“Not the rarest rock on Mars, either,” Coyote said.
To the southeast of Nicholson Crater, the two big parallel canyons of the Medusae Fossae ran for over three hundred kilometers, into the heart of the southern highlands. Coyote decided to drive up East Medusa, the bigger of the two fractures. “I like to go through canyons when I can, see if the walls have any overhangs or caves. That’s how I’ve found most of my cache sites.”
“What if you run into a transverse scarp that crosses the whole canyon?” Nirgal asked.
“I backtrack. I’ve done an inhuman lot of backtracking, no doubt about that.”
So they drove up the canyon, which proved mostly flat-floored, for the rest of the night. The following night, as they continued south, the floor of the canyon began to rise, in steps that they were always able to negotiate. Then they reached a new and higher level of flat floor, and Nirgal, who was driving, braked the car. “There’s buildings up there!”
They all crowded around to look through the windshield. On the horizon, under the eastern wall of the canyon, a cluster of small white stone buildings stood silently.
After a half hour’s examination with the car’s various imagers and scopes, Coyote shrugged. “No obvious electricity or warmth. Doesn’t look like anyone’s home. Let’s go have a look.”
So they drove toward the structures, and stopped beside a massive chunk of the cliff wall, which had rolled well out on the floor. From this distance they could see that the buildings were freestanding,’ with no tent around them; they appeared to be solid blocks of whitish rock, like the caliche bianco in the badlands north of Olympus. Small white figures stood motionlessly between these buildings, on white plazas ringed by white trees. It was all made of stone.
“A statue,” Spencer said. “A town of stone!”
“Mud,” Sax croaked, then pounded the dashboard angrily, giving it four sharp slams that startled them all. “Muh!—du!—sa!”
Spencer and Art and Coyote laughed. They clapped Sax on the shoulders as if they were trying to pile-drive him into the floor. Then they all suited up again, and went out to have a closer look.
The white walls of the buildings glowed eerily in the starlight, like giant soap carvings. There were some twenty buildings, and many trees, and a couple of hundred people—and also a few score lions, mixed freely among the people. All carved from white stone, which Spencer identified as alabaster. The central plaza seemed to have been petrified during an active morning; there was a crowded farmers market, and a group clustered around two men playing chess, with waist-high pieces on a large board. The black chess pieces and the black squares of the chessboard stood out dramatically in their surroundings—onyx, in an alabaster world.
Another group of statues watched a juggler, who looked up at invisible balls. Several of the lions were watching this exhibition closely, as if ready to bat something out of the air if the juggler came too close. All the faces of the statues, human or feline, were rounded and almost featureless, but every one of them somehow expressed an attitude.
“Look at the circular arrangement of the buildings,” Spencer said over the intercom. “It’s Bogdanovist architecture, or something like.”
“No Bogdanovist ever mentioned this to me,” Coyote said. “I don’t think any of them have ever been in this region. I don’t know anyone who has. This is pretty remote.” He looked around, a grin showing through his faceplate. “Someone spent a bit of time at this!”
“It’s strange what people will do,” Spencer said.
Nirgal wandered around the edges of the construct, ignoring the talk on the intercom, looking into one blurred face after another, looking into white stone doorways and white stone windows, his blood stirring. It was as if the sculptor had made the place in order to speak to him, to strike him with his own vision. The white world of his childhood, thrusting right out into the green—or, out here, into the red. . .
And there was something in the peace of the place. Not just the stillness, but the marvelous relaxation in all the figures, the flowing calm of their stances. Mars could be this way. No more hiding, no more strife, the children racing around the market, the lions walking among them like cats. . . .
After an extended tour of the alabaster town, they returned to the car and drove on. About fifteen minutes later Nirgal spotted another statue, a white bas-relief face only, emerging from the cliff face opposite the town. “The Medusa herself,” Spencer said, pausing in his nightly drink. The basilisk glare of the Gorgon was directed back at the town, and the stone snakes of her hair twisted away from her head and back into the cliffside, as if the rock had only just seized her by a serpentine ponytail, preventing her from emerging completely from the planet.
“Beautiful,” Coyote said. “Remember that face—if that’s not a self-portrait of the sculptor, I’m much mistaken.” He drove on without stopping, and Nirgal stared at the stone face curiously. It seemed to be Asian, although perhaps that was only the effect of having the snake hair pulled back. He tried to memorize the features, feeling it was someone he already knew.
They came out of the Medusa’s canyon before dawn, and stopped to hide through the day, and chart their next move. Beyond Burton Crater, which lay before them, the Memnonia Fossae cut the land east to west for hundreds of kilometers, blocking their way south. They had to go west, toward Williams and Ejriksson craters, then south again toward Columbus Crater, and after that weave through a narrow gap in the Sirenum Fossae farther south—and so on. Doing a continuous dance around craters, cracks, escarpments, and hollows. The southern highlands were extremely rough compared to the smooth long vistas of the north—Art commented on the difference, and Coyote said irritably, “It’s a planet, man. There’s all kind of land.”
Every day they woke to an alarm set for an hour before sunset, and spent the last light of day eating a spare breakfast, and watching the garish alpenglow colors spread with the shadows over the rugged landscape. Then every night they drove, without ever being able to use the autopilot, navigating the broken terrain kilometer by kilometer. Nirgal and Art took the graveyard shift together on most nights, and continued their long conversations. Then as the stars faded, and dawn’s pure violet light stained the eastern sky, they found places where the boulder car would be inconspicuous—in this latitude the work of a moment, almost just a matter of stopping, as Art said—and ate a leisurely supper, watching the sharp blast of sunrise and its sudden creation of great fields of shadow. A couple of hours later, after a planning session, and occasional trips out, they would darken the windshield, and sleep through the day.
At the end of another long night’s conversation about their respective childhoods, Nirgal said, I suppose it wasn’t until Sabishii that I realized that Zygote was . . .
“Unusual?” Coyote said from his sleeping mat behind them. “Unique? Bizarre? Hirokolike?”
Nirgal was not surprised to discover that Coyote was awake; the old man slept poorly, and often muttered a dreamy commentary to Nirgal and Art’s narrative, which they generally ignored, as he was mostly asleep. But now Nirgal said, “Zygote reflects Hiroko, I think. She’s very inward.”
“Ha,” Coyote said. “She didn’t use to be.”
“When was that?” Art pounced, swiveling in his chair to include Coyote in their little circle of talk.
“Oh, back before the beginning,” Coyote said. “In prehistoric times, back on Earth.”
“Is that when you met her?”
Coyote grunted affirmatively.
This was where he always stopped, when he was talking to Nirgal. But now with Art there, with just the three of them awake in all the world, in a little circle lit by the infrared imager, Coyote’s thin crooked face had a different expression than its usual mulish dismissal, and Art leaned over him and said firmly, “So just how did you get to Mars, anyway?”
“Oh God,” Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “It’s hard to remember something that long ago.
It’s almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.”
He glanced up at them, then closed his eyes, as if recalling the opening lines. The two younger men stared down at him, waiting.
“It was all due to Hiroko, of course. She and I were friends. We met young, when we were students at Cambridge. We were both cold in England, so we warmed each other. This was before she met Iwao, and long before she became the great mother goddess of the world. And back then we shared a lot of things. We were outsiders at Cambridge, and we were good at the work. And so we lived together for a couple of years there. Very much like what Nirgal has been saying about Sabishii. Even what he said about Jackie. Although Hiroko. . .”
He closed his eyes, as if trying to see it in his mind.
“You stayed together?” Art asked.
“No. She went back to Japan, and I went with her for a while, but I had to go back to Tobago when my father died. So things changed. But she and I stayed in touch, and met at scientific conferences, and when we met we fought, or promised to love each other forever. Or both. We didn’t know what we wanted. Or how we could get it, if we admitted what we wanted. And then the selection of the First Hundred began. But I was in jail in Trinidad, for objecting to the flag-of-convenience laws. And even if I had been free, I wouldn’t have had a chance of being selected anyway. I’m not even sure I wanted to go. But Hiroko either remembered our promises, or thought I would be useful to her, I have never decided which. So she contacted me, and told me that if I wanted she would hide me in the farm on the Ares, and then in the colony on Mars. She has always been a bold thinker, I give her that.”
“Didn’t it strike you as a crazy plan?” Art asked, his eyes round.
“Yes it did!” Coyote laughed. “But all the good plans are crazy, aren’t they. And at that time my prospects were dim. And if I hadn’t gone for it, I would never have seen Hiroko again.” He looked at Nirgal, smiled crookedly. “So I agreed to try it. I was still in prison, but Hiroko had some unusual friends in Japan, and one night I found myself being led out of my cell by a trio of masked men, and every guard in the jail sedated. We took a helicopter to a tanker ship, and I sailed on that to Japan. The Japanese were building the space station that the Russians and Americans were using for the construction of the Ares, and I was flown up in one of the new Earth-to-space planes, and slipped into the Ares just as construetion was ending. They popped me in with some of the farm equipment Hiroko had ordered, and after that it was up to me. I lived by my wits from that moment on, all the way to this very moment! Which meant I was pretty hungry at times, until the Ares began its flight. After that, Hiroko took care of me. I slept in a storage compartment behind the pigs, and stayed out of sight. It was easier than you might think, because the Ares was big. And when Hiroko got confident in the farm crew, she introduced me to them, and it was easier yet. Where it got hard was on the ground, in those first weeks after we landed. I went down in a lander filled with only the farm crew, and they helped me get settled in a closet in one of the trailers. Hiroko got the greenhouses built fast mostly to get me out of that closet, or so she would tell me.”
“You lived in a closet?”
“For a couple of months. It was worse than jail. But after that I lived in the greenhouse, and started work on stockpiling the materials we needed to take off on our own. Iwao had hidden the contents of a couple of freight boxes, right from the start. And after we built a rover out of spare parts I spent most of my time away from Underhill, exploring the chaotic terrain and finding a good place for our hidden shelter, and moving stuff out there. ! was out on the surface more than anyone, even Ann. By the time the farm team moved out there to it, I was used to spending a lot of time on my own. Just me and Big Man, out wandering the planet. I tell you, it was like heaven. No, not heaven—it was Mars, pure Mars. I guess I lost my mind in a way. But I loved it so . . . I can’t really talk about it.”
“You must have taken a lot of radiation.”
Coyote laughed. “Oh yes! Between those journeys and the solar storm on the Ares, I took on more rems than anyone in the First Hundred, except maybe for John. Maybe that’s what did it. Anyway”—he shrugged, looked up at Art and Nirgal—“here I am. The stowaway.”
“Amazing,” Art said.
Nirgal nodded; he had never gotten his father to reveal even a tenth as much information about his past, and now he looked from Art to Coyote and back again, wondering how Art had done it. And done it to him as well—for Nirgal had tried to tell not only what had happened to him, but what it had meant, which was much more difficult. Apparently this was a talent Art had, though it was very hard to pin down what it consisted of; just the look on his face, somehow, that cross-eyed intensity of interest, those bald bold questions, trampling on the niceties and going right to the heart of things—assuming that every person wanted to talk, to shape the meaning of their life. Even secretive weird old hermits like Coyote.
“Well, it was not that hard,” Coyote was saying now. “Concealment is never as hard as people think, you must understand that. It’s action while hiding that is the hard part.”
At that thought he frowned, then pointed a finger at Nirgal. “This is why we will have to come out eventually, and fight in the open. This is why I got you to go to Sabishii.”
“What? You told me I shouldn’t go! You said it would ruin me!”
“That was how I got you to go.”
They kept up this nocturnal, conversational life for the better part of a week, and at the end of it they approached a small settled region surrounding the mohole that had been dug in the midst of craters Hipparchus, Eudoxus, Ptolemaeus, and Li Fan. There were some uranium mines on the aprons of these craters, but Coyote did not suggest any sabotage attempts, and they drove hard past the Ptolemaic mohole, getting away from the region as quickly as possible. Soon they came to the Thaumasia Fossae, the fifth or sixth big fracture system they had encountered on their trip. Art found this curious, but Spencer explained to him that the Tharsis bulge was surrounded by fracture systems caused by its uplift, and as they were in effect circumnavigating the bulge, they kept running into them. Thaumasia was one of the biggest of these systems, and the location of the large town of Senzeni Na, which had been founded next to another of the 40° latitude moholes, one of the first moholes to be dug, and still one of the deepest. At this point they had been traveling for over two weeks, and they needed to restock at one of Coyote’s caches.
They drove south of Senzeni Na, and near dawn were weaving between rocky ancient hillocks. But when they came to the bottom end of a landslide coming off a low broken scarp, Coyote started cursing. The ground was marked by rover tracks, and a scattering of crushed gas cylinders, food boxes and fuel containers.
They stared at the sight. “Your cache?” Art asked, which provoked another outburst of swearing.
“Who were they?” Art asked. “Police?”
No one answered immediately. Sax went to one of the drivers’ seats to check supply gauges. Coyote continued cursing furiously, plopping meanwhile into the other driver’s seat. Finally he said to Art, “It wasn’t police. Not unless they’ve started using Vishniac rovers. No. These thieves were from the underground, damn them. Probably an outfit I know based in Argyre. I can’t think of anyone else who would do it. But this crowd knows where some of my old caches were, and they’ve been mad at me ever since I sabotaged a mining settlement in the Charitums, because it closed down after that, and they lost their main source of supplies.”
“You folks should try to stay on the same side,” Art said.
“Fuck off,” Coyote advised him.
Coyote started up the boulder car and drove away. “It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
He went on in that vein for quite some time. Finally S
ax tapped at one of the gauges, and Coyote said roughly, “I know!”
It was full daylight, and he stopped the car in a cleft between two of the ancient hillocks, and they blacked the windows, and lay in the dark on their narrow mattresses.
“So how many underground groups are there?” Art asked.
“No one knows,” Coyote said.
“You’re kidding.”
Nirgal answered before Coyote started in again. “There’s about forty in the southern hemisphere. And some long-standing disagreements among them are getting nasty. There are some tough groups out there. Radical Reds, Schnelling splinter groups, different kinds of fundamentalists . . . it’s causing trouble.”
“But aren’t you all working for the same thing?”
“I don’t know.” Nirgal recalled all-night arguments in Sabishii, sometimes quite violent, among students who were basically friends. “Maybe not.”
“But haven’t you talked it over?”
“Not in any formal way, no.”
Art looked surprised. “You should do that,” he said.
“Do what?” Ñirgal asked.
“You should convene some kind of meeting of all the underground groups, and see if you can’t agree about what you’re all trying to do. How to settle disputes, and like that.”
Aside from a skeptical snort from Coyote, there was no response to this. After a long time Nirgal said, “My impression is that some of these groups are wary of Gamete, because of the First Hundred in it. No one wants to give up any autonomy to what’s already perceived as the most powerful sanctuary.”