Blue Mars (24 page)

And then he began to hear sounds again. The blood in his ears. His
breath in his nose. The quiet whir of his thinking—it seemed to have a sound.
His own support system this time, his body, with its organic pumps and
ventilators and generators. The mechanisms were all still there, provided
inside him, making their noises. But now he was free of anything more, in a great
silence where he could actually hear himself quite well, just himself on this
world alone, a free body standing on its mother earth, free in the rock and ice
where it had all begun. Mother Earth—he thought of Hiroko—and this time without
the tearing grief that he had felt in Trinidad. When he returned to Mars, he
could live like this. He could walk out in the silence a free being, live
outdoors in the wind, in something like this pure vast lifeless whiteness, with
something like this dark blue dome overhead, the blue a visible exhalation of
life itself—oxygen, life’s own color. Up there doming the whiteness. A sign,
somehow. The white and the green, except here the green was blue.

With shadows. Among the faint lingering afterimages lay long
shadows, running from the west. He was a long way from Jungfraujoch, and
considerably lower as well. He turned and began hiking up the Jungfraufirn. In
the distance, up the trail, his two companions nodded and turned uphill
themselves, hiking fast.

Soon enough they were in the shadow of the ridge to the west, the
sun now out of sight for good on this day, and the wind swirling over his back,
helping on. Cold indeed. But it was his kind of temperature, after all, and his
kind of air, just a nice touch of extra thickness to it; and so despite the
weight inside him he began to trudge on up the crunchy hardpack in a little
jog, leaning into it, feeling his thigh muscles respond to the challenge, fall
into their old lung-gom-pa rhythm, with his lungs pumping hard and his heart as
well, to handle the extra weight. But he was strong, strong, and this was one
of Earth’s little high regions of Marsness; and so he crunched up the firn
feeling stronger by the minute, also appalled, exhilarated—awed—it was a most
astonishing planet, that could have so much of the white and so much of the
green as well, its orbit so exquisitely situated that at sea level the green
burst out and at three thousand meters the white blanketed it utterly—the
natural zone of life just that three thousand meters wide, more or less. And
Earth rolled right in the middle of that filmy bubble biosphere, in the right
few thousand meters out of an orbit 150 million kilometers wide. It was too
lucky to be believed.

His skin began to tingle with the effort, he was warm all over,
even his toes. Beginning to sweat. The cold air was deliciously invigorating,
he felt he was in a pace that he could sustain for hours; but alas, he would
not need to; ahead and a bit above lay the snow staircase, with its
rope-and-stanchion railing. His guides were making good time ahead of him,
hurrying up the final slope. Soon he too would be there, in the little train
station/space station. These Swiss, what they thought to build! To be able to
visit the stupendous Concordiaplatz, on a day trip from the nation’s capital!
No wonder they were so sympathetic to Mars—they were Earth’s closest thing to
Martians, truly— builders, terraformers, inhabitants of the thin cold air.

So he was feeling very benevolent toward them when he stepped onto
the terrace and then burst into the station, where he began immediately
steaming; and when he walked over to his group of escorts and the other
passengers who were waiting next to the little train, he was beaming so
completely, he was so high, that the impatient frowns of the group (he saw that
they had been kept waiting) cracked, and they looked at each other and laughed,
shaking their heads as if to say to each other, What can you do? You could only
grin and let it happen—they had all been young in the high Alps for the first
time, one sunny summer day, and had felt that same enthusiasm—they remembered
what it was like. And so they shook his hand, they embraced him— they led him
onto the little train and got going, for no matter the event, it was not good to
keep a train waiting—and once under way they remarked on his hot hands and
face, and asked him where he had gone, and told him how many kilometers that
was, and how many vertical meters. They passed him a little hip flask of
schnapps. And then as the train went by the little side tunnel that ran out
onto the north face of the Eiger, they told him the story of the failed rescue
attempt of the doomed Nazi climbers, excited, moved that he was so impressed.
And after that they settled into the lit compartments of the train, squealing
down through its rough granite tunnel.

Nirgal stood at the end of one car, looking out at the dynamited
rock as it flashed past, and then as they burst back into sunlight, up at the
looming wall of the Eiger overhead. A passenger walked by him on the way to the
next car, then stopped and stared: “Amazing to see you here, T must say.” He
had a British accent of some kind. “I just ran into your mother last week.”

Confused, Nirgal said, “My mother?”

“Yes, Hiroko Ai. Isn’t that right? She was in England, working
with people at the mouth of the Thames. I saw her on my way here. Quite a
coincidence running into you too, I must say. Makes me think I’ll start seeing
little red men any second now.”

The man laughed at the thought, began to move on into the next
car.

“Hey!” Nirgal called. “Wait!”

But the man only paused—”No no,” he said over his shoulder,
“didn’t want to intrude—all I know, anyhow. You’ll have to look her up—in
Sheerness perhaps—”

And then the train was squealing into the station at Klein
Scheidegg, and the man hopped out an opening door in the next car, and as
Nirgal went to follow him other people got in the way, and his escorts came to
explain to him that he needed to descend to Grindelwald immediately if he
wanted to get home that night. Nirgal couldn’t deny them. But looking out the
window as they rolled out of the station, he saw the British man who had spoken
to him, walking briskly down a trail into the dusky valley below.

He landed at a big airport
in southern England, and was driven north and east to a town the
escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were flooded. He
had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police team that
reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss escort:
eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they had
heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing
people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and
he insisted on going out without fanfare to look for her. Eventually he
convinced them.

They drove in a gray dawn, down to a new seafront, right there
among buildings: in some places there were lines of stacked sandbags between
soggy walls, in other places just wet streets, running off under dark water
that spread for as far as he could see. Some planks were thrown here and there
over mud and puddles.

Then on the far side of one line of sandbags was brown water
without any buildings beyond, and a number of row-boats tied to a grille
covering a window half awash in dirty foam. Nirgal followed one of the escorts
into one big row-boat, and greeted a wiry red-faced man, wearing a dirty cap
pulled low over his forehead. A kind of water policeman, apparently. The man shook
his hand limply and then they were off, rowing over opaque water, followed by
three more boats containing the rest of Nirgal’s worried-looking guards.
Nirgal’s oarsman said something, and Nirgal had to ask him to repeat it; it was
as if the man only had half his tongue. “Is that Cockney, your dialect?”

“Cockney.” The man laughed.

Nirgal laughed too, shrugged. It was a word he remembered from a
book, he didn’t know what it meant really. He had heard a thousand different
kinds of English before, but this was the real thing, presumably, and he could
hardly understand it. The man spoke more slowly, which didn’t help. He was
describing the neighborhood they were rowing away from, pointing; the buildings
were inundated nearly to their rooflines. “Brents,” he said several times,
pointing with his oar tips.

They came to a floating dock, tied to what looked like a highway
sign, saying “OARE.” Several larger boats were tied to the dock, or swinging
from anchor ropes nearby. The water policeman rowed to one of these boats, and
indicated the metal ladder welded to its rusty side. “Go on.”

Nirgal climbed the side of the boat. On the deck stood a man so
short he had to reach up to shake Nirgal’s hand, which he did with a crushing
grip. “So you’re a Martian,” he said, in a voice that lilted like the
oarsman’s, but was somehow much easier to understand. “Welcome aboard our
little research vessel. Come to hunt for the old Asian lady, I hear?”

“Yes,” Nirgal said, his pulse quickening. “She’s Japanese.”

“Hmm.” The man frowned. “I only saw her the once, but I would have
said she was Asian, Bangladeshi maybe. They’re everywhere since the flood. But
who can tell, eh?”

Four of Nirgal’s escorts climbed aboard, and the boat’s owner
pushed a button that started an engine, then spun the wheel in the wheelhouse,
and watched forward closely as the boat’s rear pushed down in the water, and
they vibrated, then moved away from the drowned line of buildings. It was
overcast, the clouds very low, sea and sky both a brownish gray.

“We’ll go out over the wharf,” the little captain said.

Nirgal nodded. “What’s your name?”

“Ely’s the name. B-L-Y.”

“I’m Nirgal.”

The man nodded once.

“So this used to be the docks?” Nirgal asked.

“This was Faversham. Out here were the marshes—Ham, Magden—it was
mostly marsh, all the way to the Isle of Sheppey. The Swale, this was. More fen
than flow, if you know what I mean. Now you get out here on a windy day and
it’s like the North Sea itself. And Sheppey is no more than that hill you see
out there. A proper island now.”

“And that’s where you saw....” He didn’t know what to call her.

“Your Asian grandma came in on the ferry from Vlis-singen to
Sheerness, other side of that island. Sheerness and Minster have the Thames for
streets these days, and at high tide they have it for their roofs too. We’re
over Magden Marsh now. We’ll go out around Shell Ness, the Swale’s too
clotted.”

The mud-colored water around them sloshed this way and that. It
was lined by long curving trails of yellowing foam. On the horizon the water grayed.
Bly spun the wheel and they slapped over short steep waves. The boat rocked,
and in its entirety moved up and down, up and down. Nirgal had never been in
one before. Gray clouds hung over them, there was only a wedge of air between
the cloud bottoms and the choppy water. The boat jostled this way and that,
bobbing corklike. A liquid world.

“It’s a lot shorter around than it used to be,” Captain Bly said
from the wheel. “If the water were clearer you could see Sayes Court,
underneath us.”

“How deep is it?” Nirgal asked.

“Depends on the tide. This whole island was about an inch above
sea level before the flood, so however much sea level has gone up, that’s how
deep it is. What are they saying now, twenty-five feet? More than this old girl
needs, that’s sure. She’s got a very shallow draft.”

He spun the wheel left, and the swells hit the boat from the side,
so that it rolled in quick uneven jerks. He pointed at one gauge: “There, five
meters. Harry Marsh. See that potato patch, the rough water there? That’ll come
up at midtide, looks like a drowned giant buried in the mud.”

“What’s the tide now?”

“Near full. It’ll turn in half an hour.”

“It’s hard to believe Luna can pull the ocean around that much.”

“What, you don’t believe in gravity?”

“Oh, I believe in it—it’s crushing me right now. It’s just hard to
believe something so far away has that much pull.”

“Hmm,” the captain said, looking out into a bank of mist blocking
the view ahead. “I’ll tell you what’s hard to believe, it’s hard to believe
that a bunch of icebergs can displace so much water that all the oceans of the
world have gone up this far.”

“That is hard to believe.”

“It’s amazing it is. But the proof’s right here floating us. Ah,
the mist has arrived.”

“Do you get more bad weather than you used to?”

The captain laughed. “That’d be comparing absolutes, I’d say.”

The mist blew past them in wet long veils, and the choppy waves
smoked and hissed. It was dim. Suddenly Nir-gal felt happy, despite the unease
in his stomach during the deceleration at the bottom of every wave trough. He
was boating on a water world, and the light was at a tolerable level at last.
He could stop squinting for the first time since he had arrived on Earth.

The captain spun his big wheel again, and they ran with the waves
directly behind them, northwest into the mouth of the Thames. Off to their left
a brownish-green ridge emerged wetly out of greenish-brown water, buildings
crowding its slope. “That’s Minster, or what’s left of it. It was the only high
ground on the island. Sheerness is over there, you can see where the water is
all shattered over it.”

Under the low ceiling of streaming mist Nirgal saw what looked
like a reef of foaming white water, sloshing in every direction at once, black
under the white foam. “That’s Sheerness?”

“Yeah.”

“Did they all move to Minster?”

“Or somewhere. Most of them. There’s some very stubborn people in
Sheerness.”

Then the captain was absorbed in bringing the boat in through the
drowned seafront of Minster. Where the line of rooftops emerged from the waves,
a large building had had its roof and sea-facing wall removed, and now it
functioned as a little marina, its three remaining walls sheltering a patch of
water and the upper floors at the back serving as dock. Three other fishing
boats were moored there, and as they coasted in, some men on them looked up and
waved.

“Who’s this?” one of them said as Ely nosed his boat into the
dock.

“One of the Martians. We’re trying to find the Asian lady who was
helping in Sheerness the other week, have you seen her?”

“Not lately. Couple of months actually. I heard she crossed to
Southend. They’ll know down in the sub.”

Ely nodded. “Do you want to see Minster?” he said to Nirgal.

Nirgal frowned. “I’d rather see the people who might know where
she is.”

“Yeah.” Ely backed the boat out of the gap, turned it around;
Nirgal looked in at boarded windows, stained plaster, the shelves of an office
wall, some notes tacked to a beam. As they motored over the drowned portion of
Minster, Ely picked up a radio microphone on a corkscrewed cord, and punched
buttons. He had a number of short conversations very hard for Nirgal to
follow—”ah jack!” and the like, with all the answers emerging from explosive
static.

“We’ll try Sheerness then. Tide’s right.”

And so they motored right into the white water and foam sloshing
over the submerged town, following streets very slowly. In the center of the
foam the water was calmer. Chimneys and telephone poles stuck out of the gray
liquid, and Nirgal caught occasional glimpses of the houses and buildings
below, but the water was so foamy on top, and so murky below, that very little
was visible—the slope of a roof, a glimpse down into a street, the blind window
of a house.

On the far side of the town was a floating dock, anchored to a
concrete pillar sticking out of the surf. “This is the old ferry dock. They cut
off one section and floated it, and now they’ve pumped out the ferry offices
down below and reoc-cupied them.”

“Reoccupied them?”

“You’ll see.”

Ely hopped from the rocking gunwale to the dock, and held out a
hand to help Nirgal across; nevertheless Nirgal crashed to one knee when he
hit.

“Come on, Spiderman. Down we go.”

The concrete pillar anchoring the dock stood chest-high; it turned
out to be hollow, and a metal ladder had been bolted down its inner side.
Electric bulbs hung from sockets on a rubber-coated wire, twisted around one
post of the ladder. The concrete cylinder ended some three meters down, but the
ladder continued, down into a big chamber, warm, humid, fishy, and humming with
the noise of several generators in another room or building. The building’s
walls, the floor, the ceilings and windows were all covered by what appeared to
be a sheet of clear plastic. They were inside a bubble of some kind of clear
material; outside the windows was water, murky and brown, bubbling like
dishwater in a sink.

Nirgal’s face no doubt revealed his surprise; Ely, smiling briefly
at the sight, said, “It was a good strong building. The what-you-might-call
sheetrock is something like the tent fabrics you use on Mars, only it hardens.
People have been reoccupying quite a few buildings like this, if they’re the
right size and depth. Set a tube and poof, it’s like blowing glass. So a lot of
Sheerness folk are moving back out here, and sailing off the dock or off their
roof. Tide people we call them. They figure it’s better than begging for
charity in England, eh?”

“What do they do for work?”

“Fish, like they always have. And salvage. Eh Kama! Here’s my
Martian, say hello. He’s short where he comes from, eh? Call him Spiderman.”

“But it’s Nirgal, innit? I’ll be fucked if I call Nirgal Spiderman
when I got him visiting in me home.” And the man, black-haired and
dark-skinned, an “Asian” in appearance if not accent, shook Nirgal’s right hand
gently.

The room was brightly lit by a pair of giant spotlights pointed at
the ceiling. The shiny floor was crowded: tables, benches, machiner-y in all
stages of assembly: boat engines, pumps, generators, reels, things Nirgal
didn’t recognize. The working generators were down a hall, though they didn’t
seem any quieter for that. Nirgal went to one wall to inspect the bubble
material. It was only a few molecules thick, Ely’s friends told him, and yet
would hold thousands of pounds of pressure. Nirgal thought of each pound as a
blow with a fist, thousands all at once. “These bubbles will be here when the
concrete’s worn away.”

Nirgal asked about Hiroko. Kama shrugged. “I never knew her name.
I thought she was a Tamil, from the south of India. She’s gone over to Southend
I hear.”

“She helped to set this up?”

“Yeah. She brought the bubbles in from Vlissingen, her and a bunch
like her. Great what they did here, we were groveling in High Halstow before
they came.”

“Why did they come?”

“Don’t know. Some kind of coastal support group, no doubt.” He
laughed. “Though they didn’t come on like that. Just moving around the coasts,
building stuff out of the wreckage for the fun of it, what it looked like.
Intertidal civilization, they called it. Joking as usual.”

“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”

“Yeah.”

“Care for some scrod?”