Nirgal thought of all the sanctuaries they had visited. Do you really think well have to hide forever, Desmond?
Desmond? Desmond? Whos this Desmond? Coyote blew out his lips. Oh, boy, I dont 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 Im not so sure its that way anymore in the surface cities theyre building in the north. The bosses on Earth learned their lesson, maybe, and people up there are more comfortable. Or maybe its just that the elevator hasnt been replaced yet.
So there might not be another revolution?
I dont know.
Or not until theres an elevator?
I dont know! But the elevators coming, and theyre 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 its 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 cant fight the powers that be anymore, especially here, because the weapons are too strong and our shelters are too fragile. Wed have to arm ourselves pretty good, or something. So, you know. Were hiding, and theyre flooding Mars with a new kind of crowd, people who were used to really tough conditions on Earth, so that things here dont strike them so bad. They get the treatment and theyre happy. Were not seeing so many people trying to get out into the sanctuaries, like we did in the years before 61. Theres some, but not many. As long as people have their entertainments, their own little tradition, you know, they arent 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 theyll have another elevator in place up on Pavonis Mons, and then very likely theyll start to screw things up all over again, those greedy bastards. And you young folks, maybe you wont want Earth calling the shots here. Well see when the time comes. Meanwhile were having fun, right? Were 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 fragments scattered in every direction, white into black.
One of the ice asteroids! Nirgal exclaimed.
Coyote snorted. Theres no surprising you, is there boy! Well, Ill tell you something you didnt 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 Gregs Place when I was in there messing with their comm system, and they jumped on it. Theyre going to do them that way all the time now. Therell be one or two every season like that, theyre thickening the atmosphere pretty fast. Look at how the stars are trembling. They used to do that all the nights of Earth. Ah, boy Itll 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 animal 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 stories 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 five kilometres across, and 250 metres 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 hills and trees. It all looked so strange and small. Then he was out on the dunes and walking out to Hirokos 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.
But home had changed. Or he had. Between the attempt to save Simon and the trip with Coyote, he had become a youth apart from the rest; the distinguishing adventures that he had so longed for had come, and their only result was to exile him from his friends. Jackie and Dao hung together tighter than ever, and acted like a shield between him and all the younger sansei. Quickly Nirgal realised that he hadnt really wanted to be different after all. He only wanted to melt back into the closeness of his little pack, and be one with his siblings.
But when he came among them they went silent, and Dao would lead them off, after the most awkward encounters imaginable. And he was left to return to the adults, who began to keep him with them in the afternoons, as a matter of course. Perhaps they meant to spare him more of his packs hard treatment, but it only had the effect of marking him even more. There was no cure for it. One day, walking the beach unhappily in the grey and pewter twilight of an autumn afternoon, it occurred to him that his childhood was gone. That was what this feeling was; he was something else now, neither adult nor child, a solitary being, a foreigner in his own country. The melancholy realisation had a peculiar pleasure to it.
One day after lunch Jackie stayed behind with him and Hiroko, who had come in for the day to teach, and demanded to be included in her afternoon lesson. Why should you teach him and not me?
No reason, Hiroko said impassively. Stay if you want. Get out your lectern and call up Thermal Engineering, page 1050. Well model Zygote Dome for example. Tell me what is the warmest point under the dome?
Nirgal and Jackie attacked the problem, competing and yet side by side. He was so happy she was there that he could hardly remember the problem, and Jackie raised a finger before he had even organised his thinking about it. And she laughed at him, a bit scornful but also pleased. Through all these enormous changes in them both there remained in Jackie that capacity for infectious joy, that laughter from which it was so painful to be exiled
Here is a question for next time, Hiroko said to them. All the names for Mars in the areophany are names given to it by Terrans. About half of them mean fire star in the languages they come from, but that is still a name from the outside. The question is, what is Marss own name for itself?
Several weeks later Coyote came through again, which made Nirgal both happy and nervous. Coyote took a morning teaching the children, but fortunately he treated Nirgal the same as all the rest. Earth is in very bad shape, he told them as they worked on vacuum pumps from the liquid sodium tanks in the Rickover, and it will only get worse. That makes their control over Mars all the more dangerous to us. Well have to hide until we can cut ourselves free of them entirely, and then stand safe to the side while they descend into madness and chaos. You remember my words here, this is a prophecy as true as truth.
That isnt what John Boone said, Jackie declared. She spent many of her evening hours exploring John Boones AI, and now she pulled out the box from her thigh pocket, and with only the briefest search for a passage, the friendly voice from the box was saying, Mars will never be truly safe until Earth is too.
Coyote laughed raucously. Yes, well, John Boone was like that, wasnt he? But you note he is dead, while Im still here.
Anyone can hide, Jackie said sharply. But John Boone got out there and led. Thats why Im a Boonean.
Youre a Boone and a Boonean! Coyote exclaimed, teasing her. And Boonean algebra never did add up. But look here, girl, you have to understand your grandfather better than that if you want to call yourself a Boonean. You cant make John Boone into any kind of dogma and be true to what he was. I see other so-called Booneans out there doing just that, and it makes me laugh when it doesnt make me foam at the mouth. Why if John Boone were to meet you and talk to you for even just an hour, then at the end of that time he would be a Jackie-ist. And if he met Dao and talked to him, then he would become a Daoist, maybe even a Maoist. Thats just the way he was. And that was good you see, because what it did was put the responsibility for thinking back onto us. It forced us to make a contribution, because without that Boone couldnt operate. His point was not just that everyone can do it, but that everyone should do it.
Including all the people on Earth, Jackie replied.
Not another quick one! Coyote cried. Oh you girl, why dont you leave these boys of yours and marry me now, I got a kiss like this vacuum pump, here, come on, and he waved the pump at her and Jackie knocked it aside and shoved him back and ran, just for the fun of the chase. She was now the fastest runner in Zygote bar noneeven Nirgal with all his endurance could not sprint the way she didand the kids laughed at Coyote as he skipped after her; he was pretty swift himself for an ancient, and he turned and jinked and went after them all, growling and ending up at the bottom of a pile-on, crying, Oh my leg, oh, Im going to get you for thatyou boys are just jealous of me because Im going to steal your girl away, oh! Stop! Oh!
This kind of teasing made Nirgal uncomfortable, and Hiroko didnt like it either. She told Coyote to stop, but he just laughed at her. Youre the one thats gone and made yourself a little incest camp, he said. What are you going to do, neuter them? He laughed at Hirokos dark expression. Youre going to have to farm them out soon, thats what youre going to have to do. And I might as well get some of them.
Hiroko dismissed him, and soon after that he was off on a trip again. And the next time Hiroko taught, she took all the kids to the bathhouse and they got in the bath after her and sat on the slick tiles in the shallow end, soaking in the hot steamy water while Hiroko spoke. Nirgal sat next to Jackies long-limbed naked body which he knew so well, including all its dramatic changes of the past year, and he found that he was unable to look at her.
His ancient naked mother said, You know how genetics works, Ive taught you that myself. And you know that many of you are half brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces and cousins and so forth. I am mother or grandmother to many of you, and so you should not mate and have children together. Its as simple as that, a very simple genetic law. She held up a palm, as if to say, This is our shared body.
But all living things are filled with viriditas, she went on, the green force, patterning outward. And so it is normal that you will love each other, especially now that your bodies are blooming. There is nothing wrong with that, no matter what Coyote says. He is only joking in any case. And in one thing he is right; you will soon be meeting many other people your age, and they will eventually become mates and partners and co-parents with you, closer to you even than your tribe kin, whom you know too well to ever love as an other. We here are all pieces of your self; and true love is always for the other.
Nirgal kept his eyes on his mothers, his gaze blank. Still he knew exactly when Jackie had brought her legs together, he had felt the minute change in temperature in the water swirling between them. And it seemed to him that his mother was wrong in some of what she had said. Although he knew Jackies body so well, she was still in most ways as distant as any fiery star, bright and imperious in the sky. She was the queen of their little band, and could crush him with a glance if she cared to, and did fairly often even though he had been studying her moods all his life. That was as much otherness as he cared to handle. And he loved her, he knew he did. But she didnt love him back, not in the same way. Nor did she love Dao in that way, he thought, at least not any more; which was a small comfort. It was Peter she watched in the way that he watched her. But Peter was away most of the time. So she loved no one in Zygote the way Nirgal loved her. Perhaps for her it was already as Hiroko had said, and Dao and Nirgal and the rest were simply too well known. Her brothers and sisters, no matter the genes involved.
Then one day the sky fell in earnest. The whole highest part of the water ice sheet cracked away from the CO2, collapsing through the mesh and into the lake and all over the beach and the surrounding dunes. Luckily it happened in the early morning when no one was down there, but in the village the first booms and cracks were explosively loud, and everyone rushed to their windows and saw most of the fall: the giant white sections of ice dropping like bombs or spinning down like skipped plates, and then the whole surface of the lake exploding and spilling out over the dunes. People came charging out of their rooms, and in the noise and panic Hiroko and Maya herded the kids into the school, which had a discrete air system. When a few minutes had passed and it appeared that the dome itself was going to hold, Peter and Michel and Nadia ran off through the debris, dodging and jumping over the shattered white plates, around the lake to the Rickover to make sure it was all right. If it werent it would be a deadly mission for the three of them, and mortal danger to everyone else. From the school window Nirgal could see the far shore of the lake, which was cluttered with icebergs. The air was aswirl with screaming gulls. The three figures twisted along the narrow high path just under the edge of the dome, and disappeared into the Rickover. Jackie chewed her knuckles in fear. Soon they phoned back a report: all was well. The ice over the reactor was supported by a particularly close-meshed framework, and it had held.