“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 bass drum with the band, then sat on top of a small grassy 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.
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 ass—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 fucking 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 hell 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.”
“But the lithosphere up there is thicker, Ann says.”
“Sure, but the moholes are deeper too.”
“Hmm,” Coyote said.
And the conversation moved on to more serious matters, mostly the inevitable topics of shortages, and developments in the north. But at the end of that week, when they left Vishniac, by way of a different and longer tunnel, they headed north, and all Coyote’s previous plans had been thrown out the window. “That’s the story of my life, boy.”
On the fifth night of driving over the jumbled highlands of the south, Coyote slowed the rover, and circled the edge of a big old crater, subdued almost to the level of the surrounding plain. From a defile in the ancient rim one could see that the sandy crater floor was marred by a giant round black hole. This, apparently, was what a mohole looked like from the surface. A plume of thin frost stood in the air a few hundred meters over the hole, appearing from nothing like a magician’s trick. The edge of the mohole was beveled so that there was a band of concrete funneling down at about a forty-five-degree angle; it was hard to say how big this coping band was, because the mohole made it seem like no more than a strip. There was a high wire fence at its outer edge. “Hmm,” Coyote said, staring out the windshield. He backed up in the defile and parked, then slipped into a walker. “Back soon,” he said, and hopped into the lock.
It was a long, anxious night for Nirgal. He barely slept, and was in an intensifying agony of worry the next morning when he saw Coyote appear outside the boulder car lock, just before seven A.M. when the sun was about to rise. He was ready to complain about the length of this disappearance, but when Coyote got inside and got his helmet off it was obvious he was in a foul temper. While they sat out the day he tapped away at his AI in an absorbed conference, cursing vilely, oblivious to his hungry young charge. Nirgal went ahead and heated meals for them both, and then napped uneasily, and woke when the rover jerked forward. “I’m going to try going in through the gate,” Coyote said. “That’s quite the security they have on that hole. One more night should see it either way.” He circled the crater and parked on the far rim, and at dusk once again left on foot.
Again he was gone all night, and again Nirgal found it very difficult to sleep. He wondered what he was supposed to do if Coyote didn’t return.
And indeed he was not back by dawn. The day that followed was the longest of Nirgal’s life without a question, and at the end of it he had no idea what he was going to do. Try to rescue Coyote; try to drive back to Zygote, or Vishniac; go down to the mohole, and give himself up to whatever mysterious security system had eaten up Coyote: all seemed impossible.
But an hour after sunset Coyote tapped the car with his tik-tik-tik, and then he was inside, his face a furious mask. He drank a liter of water and then most of another, and blew out his tips in disgust. “Let us get the fuck out of here,” he said.
After a couple of hours of silent driving Nirgal thought to change the subject, or at least enlarge it, and he said, “Coyote, how long do you think we will have to stay hidden?”
“Don’t call me Coyote! I’m not Coyote. Coyote is out there in the back of the hills, breathing the air already and doing what he wants, the bastard. Me my name is Desmond, you call me Desmond, understand?”
“Okay,” Nirgal said, afraid.
“As for how long we will have to stay hiding, I think it will be forever.”
They drove back south to Rayleigh mohole, whe
re Coyote (he didn’t seem to be a Desmond) had thought to go in the first place. This mohole was truly abandoned, an unlit hole in the highlands, its thermal plume standing over it like the ghost of a monument. They could drive right into the empty sand-covered parking lot and garage at its rim, between a small fleet of robot vehicles shrouded by tarpaulins and sand drifts. “This is more like it,” Coyote muttered. “Here, we’ve got to take a look down inside it. Come on, get into your walker.”
It was strange to be out in the wind, standing on the rim of such an enormous gap in things. They looked over a chest-high wall and saw the beveled concrete band that rimmed the hole, dropping at an angle for äbout two hundred meters. In order to see down the shaft proper, they had to walk about a kilometer down a curving road cut into the concrete band. There they could stop at last, and look over the road’s edge, down into blackness. Coyote stood right on the edge, which made Nirgal nervous. He got on his hands and knees to look over. No sign of a bottom; they might as well have been looking into the center of the planet. “Twenty kilometers,” Coyote said over the intercom. He held a hand out over the edge, and Nirgal did too. He could feel the updraft. “Okay, let’s see if we can get the robots going.” And they hiked back up the road.
Coyote had spent many of their daytime hours studying old programs on his AI, and now, with the hydrogen peroxide from their trailer pumped into two of the robot behemoths in the parking lot, he plugged into their control panels and went at it. When he was done he was satisfied they would perform as required at the bottom of the mohole, and they watched the two, with wheels four times as tall as Coyote’s car, roll off down the curving road.
“All right,” Coyote said, cheering up again. “They’ll use their solar-panel power to process their own peroxide explosives, and their own fuel as well, and go at it slow and steady until maybe they hit something hot. We just may have started a volcano!”
“Is that good?”
Coyote laughed wildly. “I don’t know! But no one’s ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it.”
They returned to their scheduled travel, among sanctuaries both hidden and open, and Coyote went around saying, “We started up Rayleigh mohole last week, have you seen a volcano yet?”
No one had seen it. Rayleigh seemed to be behaving much as before, its thermal plume undisturbed. “Well, maybe it didn’t work,” Coyote would say. “Maybe it will take some time. On the other hand if that mohole was now floored with molten lava, how would you be able to tell?”
“We could tell,” people said. And some added: “Why would you do something as stupid as that? You might as well call up the Transitional Authority and tell them to come down here to look for us.”
So Coyote stopped bringing it up. They rolled on from sanctuary to sanctuary: Mauss Hyde, Gramsci, Overhangs, Christian-opolis. . . . At each stop Nirgal was made welcome, and often people knew of him in advance, by reputation. Nirgal was very surprised by the variety and number of sanctuaries, forming together their strange world, half secret and half exposed. And if this world was only a small part of Martian civilization as a whole, what must the surface cities of the north be like? It was beyond his grasp—although it did seem to him that as the marvels of the journey continued, one after the next, his grasp was getting a bit larger. You couldn’t just explode from amazement, after all.
“Well,” Coyote would say as they drove (he had taught Nirgal how), “we may have started a volcano and we may not have. But it was a new idea in any case. That’s one of the greatest things about this, boy, this whole Martian project. It’s all new.”
They headed south again, until the ghostly wall of the polar cap loomed over the horizon. Soon they would be home again.
Nirgal thought of all the sanctuaries they had visited. “Do you really think we’ll have to hide forever, Desmond?”
“Desmond? Desmond? Who’s this Desmond?” Coyote blew out his lips. “Oh, boy, I don’t know. No one can know for sure. The people hiding out here were shoved out at a strange time, when their way of life was threatened, and I’m not so sure it’s that way anymore in the surface cities they’re building in the north. The bosses on Earth learned their lesson, maybe, and people up there are more comfortable. Or maybe it’s just that the elevator hasn’t been replaced yet.”
“So there might not be another revolution?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or not until there’s another space elevator?”
“I don’t know! But the elevator’s coming, and they’re building some big new mirrors out there, you can see them shining at night sometimes, or right around the sun. So anything might happen, I guess. But revolution is a rare thing. And a lot of them are reactionary anyway. Peasants have their tradition, you see, the values and habits that allow them to get by. But they live so close to the edge that rapid change can push them over it, and in those times it’s not politics, but survival. I saw that myself when I was your age. Now the people sent here were not poor, but they did have their own tradition, and like the poor they were powerless. And when the influx of the 2050s hit, their tradition was wiped out. So they fought for what they had. And the truth is, they lost. You can’t fight the powers that be anymore, especially here, because the weapons are too strong and our shelters are too fragile. We’d have to arm ourselves pretty good, or something. So, you know. We’re hiding, and they’re flooding Mars with a new kind of crowd, people who were used to really tough conditions on Earth, so that things here don’t strike them so bad. They get the treatment and they’re happy. We’re not seeing so many people trying to get out into the sanctuaries, like we did in the years before sixty-one. There’s some, but not many. As long as people have their entertainments, their own little tradition, you know, they aren’t going to lift a finger.”
“But. . .” Nirgal said, and faltered.
Coyote saw the expression on his face and laughed. “Hey, who knows? Pretty soon now they’ll have another elevator in place up on Pavonis Mons, and then very likely they’ll start to screw things up all over again, those greedy bastards. And you young folks, maybe you won’t want Earth calling the shots here. We’ll see when the time comes. Meanwhile we’re having fun, right? We’re keeping the flame.”
That night Coyote stopped the car, and told Nirgal to suit up. They went out and stood on the sand, and Coyote turned him around so that he was facing north. “Look at the sky.”
Nirgal stood and watched; and saw a new star burst into existence, there over the northern horizon, growing in a matter of seconds to a long white-tailed comet, flying west to east. When it was about halfway across the sky the blazing head of the comet burst apart, and bright framents scattered in every direction, white into black.
“One of the ice asteroids!” Nirgal exclaimed.
Coyote snorted. “There’s no surprising you, is there boy! Well, I’ll tell you something you didn’t know; that was ice asteroid 2089 C, and did you see how it blew up there at the end? That was a first. They did that on purpose. Blowing them up when they enter the atmosphere allows them to use bigger asteroids without endangering the surface. And that was my idea! I told them to do that myself, I put an anonymous suggestion in the AI at Greg’s Place when I was in there messing with their comm system, and they jumped on it. They’re going to do them that way all the time now. There’ll be one or two every season like that, they’re thickening the atmosphere pretty fast. Look at how the stars are trembling. They used to do that all the nights of Earth. Ah, boy . . . It’ll happen here all the time too, someday. Air you can breathe like a bird in the sky. Maybe that will help us to change the order of things on this world. You can never tell about things like that.”
Nirgal closed his eyes, and saw red afterimages of the ice meteor score his eyelids. Meteors like white fireworks, holes boring straight into the mantle, volcanoes. . . . He turned and saw the Coyote hopping over the plain, small and thin, his helmet strangely large on him as if he were a mutant or a shaman wearing a sacred an
imal head, doing a changeling dance over the sand. This was the Coyote, no doubt about it. His father!
Then they had circumnavigated the world, albeit high in the southern hemisphere. The polar cap rose over the horizon and grew, until they were under the overhang of ice, which did not seem as tall as it had at the start of the journey. They circled the ice to home, and drove into the hangar, and got out of the little boulder car that had become so well known to Nirgal in the previous two weeks, and walked stiffly through the locks and back down the long tunnel into the dome, and suddenly they were among all the familiar faces, being hugged and cosseted and questioned. Nirgal shrank shyly from the attention, but there was no need, Coyote told all their stones for him, and he only had to laugh, and deny responsibility for what they had done. Glancing past his kin, he saw how small his little world really was; the dome was less than 5 kilometers across, and 250 meters high out over the lake. A small world.
When the homecoming was over he walked out in the early-morning glow, feeling the happy nip of the air and looking closely at the buildings and bamboo stands of the village, in its nest of hüls and trees. It all looked so strange and small. Then he was out on the dunes and walking out to Hiroko’s place, with the gulls wheeling overhead, and he stopped frequently just to see things. He breathed in the chill kelp-and-salt scent of the beach; the intense familiarity of the scent triggered a million memories at once, and he knew he was home.