Green Mars Part 16

Then their radio beeped, and a compresed message lasting no more than two seconds buzzed over the speakers. "See," Randolph said helpfully, "you could get a message out to Praxis just like that."

But when the AI finished running the message through the decryption sequence, there was no more joking. Sax had been arrested in Burroughs.

At dawn they drew up with Coyote's car, and spent the day conferring about what to do. They sat in a cramped circle in the living compartment, their faces all lined and etched with worry- all except their prisoner, who sat between Nirgal and Maya. Nirgal had shaken hands with him and nodded as if they were old friends, although neither had said a word. But the language of friends.h.i.+p was not in words.

The news about Sax had come from Spencer, by way of Nadia. Spencer was working in Kasei Vallis, which was a kind of new Korolyov, a security town, very sophisticated and at the same time very low-profile. Sax had been taken to one of the compounds there, and Spencer had found out about it and made the call out to Nadia.

"We have to get him out," Maya said, "and fast. They've only had him a couple days."

"The Sax Russell?" Randolph was saying. "Wow. I can't believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?" Sax Russell?" Randolph was saying. "Wow. I can't believe it. Who are you all, anyway? Hey, are you Maya Toitovna?"

Maya cursed him in livid Russian. Coyote ignored them all; he hadn't said anything since the message had arrived, and was busy at his AI screen, looking at what appeared to be weather satellite photos.

"You might as well let me go," Randolph said into the silence. "I couldn't tell them anything they won't get out of Russell."

"He won't tell them anything!" Kasei said hotly.

Randolph waggled a hand. "Scare him, maybe hurt him a little, put him under, plug him in, dope him up and zap his brain in the right places- they'll get answers to whatever they ask. They've got it down to a science, as I understand it." He was staring at Kasei. "You look familiar too. Never mind! Anyway, if they can't tweak it out, they can usually do it more crudely."

"How do you know all this?" Maya demanded.

"Common knowledge," Randolph said. "So maybe it's all wrong, but..."

"I want to go get him," Coyote said.

"But they'll know we're out here," Kasei said.

"They know that anyway. What they don't know is where we are."

"Besides," Michel said, "it's our Sax."

Coyote said, "Hiroko won't object."

"If she does, tell her to f.u.c.k off!" Maya exclaimed. "Tell her s.h.i.+kata ga nai s.h.i.+kata ga nai!"

"It would be my pleasure," Coyote said.

The western and northern slopes of the Tharsis bulge were unpopulated relative to the eastern drop to Noctis Labyrinthus; there were a few areothermal stations and aquifer wells, but much of the region was covered in a year-round blanket of snow and firn and young glaciers. Winds out of the south collided with the strong northwest winds coming around Olympus Mons, and the blizzards could be fierce. The protoglacial zone extended up from the six- or seven-kilometer contour nearly to the base of the great volcanoes; it was not a good place to build, nor was it a good place for stealth cars to hide. They drove hard over the sastrugi and along ropy lava mounds that served as roads, north past the bulk of Tharsis Tholus, a volcano that was about the size of Mauna Loa, though under the rise of Ascraeus it looked like a cinder cone. The next night they made it off the snow and northeast across Echus Chasma, and hid for the day under the stupendous eastern wall of Echus, just a few kilometers north of Sax's old headquarters at the top of the cliff.

The east wall of Echus Chasma was the Great Escarpment at its absolute greatest- a cliff three kilometers tall, running in a straight line north and south for a thousand kilometers. The areologists were still arguing over its origin, as no ordinary force of landscape formation seemed adequate to have created it. It was simply a break in the fabric of things, separating the floor of Echus Chasma from the high plateau of Lunae Planum. Michel had visited Yosemite Valley in his youth, and he still recalled those towering granite cliffs; but this wall standing before them was as long as the whole state of California, and three kilometers high for most of that length: a vertical world, its ma.s.sive planes of redrock staring out blankly to the west, glowing in each empty sunset like the side of a continent.

At its northern end this incredible cliff finally became less tall, and less steep, and just above 20 North it was cut by a deep broad channel, which ran east through Lunae plateau, down onto the Chryse basin. This big canyon was Kasei Vallis, one of the clearest manifestations of ancient flooding anywhere on Mars. A single glance at a satellite photo and it was obvious that a very large flood had run down Echus Chasma once upon a time, until it reached a break in its great eastern wall, perhaps a graben. The water had turned right down this valley and smashed through it with fantastic force, eroding the entrance until it was a smooth curve, slopping over the outside bank of the turn and ripping at joints in the rock until they were a complex gridwork of narrow canyons. A central ridge in the main valley had been shaped into a long lemniscate or tear-shaped island, the shape as hydrodynamic as a fishback. The inner bank of the fossil watercourse was incised by two canyons that had been mostly untouched by water, ordinary fossae that showed what the main channel had probably looked like before the flood. Two late meteor strikes on the highest part of the inner bank had completed the shaping of the terrain, leaving fresh steep craters.

From the ground, driving slowly onto the rise of the outer bank, it was a rounded elbow of a valley, with the lemniscate ridge, and the round ramparts of the craters on the rise of the inner bank, the most prominent features. It was an attractive landscape, reminiscent of the Burroughs region in its spatial majesty, the great sweep of the main channel just begging to be filled with running water, which no doubt would be a shallow braided stream, coursing over pebbles and cutting new beds and islands every week....

But now it was the site for the transnationals' security compound. The two craters on the inner bank had been tented, as had big sections of the gridwork terrain on the outer bank, and part of the main channel on both sides of the lemniscate island; but none of this work was ever shown on the video, or mentioned in the news. It was not even on the maps.

Spencer had been there since the beginning of construction, however, and his infrequent reports out had told them what the new town was for. These days almost all the people found guilty of crimes on Mars were sent out to the asteroid belt, to work off their sentences in mining s.h.i.+ps. But there were people in the Transitional Authority who wanted a jail on Mars itself, and Kasei Vallis was it.

Outside the valley entrance they hid their boulder cars in a knot of boulders, and Coyote studied weather reports. Maya fumed at the delay, but Coyote shrugged her off. "This isn't going to be easy," he told her sternly, "and it isn't possible at all except in certain circ.u.mstances. We need to wait for some reinforcements to arrive, and we need to wait on the weather. This is something Spencer and Sax himself helped me to set up, and it is very clever, but the initial conditions have to be right."

He returned to his screens, ignoring them all, talking to himself or to the screens, his dark thin face flickering in their light. Alchemist indeed, Michel thought, muttering as if over alembic or crucible, working his trans.m.u.tations on the planet... a great power. And now focused on the weather. Apparently he had discovered some prevailing patterns in the jet stream, tied to certain anchoring points in the landscape. "It's a question of the vertical scale," he said brusquely to Maya, who with all her questions was beginning to sound like Art Randolph. "This planet has a thirty-k span top to bottom. Thirty thousand meters! So there are strong winds."

"Like the mistral," Michel offered.

"Yes. Katabatic winds. And one of the strongest of them drops off the Great Escarpment here."

The prevailing winds in the region, however, were westerlies. When these hit the Echus cliff, towering updrafts resulted, and flyers living in Echus Overlook took advantage of them for sport, flying all day in gliders or birdsuits. But fairly frequently cyclonic systems came by, bringing winds from the east, and when that happened cold air ran over the snow-covered Lunae plateau, scouring snow and becoming denser and colder, until the entire drainage area was funneled out through notches in the great cliff's edge, and the winds then fell like an avalanche.

Coyote had studied these katabatic winds for some time, and his calculations had led him to believe that when conditions were right- sharp temperature contrasts, a developed storm track east to west across the plateau- then very slight interventions in certain places would cause the downdrafts to turn into vertical typhoons, smas.h.i.+ng down into Echus Chasma and blasting north and south with immense power. When Spencer had identified for them the nature and purpose of the new settlement in Kasei Vallis, Coyote had immediately decided to try to create the means to effect these interventions.

"Those idiots built their prison in a wind tunnel," he muttered at one point, in answer to Maya's inquisition. "So we built a fan. Or rather a switch to turn the fan on. We dug in some silver nitrate dispensers at the top of the cliff. Big monster jet hoses. Then some lasers to burn the air just over the flow zone. That creates an unfavorable pressure gradient, damming up the normal outflow so that it's stronger when it finally breaks through. And explosives installed all down the cliff face, to push dust into the wind and make it heavier. See, wind heats up as it falls, and that would slow it down some if it weren't so full of snow and dust. I climbed down that cliff five times to set it all up, you should have seen it. Set some fans as well. Of course the power of the whole apparatus is negligible compared to the total wind force, but sensitive dependence is the whole key to weather, you see, and our computer modeling located the spots to push the initial conditions the way we want. Or so we hope."

"You haven't tried it?" Maya asked.

Coyote stared at her. "We tried it in the computer. It works fine. If we get initial conditions of hundred-and-fifty kilometer cyclonic winds over Lunae, you'll see."

"They must know about these katabatic winds in Kasei," Randolph pointed out.

"They do. But what they calculated as once-a-millennium winds, we think we can create any time the initial conditions are there on top."

"Guerrilla climatology," Randolph said, eyes bugged out. "What do you call that, climatage? Attack meteorology?"

Coyote pretended to ignore him, although Michel saw a brief grin through the dreadlocks.

But his system would only work with the proper initial conditions. There was nothing to do but sit and wait, and hope they developed.

During these long hours it seemed to Michel that Coyote was trying to project himself through his screen, out into the sky. "Come on," the wiry little man urged under his breath, nose against gla.s.s. "Push, push, push. Come over that hill, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d wind. Tuck and turn, spiral tight. Come on!"

He wandered the darkened car when the rest of them were trying to sleep, muttering, "Look, yes, look," and pointing at features of satellite photos that none of the rest of them could see. He sat brooding over scrolling meteorological data, chewing on bread and cursing, whistling like a wind. Michel lay on his narrow cot, head propped on his hand, watching in fascination as the wild man prowled through the dimness of the car, a small, shadowy, secretive, shamanesque figure. And the bearish lump of their prisoner, one eye agleam, was likewise awake to witness this nocturnal scene, rubbing his scruffy jaw with an audible rasping, glancing at Michel as the whispering continued. "Come on, d.a.m.n you, come on. Shoooooooooo... Blow like an October hurricane..."

Finally, at sunset on their second day of waiting, Coyote stood and stretched like a cat. "The winds have come."

During the long wait some Reds had driven from Mareotis to aid in the rescue, and Coyote had worked out a plan of attack with them, based on information Spencer had sent out. They were going to split up, and come on the town from several angles. Michel and Maya were to drive one car onto the cracked terrain of the outer bank, where they could hide at the foot of a small mesa within sight of the outer-bank tents. One of these tents contained a medical clinic where Sax was being taken some of the time, a fairly low-security place according to Spencer, at least compared to the holding compound on the inner bank, where Sax was being kept between sessions in the clinic. His schedule was staggered, and Spencer could not be sure which location he would be in at any given time. So when the wind hit, Michel and Maya were going to enter the outer-bank tent and meet Spencer, who would be there ready to guide them to the clinic. The bigger car, with Coyote, Kasei, Nirgal, and Art Randolph, was going to converge, with some of the Reds from Mareotis, on the inner bank. Other Red cars would be doing their best to make the raid look like a full-scale attack from all directions, particularly the east. "We will make the rescue," Coyote said, frowning at his screens. "The wind will make the attack."

So the next morning Maya and Michel sat in their car, waiting for the winds to arrive. They had a view down the slope of the outer bank to the big lemniscate ridge. Through the day they could see into the green bubble worlds under the tents on the outer bank and the ridge- little terrariums, overlooking the red sandy sweep of the valley, connected by clear transit tubes and one or two arching bridge tubes. It looked like Burroughs some forty years before, patches of a city growing to fill a big desert arroyo.

Michel and Maya slept; ate; sat; watched. Maya paced the car. She had been getting more nervous every day, and now she padded about like a caged tigress that has smelled the blood of a meal. Static electricity jumped off her fingertips as she caressed Michel's neck, making her touch painful. It was impossible to calm her down; Michel stood behind her when she sat in the pilot's chair, ma.s.saging her neck and shoulders as she had his, but it was like trying to knead blocks of wood, and he could feel his arms getting tense from the contact.

Their talk was disconnected and desultory, wandering in random jumps of free a.s.sociation. In the afternoon they found themselves talking for an hour about the days in Underhill- about Sax, and Hiroko, and even Frank and John.

"Do you remember when one of the vaulted chambers collapsed?"

"No," she said irritably. "I don't. Do you remember the time Ann and Sax had that big argument about the terraforming?"

"No," Michel said with a sigh, "I can't say I do."

They could go back and forth like that for a long time, until it seemed they had lived in completely different Underhills. When they both remembered an event, it was cause for cheer. All the First Hundred's memories were growing spotty, Michel had noticed, and it seemed to him that most of them recalled their childhoods on Earth better than they did their first years on Mars. Oh, they remembered their own biggest events, and the general shape of the story; but the little incidents that somehow stuck in mind were different for everyone. Memory retention and recollection were getting to be big clinical and theoretical problems in psychology, exacerbated by the unprecedented longevities now being achieved. Michel had read some of the literature on it from time to time, and though he had long ago given up the clinical practice of therapy, he still asked questions of his old comrades in a kind of informal experiment, as he did now with Maya: Do you remember this, do you remember that? No, no, no. What do do you remember? you remember?

The way Nadia bossed us around, Maya said, which made him smile. The way the bamboo floors felt underfoot. And do you remember the time she screamed at the alchemists? Why no! he said. On and on it went, until it seemed that the private Underhills they inhabited were separate universes, Riemannian s.p.a.ces that intersected each other only at the plane at infinity, each of them meanwhile wandering in the long reach of his or her own idiocosmos.

"I hardly remember any of it," Maya said at last, darkly. "I can still barely stand to think of John. And Frank too. I try not not to. And then something will trigger something, and I'll be lost to everything else while I remember it. Those kinds of memories are as intense as if what you remember only happened an hour before! Or as if it were happening again." She shuddered under his hands. "I hate them. Do you know what I mean?" to. And then something will trigger something, and I'll be lost to everything else while I remember it. Those kinds of memories are as intense as if what you remember only happened an hour before! Or as if it were happening again." She shuddered under his hands. "I hate them. Do you know what I mean?"

"Of course. Memoire involuntaire Memoire involuntaire. But I remember also that the very same thing happened to me when we were living in Underhill. So it isn't just getting old."

"No. It's life. What we can't forget. Still, I can hardly look at Kasei..."

"I know. Those children are strange. Hiroko is strange."

"She is. But were you happy, then? After you left with her?"

"Yes." Michel thought back on it, working hard to recall. Recollection was certainly the weak link in the chain.... "I was, certainly. It was a matter of admitting things I had tried to suppress in Underhill. That we are animals. That we are s.e.xual creatures." He kneaded her shoulders harder than ever, and she rolled them under his hands.

"I didn't need reminding of that," she said with a short laugh. "And did Hiroko give that back to you?"

"Yes. But not just Hiroko. Evgenia, Rya- all of them, really. Not directly, you know. Well, sometimes directly. But just in admitting that we had bodies, that we were bodies. Working together, seeing and touching each other. I needed that. I was really having trouble. And they managed to connect it to Mars as well. You never seemed to have trouble with that part either, but I did, I really did. I was sick. Hiroko saved me. For her it was a sensuous matter to make our home and food out of Mars. A kind of making love to it, or impregnating it, or midwifing it- in any case, a sensuous act. It was this that saved me."

"This and their bodies, Hiroko's and Evgenia's and Rya's." She looked over her shoulder at him with a wicked grin, and he laughed. "That you remember well enough, I bet."

"Well enough."

It was midday, but to the south, up the long throat of Echus Chasma, the sky was darkening. "Maybe the wind is coming at last," Michel said.

Clouds topped the Great Escarpment, a tall ma.s.s of highly turbulent c.u.mulonimbus clouds, their black bottoms flickering with lightning, striking the top of the cliff. The air in the chasm was hazy, and the tents of Kasei Vallis were defined sharply under this haze, little blisters of clear air standing over the buildings and curiously still trees, like gla.s.s paperweights dropped on the windy desert. It was only just past noon. They would have to wait until dark even if the winds did come. Maya stood and paced again, radiating energy, muttering to herself in Russian, ducking down to take looks out of their low windows. Gusts were picking up and striking the car, whistling and keening over the broken rock at the foot of the little mesa behind them.

Maya's impatience made Michel nervous. It really was like being trapped with a wild beast. He slumped down in one of the drivers' seats, looking up at the clouds rolling off the Escarpment. Martian gravity allowed thunderheads to tower tremendous heights into the sky, and these immense white anvil-topped ma.s.ses, along with the stupendous cliff face under them, made the world seem surrealistically big. They were ants in such a landscape, they were the little red people themselves.

Certainly they would make the rescue attempt that night; they had had to wait too long as it was. On one of her restless turns Maya stopped behind him again, and took the muscles between his shoulders and neck and squeezed them. The squeezes sent great shocks of sensation down his back and flanks, and then along the insides of his thighs. He flexed in her clutches, and turned in the rotating seat so that he could put his arms around her waist, and his ear against her sternum. She continued to work his shoulders, and he felt his pulse pumping in him, and his breath grow short. She leaned over and kissed the top of his head. They worked their way against each other until they were tightly wrapped together, Maya kneading his shoulders all the while. For a long time they stayed like that.

Then they moved back into the living compartment of the car, and made love. Tight with apprehension as they both were, they fell into it with intensity. No doubt the talk of Underhill had started this; Michel recalled vividly his illicit l.u.s.ts for Maya in those years, and buried his face in her silvery hair, and tried his best to merge with her, to climb right into her. Such a big feline animal she was, pus.h.i.+ng back in an equally wild attempt to take him in, which effort carried him completely away. It was good to be by themselves, to be free to disappear into surprised ravishment, nothing but a series of moans and yelps and electric rushes of sensation.

Afterward he lay on her, still inside her, and she held his face and stared at him. "In Underhill I loved you," he said.

"In Underhill," she said slowly, "I loved you too. Truly. I never did anything about it because I would have felt foolish, what with John and Frank. But I loved you. That was why I was so angry at you when you left. You were my only friend. You were the only one I could talk with honestly. You were the only one who really listened to me."

Michel shook his head, remembering. "I didn't do a very good job of that."

"Maybe not. But you cared about me, didn't you? It wasn't just your job?"

"Oh no! I loved you, yes. It is never just a job with you, Maya. Not for anyone or anything."

"Flatterer," she said, pus.h.i.+ng him. "You always did that. You tried to put the best interpretation on all the horrible things I did." She laughed shortly.

"Yes. But they weren't so horrible."

"They were." She pursed her mouth. "But then you disappeared!" She slapped his face lightly. "You left me!"

"I left, anyway. I had to."

Her mouth tightened unhappily, and she looked past him, into the deep chasm of all their years. Sliding back down the sine curve of her moods, into something darker and deeper. Michel watched it happen with a sweet resignation. He had been happy for a very long time; and just in that expression on her face, he could see that he would, if he stayed with this, be trading his happiness- at least that particular happiness- for her. His "optimism by policy" was going to become more of an effort, and he would now have another antinomy to reconcile in his life, as centrifugal as Provence and Mars- which was simply Maya and Maya.

They lay side by side, each in his or her own thoughts, looking outside and feeling the rover bounce on its shock absorbers. The wind was still rising, the dust now pouring down Echus Chasma and then Kasei Vallis, in a ghostly mimicry of the great outflow that had first carved the channel. Michel pushed up to check the screens. "Up to two hundred kilometers per hour." Maya grunted. Winds had been far faster in the old days, but with the atmosphere so much thicker, these slower speeds were deceptive; present-day gales were much more forceful than the old insubstantial screamers.

Clearly they would go in tonight, it was only a matter of getting Coyote's bursted signal. So they lay back down together and waited, tense and relaxed at the same time, giving each other thorough ma.s.sages to pa.s.s the time and relieve the tension, Michel marveling throughout at the catlike grace of Maya's long muscular body, ancient by the dates, but in most respects the same as ever. As beautiful as ever.

Then finally sunset stained the hazy air, and the monumental clouds to the east, clouds which now covered the cliff face. They got up and sponged down, and ate a meal, and dressed and sat in the drivers' seats, getting nervous again as the quartz sun disappeared and the stormy twilight fell away.

In the dark the wind was sheer noise, and an irregular trembling of the rover on its stiff shock absorbers. Gusts buffeted the car so hard that it was sometimes held down against the full crush of the shocks for seconds at a time, the car struggling to rise on the springs and failing, like an animal fighting to free itself from the bottom of a stream. Then the gust would let off and the car would jerk up wildly. "Are we going to be able to walk in this?" Maya asked.

"Hmm." Michel had been out in some hard blows before, but in the dark one couldn't be sure if this was worse than those or not. It certainly seemed like it, and the rover anemometer was now registering gusts of 230 kilometers per hour, but in the lee of their little mesa it was unclear whether these represented true maximums or not.

He checked the fines gauge, and was not surprised to find it was now a full-blown dust storm as well. "Let's drive down closer," Maya said. "It will get us there quicker, and make it easier to relocate the car as well."

"Good idea."

They sat in the drivers' seats and took off. Out of the shelter of the mesa, the wind was ferocious. At one point the bouncing grew so severe it felt as if they might be flipped over, and if they had been side-on to the wind, they might have been; as it was, with the wind behind them, they rolled on at fifteen kilometers per hour when they should have been going ten, and the motor hummed unhappily as it braked the car from going even faster. "This is too much wind, isn't it?" Maya asked.

"I don't think Coyote has much control over it."

"Guerrilla climatology," Maya said with a snort. "That man is a spy, I'm sure of it."

"I don't think so."

The cameras showed nothing but a starless black rush. The car's AI was guiding them by dead reckoning, and on the screen's map they were shown within two kilometers from the outer bank's southernmost tent. "We'd better walk from here," Michel said.

"How will we find the car again?"

"We'll have to get out the Ariadne thread."

They suited up and got in the lock. When the outer door slid open the air sucked out instantly, pulling them hard. The wind keened across the doorway.

They stepped out of the lock and were slammed by great blows to the back. One knocked Michel to his hands and knees, and he could just see through the dust to Maya, in the same position beside him. He reached back into the lock and took the thread reel in one hand, Maya's hand in the other. He clipped the reel to his forearm.

By careful experiment they found they could stand if they stayed crouched forward, helmets at waist level and hands up and ready to catch themselves if they were knocked down. They stumbled ahead slowly, cras.h.i.+ng down when strong gusts made it impossible to stand. The ground under them was just barely visible, and a knee striking a rock was all too possible. Coyote's wind had indeed come down too strong. But there was nothing to be done about it. And clearly the inhabitants of the Kasei tents were not going to be out wandering around.

A gust knocked them down again, and Michel let the wind pour over him. It was hard to keep from being rolled. His wristpad was connected to Maya's by a phone cord, and he said, "Maya, are you all right?"