Day after day of this ceaseless interaction with strangers taught him at least as much as he learned in the classes. Not that Zygote had left him completely ignorant; its inhabitants had included such a great variety of human behavior as to have left few surprises for Nirgal on that score. In fact, as he began to understand, he had been raised in something like an asylum of eccentrics, people bent hard by those first overpressured years on Mars.
But there still were some surprises, nevertheless. The natives from the northern cities, for instance—and not only them, but almost everyone not from Zygote—were much less physical with each other than Nirgal was used to being. They did not touch or hug or caress each other as much, or shove or strike—nor did they bathe together, although some learned to in Sabishii’s public baths. So Nirgal was always surprising people by his touch. He said odd things; he liked to run all day; whatever the reasons, as the months passed and he got involved in endlessly connected groups, bands, cells, and gangs, he was aware that he stuck out somehow, that he was the focal point of some groups—that a party was following him from café to café, from day to day. That there was such a thing as “Nirgal’s crowd.” Quickly he learned to deflect this attention if he didn’t want it. But sometimes he found he did.
Often it was when Jackie was there.
“Jackie again!” Art observed. It was not the first time she had come up, or the tenth.
Nirgal nodded, feeling his pulse jump.
Jackie too had moved to Sabishii, soon after Nirgal. She had taken rooms nearby, and attended some of the same classes. And in the fluctuating group of their peers, they sometimes showed off to each other—especially in the very common situation in which one or the other of them was involved in seducing someone or in being seduced.
But they soon learned that they could not indulge themselves in that, if they did not want to drive away other partners. Which neither did. So they left each other alone, except if one actively disliked the other’s choice of partner. So that in á way they were judging each other’s partners, and acquiescing to each other’s influence. And all this without a word, with this rare behavior the only visible sign of their power over each other. They were both fooling around with a lot of other people, making new relationships, friendships, having affairs. Sometimes they didn’t see each other for weeks. And yet at some deeper level (Nirgal shook his head unhappily as he tried to express this to Art) they “belonged to each other.”
If one of them ever needed to confirm that bond, the other responded to the seduction in a blaze of excitement, and off they went. That had only happened three times in the three years they were in Sabishii, and yet Nirgal knew by those meetings that the two of them were linked—by their shared childhood and all that had happened in it, certainly, but also by something more. Everything they did together was different than when they did it with other people, more intense.
With the rest of his acquaintances, there was nothing so fraught with significance, or danger. He had friends—a score, a hundred, five hundred. He always said yes. He asked questions and listened, and rarely slept. He went to the meetings of fifty different political organizations, and agreed with them all, and spent many a night talking, deciding the fate of Mars, and then of the human race. Some people he hit it off with better than others. He might talk to a native from the north and feel an immediate empathy, starting a friendship that would endure forever. Much of the time it happened that way. But then once in a while he would be utterly surprised by some action totally foreign to his understanding, and be reminded yet again what a cloistered, even claustrophobic upbringing he had had in Zygote—leaving him as innocent, in some ways, as a fairy brought up under an abalone shell.
“No, it’s not Zygote that made me,” he said to Art, looking behind them to make sure that Coyote was really sleeping. “You can’t choose your childhood, it’s just what happens to you. But after that you choose. I chose Sabishii. And that’s really what made me.”
“Maybe,” Art said, rubbing his jaw. “But childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.”
One dawn the deep plum color of the sky illuminated the spectacular fin ridge of Acheron to the north, looming like a Manhattan of solid rock, as yet uncut into individual skyscrapers. The canyonland underneath the fin was particolored, giving the fractured land a painted look. “That’s a lot of lichen,” Coyote said. Sax climbed into the seat beside him and leaned almost nose to windshield, showing as much animation as he had since the rescue.
Under the very top of the Acheron fin, there was a line of mirror Windows like a diamond necklace, and on top of the ridge itself, a long tuft of green, under the ephemeral glint of tenting. Coyote exclaimed, “It looks like it’s been reoccupied!”
Sax nodded.
Spencer, looking over their shoulders, said, “I wonder who’s in there.”
“No one is,” Art said. They stared at him, and he went on: “I heard about it in my orientation in Sheffield. It’s a Praxis project. They rebuilt it, and got everything ready. And now they’re just waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For Sax Russell, basically. For Taneev, Kohl, Tokareva, Russell . . .”He looked at Sax, shrugging almost apologetically.
Sax croaked something wordlike.
“Hey!” Coyote said.
Sax cleared his throat hard, tried again. His mouth pursed to a little O, and a horrible noise started deep in his throat: “W-w-w-w-w-” He looked over at Nirgal, gestured as if Nirgal would know.
“Why?” Nirgal said.
Sax nodded.
Nirgal felt his cheeks burn as an electric flush of acute relief ran through his skin, and he leaped up and gave the little man a hard hug. “You do understand!”
“Well,” Art was saying, “they did it as a kind of gesture. It was Fort’s idea, the guy who founded Praxis. ‘Maybe they’ll come back,’ he supposedly said to the Praxis people in Sheffield. I don’t know if he thought out the practicalities or not.”
“This Fort is strange,” Coyote said, and Sax nodded again.
“True,” Art said. “But I wish you could meet him. He reminds me of the stories you tell about Hiroko.”
“Does he know we’re out here?” Spencer asked.
Nirgal’s pulse leapt, but Art showed no sign of discomfort. “I don’t know. He suspects. He wants you to be out here.”
“Where does he live?” Nirgal asked.
“I don’t know.” Art described his visit to Fort. “So I don’t know exactly where he is. Somewhere on the Pacific. But if I could get word to him . . .”
No one responded.
“Well, maybe later,” Art said.
Sax was looking out the rover’s low windshield at the distant rock fin, at the tiny line of lit windows marking the labs behind them, empty and silent. Coyote reached out and squeezed his neck. “You want it back, don’t you.”
Sax croaked something.
On the empty plain of Amazonis there were few settlements of any kind. This was the back country, and they rolled rapidly south through it, night after night, and slept in the darkened cabin of the car through the days. Their biggest problem was finding adequate hiding places. On flat open plains the boulder car stood out like a glacial erratic, and Amazonis was almost nothing but flat open plain. They usually tucked into the apron of ejecta around one of the few craters they passed. After the dawn meals Sax sometimes exercised his voice, croaking incomprehensible words, trying to communicate with them and failing. This upset Nirgal even more than it seemed to bother Sax himself, who, though clearly frustrated, did not seem pained. But then he had not tried to talk to Simon in those last weeks. . . .
Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. “Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. “I’m afraid his interr
ogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”
“There’s such a thing as fluent aphasia?” Coyote said.
“Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can’t read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”
Sax nodded, as if to confirm the description.
“In fluent aphasia the subjects talk at great length, but are unaware that what they’re saying makes no sense.”
Art said, “I know a lot of people with that problem.”
Spencer ignored him. “We’ve got to get Sax down to Vlad and Ursula and Michel.”
“That’s what we’re doing.” Coyote gave Sax a squeeze on the arm before retiring to his mat.
On the fifth night after leaving the Bogdanovists, they approached the equator, and the double barrier of the fallen elevator cable. Coyote had passed the barrier in this region before, using a glacier formed by one of the aquifer outbursts of 2061, in Mángala Vallis. During the unrest water and ice had poured down the old arroyo for a hundred and fifty kilometers, and the glacier left behind when the flood froze had buried both passes of the fallen cable, at 152° longitude. Coyote had located a route over an unusually smooth stretch of this glacier, which had taken him across the two passes of the cable.
Unfortunately, when they approached Mangala Glacier—a long tumbled mass of gravel-covered brown ice, filling the bottom of a narrow valley—they found that it had changed since Coyote had last been there. “Where’s that rampway?” he kept demanding. “It was right here.”
Sax croaked, then made kneading motions with his hands, staring all the while through the windshield at the glacier.
Nirgal had a difficult time comprehending the glacier’s surface; it was a kind of visual static, all patches of dirty white and gray and black and tan, tumbled together until it was hard to distinguish size, shape, or distance. “Maybe it isn’t the same place,” he suggested.
“I can tell,” Coyote said.
“Are you sure?”
“I left markers. See, there’s one there. That trail duck on the lateral moraine. But beyond it should be a rampway up onto smooth ice, and it’s nothing but a wall of icebergs. Shit. Tve been using this trail for ten years.”
“You’re lucky you had it that long,” Spencer said. “They’re slower than Terran glaciers, but they still flow downhill.”
Coyote only grunted. Sax croaked, then tapped at the inner lock door. He wanted to go outside.
“Might as well,” Coyote muttered, looking at a map on the screen. “We’ll have to spend the day here anyway.”
So in the predawn light Sax wandered the rubble plowed up by the glacier’s passage: a little upright creature with a light shining out of his helmet, like some deep-sea fish poking about for food. Something in the sight made Nirgal’s throat tighten, and he suited up and went outside to keep the old man company.
He wandered through the lovely chill gray morning, stepping from rock to rock, following Sax in his winding course through the moraine. Illuminated one by one in the cone of Sax’s headlamp were eldritch little worlds, the dunes and boulders interspersed with spiky low plants, filling cracks and hollows under rocks. Everything was gray, but the grays of the plants were shaded olive or khaki or brown, with occasional light spots, which were flowers—no doubt colorful in the sun, but now light luminous grays, glowing among thick furry leaves. Over his intercom Nirgal could hear Sax clearing his throat, and the little figure pointed at a rock. Nirgal crouched to inspect it. In cracks on the rock were growths like dried mushrooms, with black dots all over their shriveled cups, and sprinkled with what looked like a layer of salt. Sax croaked as Nirgal touched one, but he could not say what he wanted. “R-r-r . . .”
They stared at each other. “It’s okay,” Nirgal said, stricken again by the memory of Simon.
They moved to another patch of foliage. The areas that supported plants appeared like little outdoor rooms, separated by zones of dry rock and sand. Sax spent about fifteen minutes in each frosty fellfieid, stumbling around awkwardly. There were a lot of different kinds of plants, and only after they had visited several glens did Nirgal begin to see some that appeared again and again. None of them resembled the plants he had grown up with in Zygote, nor were they like anything in the arboretums of Sabishii. Only the first-generation plants, the lichens, mosses, and grasses, looked at all familiar, like the ground cover in the high basins above Sabishii.
Sax didn’t try to speak again, but his headlamp was like a pointed finger, and Nirgal often trained his headlamp on the same area, doubling the illumination. The sky turned rosy, and it began to feel like they were in the planet’s shadow, with sunlight just overhead.
Then Sax said, “Dr—!” and aimed his headlamp at a steep slope of gravel, over which a network of woody branches grew, like a mesh put there to hold the rubble in place. “Dr—J”
“Dryad,” Nirgal said, recognizing it.
Sax nodded emphatically. The rocks under their feet were covered with light green patches of lichen, and he pointed at a patch, and said, “Apple. Red. Map. Moss.”
“Hey,” Nirgal said. “You said that really well.”
The sun rose, throwing their shadows over the gravel slope. Suddenly the dryad’s little flowers were picked out by the light, the ivory petals cupping gold stamens. “Dry-ad,” Sax croaked. Their headlamp beams were now invisible, and the flowers blazed with daylight color. Nirgal heard a sound over the intercom and looked into Sax’s helmet, and saw that the old man was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks.
Nirgal pored over maps and photos of the region. “I have an idea,” he said to Coyote. And that night they drove to Nicholson Crater, four hundred kilometers to the west. The falling cable had to have landed across this large crater, at least on its first pass, and it seemed to Nirgal that there might be some kind of break or gap near the rim.
Sure enough, when they rolled up the low flat-topped hill that was the crater’s north apron, they came to the eroded rim and saw the weird vision of a black line, crossing the middle of the crater some forty kilometers away, looking like an artifact of some long-forgotten race of giants. “Big Man’s . . .” Coyote began.
“Hair strand,” Spencer suggested.
“Or black dental floss,” Art said.
The inner wall of the crater was much steeper than the outer apron, but there were a number of rim passes to choose from, and they drove without trouble down the stabilized slope of an ancient landslide, then crossed the crater floor, following the curve of the western inner wall. As they approached the cable, they saw that it emerged from a depression it had crushed in the rim, and drooped gracefully to the crater floor, like the suspension cable of a buried bridge.
They drove slowly under it. Where it left the rim, it was nearly seventy meters off the crater floor, and it didn’t touch down until it was over a kilometer out. They pointed the boulder car’s cameras up, and watched the view on the screen curiously; but the black cylinder was featureless against the stars, and they could only speculate about what the burn of the descent had done to the carbon.
“That’s nifty,” Coyote remarked as they drove up a smooth slope of eolian deposit, over another rim pass and out of the crater. “Now let’s hope there’s a way over the next pass.”
From the southern flank of Nicholson they could see south for many kilometers, and midway to the horizon was the black line of the cable’s second time around. This section had impacted many times harder than the first pass, and two swaths of ejecta paralleled the cable like henge mounds. It appeared that the cable just barely stuck out of the trench it had smashed into the plain.
As they got closer to it, weaving between ejecta boulders, they could see that the cable was a shattered mass of black rubble, a mound of carbon three to five meters higher than the plain, and steep on its sides, so that it did not look like it would be possible to drive over it in the boulder car.
Off to the east, however, was a dip in the mound of wreckage, and when they drove down the line to investigate, they found that a meteor impact subsequent to the cable’s fall had landed on the wreckage itself, smashing the cable and the ejecta swaths on both sides, and creating a new low crater that was all flecked and studded with black cable fragments, and occasional chunks of the diamond matrix that had spiraled inside the cable. It was a disordered mess of a crater, with no well-defined rim to block their way; and it looked like it would be possible to find a route through.
“Incredible,” said Coyote.
Sax shook his head vigorously. “Dei—Dei—”
“Phobos,” Nirgal said, and Sax nodded.
“Do you think so?” Spencer exclaimed.
Sax shrugged, but Spencer and Coyote discussed the possibility enthusiastically. The crater appeared oval, a so-called bathtub crater, which would support the idea of a low-angle impact. And while a random meteor hitting the cable in the forty years since its fall would be quite a coincidence, the fragments of Phobos had fallen entirely in the equatorial zone, and so a piece of it hitting the cable was much less surprising. “Very useful,” Coyote noted after he had negotiated their way over the little crater, and gotten the car south of the ejecta zone.
They parked next to one of the last big chunks of ejecta, and suited up and went back to have a look at the site.
There were brecciated chunks of rock everywhere, so that it was not obvious which were pieces of the meteor and which ejecta excavated by the cable’s fall. But Spencer was pretty good at rock ID, and he collected several samples that he said were exotic carbonaceous chondrite, very likely to be pieces of the impact rock. It would take a chemical analysis to be sure, but back in the car he looked at them under magnification, and declared himself confident that these were pieces of Phobos. “Arkady showed me a piece just like it, the first rime he came down.” They passed around a heavy burned-looking black chunk. “Impact brecciation has metamorphosed it,” Spencer said, inspecting the stone when it came back to him. “I suppose it has to be called phobosite.”