench toward her.
“Makes sense to me,” Art said.
“We ail share the work—extending the tunnel segments, farming, raising the children, whatever needs doing. Everybody tries to get good at more than just their specialty, which is a custom that comes from the First Hundred, I think, and the Sabishiians.”
Art nodded. “And how many of you are there?”
“About four thousand now.”
Art whistled his surprise.
That afternoon they were taken down the tunnel through several kilometers of transformed segments, many of them forested, and all containing a large stream that ran down the floor of the tunnel, widening in some segments to form big ponds. When Ariadne brought them back up to the first chamber, called Zakros, almost a thousand people showed up for an open-air meal in the largest park. Nirgal and Art wandered around talking to people, enjoying a plain meal of bread and salad and broiled fish. The people there appeared receptive to the idea of a congress of the underground. They had tried something like it years before, but had not gotten many takers at the time—had lists of the sanctuaries in their region—and one of the older women said, with authority, that they would be happy to host it, as they had a space large enough to handle a great number of guests.
“Oh, that would be marvelous,” Art said, glancing at Ariadne.
Later Nadia agreed. “It will help a lot,” she said. “A lot of people will be resistant to the idea of a meeting, because they suspect the First Hundred of trying to take charge of the underground. But if it’s held here, and the Bogdanovists are behind it. . .”
When Jackie came over and heard of the offer, she gave Art a hug. “Oh, it’s going to happen! And it’s just what John Boone would have done. It’s like the meeting he called on Olympus Mons.”
They left Dorsa Drevia and headed north again, on the east side of the Helias Basin. During the nights of this drive Jackie often brought out John Boone’s AI, Pauline, which she had studied and cataloged. She played back selections from his thoughts about an independent state, thoughts disorganized and rambling, the reflections of a man with more enthusiasm (and omegendorph) than analytic ability; but sometimes he would get on a roll, and ad-lib in the manner of the famous speeches, and that could be fascinating. He had had a knack for free association which made his
ideas sound like logical progression even when they weren’t.
“See how often he talks about the Swiss,” Jackie said. She sounded like John, Nirgal noticed suddenly. She had been working with Pauline extensively for a long time, and her manner had been affected by it. John’s voice, Maya’s manner; in such ways they carried the past with them. “We have to make sure some Swiss are at the congress.”
“We’ve got Jürgen and the group at Overhangs,” Nadia said.
“But they’re not really so Swiss, are they?”
“You’ll have to ask them,” Nadia said. “But if you mean Swiss officials, there are a lot of them in Burroughs, and they’ve been helping us there, without ever even talking to us about it. About fifty of us have Swiss passports now. They’re a big part of the demimonde.”
“As is Praxis,” Art put in.
“Yes yes. Anyway, we’ll talk to the group at Overhangs. They’ll have contacts with the surface Swiss, I’m sure.”
Northeast of the volcano Hadriaca Patera, they visited a town that had been founded by Sufis. The original structure was built into the side of a canyon cliff, in a kind of high-tech Mesa Verde—a thin line of buildings, inserted into the break point where the cliffs imposing overhang began to slope back out and down to the canyon floor. Steep staircases in walktubes ran down the lower slope to a small concrete garage, and around the garage had sprung up a number of blister tents and greenhouses. These tents were occupied by people who wished to study with the Sufis. Some came from the sanctuaries, some from the cities of the north; many were natives, but quite a few were newcomers from Earth. Together they hoped to roof the entire canyon, using materials developed for the new cable to support an immense spread of tent fabric. Nadia was immediately drawn into discussions of the construction problems such a project would encounter, which she happily told them would be various and severe. Ironically, the thickening atmosphere made all dome projects more difficult, because the domes could not be floated by the air pressures underneath them to the extent they once had been; and though the tensile and load-bearing strengths of the new carbon configurations were more than they would need, anchoring points that would hold such weights as they had in mind would be almost impossible to find. But the local engineers were confident that lighter tent fabrics and new anchoring techniques might serve, and the walls of the canyon, they said, were solid; They were in the very upper reach of Reull Vallis, and ancient sapping had cut back into very hard material. Good anchoring points should be everywhere.