One hundred and nine. Ah ha ha! You best shut your eyes or theyll pop out of your head. Dont you look at me like that. I was old the day I was born and Ill be young the day I die.
They drowsed as the sky on the eastern skyline turned a deep purply blue. Coyote hummed a little tune to himself, sounding as if he had eaten a tab of omegendorph, as he often did in the evenings at Zygote. Gradually it became clear that the skysill was very far away, and also very high; Nirgal had never seen land so far away, and it seemed to curve around them as well, a black curving wall that lay an immense distance off, over a black rocky plain. Hey Coyote! he exclaimed. What is this?
Ha! Coyote said, sounding deeply satisfied.
The sky lightened and the sun suddenly cracked the upper edge of the distant wall, blasting Nirgals vision for a while. But as the sun rose, the shadows on the huge semi-circular cliff gave way in wedges of light that revealed sharp ragged embayments, scalloping the larger curve of the wall, which was so big that Nirgal simply gasped, his nose pressed right against the windshieldit was almost frightening it was so big! Coyote, what is it?
Coyote let out one of his alarming laughs, the animal cackle filling the car. So you see it isnt such a small world after all, eh, boy? This is the floor of Promethei Basin. Its an impact basin, one of the biggest on Mars, almost as big as Argyre, but it hit down here near the South Pole, so about half of its rim has since been buried under the polar cap and the layered terrain. The other half is this curved escarpment here. He waved a hand expansively. Kind of like a super-big caldera, but only half there, so you can drive right into it. This little rise is the best place I know for seeing it. He called up a map of the region, and pointed. Were on the apron of this little crater here, Vt, and looking northwest. The cliff is Promethei Rupes, there. Its about a kilometre high. Of course the Echus cliff is three kilometres high, and the Olympus Mons cliff is six kilometres high, do you hear that Mister Small Planet? But this baby will have to do for this morning.
The sun rose higher, illuminating the great curve of the cliff from above. It was deeply cut by ravines and smaller craters. Prometheus Sanctuary is in the side of that big indentation there, Coyote said, and pointed to the left side of the curve. Crater Wj.
As they waited through the long day Nirgal looked at the gigantic cliff almost continuously, and each time it looked different, as the shadows shortened and shifted, revealing new features and obscuring others. It would have taken years of looking to see it all, and he found he could not overcome the feeling that the wall was unnaturally, or even impossibly huge. Coyote was rightthe tight horizons had fooled himhe had not imagined the world could be so big.
That night they drove into Crater Wj, one of the biggest embayments in the giant wall. And then they reached the curving cliff of Promethei Rupes. The cliff towered over them like the vertical side of the universe itself: the polar cap was nothing compared to this rock mass. Which meant that the Olympus Mons cliff that Coyote had mentioned would have to be he didnt know how to think it.
Down at the foot of the cliff, at a spot where unbroken rock dropped almost vertically into flat sand, there was a recessed lock door. Inside was the sanctuary called Prometheus, a collection of wide chambers stacked like the rooms of a bamboo house, with incurving filtered windows overlooking Crater Wj and the larger basin beyond. The inhabitants of the sanctuary spoke French, and so did Coyote when talking to them. They were not as old as Coyote or the other issei, but they were pretty old, and of Terran height, which meant they mostly looked up to Nirgal, while speaking very hospitably to him, in fluent but accented English. So you are Nirgal! Enchanté! We have heard of you, we are happy to meet you!
A group of them showed him around while Coyote did other things. Their sanctuary was very unlike Zygote; it was, to put it plainly, nothing but rooms. There were several large ones stacked by the wall, with smaller ones at the back of these. Three of the window rooms were greenhouses, and all the rooms throughout the refuge were kept very warm, and filled with plants and wall hangings and statuary and fountains; to Nirgal it seemed confining, and much too hot, and utterly fascinating.
But they only stayed a day, and then they drove Coyotes car into a big elevator, and sat in it for an hour. When Coyote drove out of the opposite door they were on top of the rugged plateau that lay behind Promethei Rupes. And here Nirgal was once again shocked. When they had been down at Rays Lookout, the great cliff had formed a limit to what they could see, and he had been able to comprehend it. But on top of the cliff, looking back down, the distance was so great that Nirgal could not grasp it at all. He had trouble focusinghe saw nothing but a blurry vertiginous mass of blobs and patches of colourwhite, purple, brown, tan, rust, whiteit made him queasy. Storm coming in, Coyote said, and Nirgal saw that the colours above them were a fleet of tall solid clouds, sailing through a violet sky with the sun well to the westthe clouds whitish above and infinitely lobed, but dark grey on their bottoms. These cloud bottoms were closer to their heads than the ground of the basin, and they were all on a level, as if rolling over a transparent floor. The world below was nothing so even, mottled tan and chocolateahthose were the shadows of the clouds, visibly moving. And that white crescent out in the middle of things was the polar cap! They could see all the way home! Recognising the ice gave him the final bit of perspective needed to make sense of things, and the blobs of colour stabilised into a bumpy uneven ringed landscape, mottled by moving cloud shadows.
This dizzying act of cognition had only taken Nirgal a few seconds, but when he finished he saw that Coyote was watching him with a big grin.
Just how far can we see, Coyote? How many kilometres?
Coyote only cackled. Ask Big Man, boy. Or figure it out for yourself! What, three hundred k? Something like that. A hop and a jump for the big one. A thousand empires for the little ones.
I want to run it.
Im sure you do. Oh, look, look! Therefrom the clouds over the ice cap. Lightning, see it? Those little flickers are lightning.
And there they were, bright threads of light, appearing and disappearing soundlessly, one or two every few seconds, connecting black clouds with white ground. He was seeing lightning at last, with his own eyes. The white world sparkling into the green, jolting it. Theres nothing like a big storm, Coyote was saying. Nothing like it. Oh to be out in the wind! We made that storm, boy. Although I think I could make an even bigger one.
But a bigger one was beyond Nirgals ability to imagine; what lay below them was cosmically vastelectric, shot with colour, windy with spaciousness. He was actually a bit relieved when Coyote turned their car around and drove off, and the blurry view disappeared, the edge of the cliff becoming a new skysill behind them.
Just what is lightning again?
Well, lightning shit. I must confess that lightning is one of the phenomena in this world that I cannot hold the explanation for in my head. People have told me, but it always slips away. Electricity, of course, something about electrons or ions, positive and negative, charges building up in thunderheads, discharging to the ground, or both up and down at once, I seem to recall. Who knows. Ka boom! Thats lightning, eh?
The white world and the green, rubbing together, snapping with the friction. Of course.
There were several sanctuaries on the plateau north of Promethei Rupes, some hidden in escarpment walls and crater rims, like Nadias tunnelling project outside Zygote; but others simply sitting in craters under clear tent domes, there for any sky police to see. The first time Coyote drove up to the rim of one of these and they looked down through the clear tent dome onto a village under the stars, Nirgal had been once again amazed, though it was amazement of a lesser order than that engendered by the landscape. Buildings like the school, and the bathhouse and the kitchen, trees, greenhousesit was all basically familiarbut how could they get away with it, out in the open like this? It was disconcerting.
And so full of people, of strangers. Nirgal had known in theory that there were a lot of people in the southern sanctuaries, five thousand as they said, but it was something else again to meet so many of them so fast, and see that it was really true. And staying in the unhidden settlements made him extremely nervous. How can they do it? he asked Coyote. Why arent they arrested and taken away?
You got me, boy. Its possible they could be. But they havent been yet, and so they dont think its worth the trouble to hide. You know it takes a tremendous effort to hideyou got to do all that thermal disposal engineering, and electronic hardening, and you got to keep out of sight all the timeits a pain in the ass. And some people down here just dont want to do it. They call themselves the demi-monde. They have plans for if theyre ever investigated or invadedmost of them have escape tunnels like ours, and some even have some weapons stashed away. But they figure that if theyre out on the surface, theres no reason to be checked out in the first place. The folks in Christianopolis just told the UN straight out that they came down here to get out of the net. But I agree with Hiroko on this one. That some of us have to be a little more careful than that. The UN is out to get the First Hundred, if you ask me. And its family too, unfortunately for you lads. Anyway, now the resistance includes the underground and the demi-monde, and having the open towns is a big help to the hidden sanctuaries, so Im glad theyre here. At this point we depend on them.
Coyote was welcomed effusively in this town as he was everywhere, whether the settlement was hidden or exposed. He settled into a corner of a big garage on the crater rim, and conducted a continuous brisk exchange of goods, including seed stocks, software, light bulbs, spare parts, and small machines. These he gave out after long consultations with their hosts, in bargaining sessions that Nirgal couldnt understand. And then, after a brief tour of the crater floor, where the village looked surprisingly like Zygote under a brilliant purple dome, they were off again.
On the drives between sanctuaries Coyote did not explain his bargaining sessions very effectively. Im saving these people from their own ridiculous notion of economics, thats what Im doing! A gift economy is all very well, but it isnt organised enough for our situation. There are critical items, that everyone has to have, so people have to give, which is a contradiction, right? So I am trying to work out a rational system. Actually Vlad and Marina are working it out, and I am trying to implement it, which means I get all the grief.
And this system
Well, its a sort of two-track thing, where they can still give all they want, but the necessities are given values and distributed properly. And good God you wouldnt believe some of the arguments I get in. People can be such fools. I try to make sure it all adds up to a stable ecology, like one of Hirokos systems, with every sanctuary filling its niche and providing its speciality, and what do I get for it? Abuse, thats what I get! Radical abuse. I try to stop potlatching and they call me a robber baron, I try to stop hoarding and they call me a fascist. The fools! What are they going to do, when none of them are self-sufficient, and half of them are crazy paranoid? He sighed theatrically. So, anyway. Were making progress. Christianopolis makes light bulbs, and Mauss Hyde grows new kinds of plants, as you saw, and Bogdanov Vishniac makes everything big and difficult, like reactor rods and stealth vehicles and most of the big robots, and your Zygote makes scientific instrumentation, and so on. And I spread them around.
Are you the only one doing that?
Almost. Theyre mostly self-sufficient, actually, except for these few criticalities. They all got programs and seeds, thats the basic necessities. And besides, its important that not too many people know where all the hidden sanctuaries are.
Nirgal digested the implications of this as they drove through the night. Coyote went on about the hydrogen peroxide standard and the nitrogen standard, a new system of Vlad and Marinas, and Nirgal did his best to follow but found it hard going, either because the concepts were difficult or else because Coyote spent most of his explanations fulminating over the difficulties he encountered in certain sanctuaries. Nirgal decided to ask Sax or Nadia about it when he got home, and stopped listening.
The land they were crossing now was dominated by crater rings, the newer ones overlapping and even burying older ones. This is called saturation cratering. Very ancient ground. A lot of the craters had no raised rims at all, but were simply shallow flat-bottomed round holes in the ground. What happened to the rims?
Worn away.
By what?
Ann says ice, and wind. She says as much as a kilometre was stripped off the southern highlands over time.
That would take away everything!
But then more came back. This is old land.
In between craters the land was covered with loose rock, and it was unbelievably uneven; there were dips, rises, hollows, knolls, trenches, grabens, uplifts, hills and dales; never even a moments flatness, except on crater rims and occasional low ridges, both of which Coyote used as roads when he could. But the track he followed over this lumpy landscape was still tortuous, and Nirgal could not believe it was memorised. He said as much, and Coyote laughed. What do you mean memorised? Were lost!
But not really, or not for long. A mohole plume appeared over the horizon, and Coyote drove for it.
Knew it all along, he muttered. This is Vishniac mohole. There were four moholes started around the 75° latitude line, and two of them are no longer occupied, even by robots. Vishniac is one of the two, and its been taken over by a bunch of Bogdanovists who live down inside it. He laughed. Its a wonderful idea, because they can dig into the side wall along the road to the bottom, and down there they can put out as much heat as they want and no one can tell that its not just more mohole outgassing. So they can build anything they like, even process uranium for reactor fuel rods. Its an entire little industrial city now. Also one of my favourite places, very big on partying.
He drove them into one of the many small trenches cutting the land, then braked and tapped at his screen, and a big rock swung out from the side of the trench, revealing a black tunnel. Coyote drove into the tunnel and the rock door closed behind them. Nirgal had thought he was beyond surprise at this point, but he watched round-eyed as they drove down the tunnel, its rough rock walls just outside the edges of the boulder car. It seemed to go on forever. Theyve dug a number of approach tunnels, so that the mohole itself can look completely unvisited. We have about twenty kilometers to go.