Blue Mars (25 page)

The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with
tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Kama cried
“Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People
were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots
that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to
eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were
rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such
vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s
heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could
scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him.
Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her
enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow
and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you
know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the
nose.”

“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”

Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot
and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”

Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two
whites.

“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?” None. Still... if
Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones
would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into
such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nir-gal doubted it. Return
to Earth in its hour of need . . . the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded
like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra,
organizing a reinhabitation.. ..

“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up
the coast.”

Nirgal looked at Ely, who nodded; they could cross too.

But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted
a day to arrange things. Meanwhile Ely and his friends were talking about
underwater salvage projects, and when Ely heard about the bodyguards’ proposed
delay, he asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the
next morning—”though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the
escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do
it.

So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse,
Ely and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the
night on short narrow beds in Ely’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.

The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of
Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve
water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s
escorts followed Ely’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats,
maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles,
conferring frequently. Ely had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he
called out the street names of Sheer-ness, navigating to specific warehouses or
shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged,
apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the
blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s
target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a
small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might
say.”

They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines.
Ely threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men
gathered around a small AI screen set on Ely’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid
out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color
image changed from brown to black to brown.

“How do you know what you’re seeing?” Nirgal asked.

“We don’t.”

“But look, there’s a door, see?”-

“No.”

Ely tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing.
There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”

“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.

“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move
at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you
could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So
we pull the stuff worth pulling.”

“What about the owners?”

“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people
when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re
not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and
such. Here, look—we’ll see what that is.”

He pushed a key, and the screen got brighter. “Ah yeah.
Refrigerator. We could use it, but it’s hell getting it up.”

“What about the house?”

“Oh we blow that up. Clean shot if we set the charges right. But
not this morning. We’ll tag this and move on.”

They puttered away. Ely and another man continued to watch the
screen, arguing mildly about where to go next. “This town wasn’t much even
before the flood,” Ely explained to Nirgal. “Falling into the drink for a
couple hundred years, ever since the empire ended.”

“Since the end of sail you mean,” the other man said.

“Same thing. The old Thames was used less and less after that, and
all the little ports on the estuary began to go seedy. And that was a long time
ago.”

Finally Ely killed the engine, looked at the others. In their
whiskery faces Nirgal saw a curious mix of grim resignation and happy
anticipation. “There then.”

The other men started getting out underwater gear: full wet suits,
tanks, face masks, some full helmets. “We thought Eric’s’d fit you,” Ely said.
“He was a giant.” He pulled a long black wet suit out of the crowded locker,
one without feet or gloves, and only a hood and face mask rather than a
complete helmet. “There’s booties of his too.”

“Let me try them on.”

So he and two of the men took off their clothes and pulled on the
wet suits, sweating and puffing as they yanked the fabrics on and zipped up the
tight collars. Nirgal’s wet suit turned out to have a triangular rip across the
left side of the torso, which was lucky, as otherwise it might not have fit; it
was very tight around the chest, though loose on his legs. One of the other
divers, named Kev, taped up the V split with duct tape. “That’ll be all right
then, for one dive anyway. But you see what happened to Eric, eh?” Tapping him
on the side. “See you don’t get caught up in any of our cable.”

“I will.”

Nirgal felt his flesh crawl under the taped rip, which suddenly
felt huge. Caught on a moving cable, pulled into concrete or metal, ka, what an
agony—a fatal blow—how long would he have stayed conscious after that, a
minute, two? Rolling in agony, in the dark. . . .

He pulled himself out of an intense recreation of Eric’s end, feeling
shaken. They got a breathing rig attached to his upper arm and face mask, and
abruptly he was breathing cold dry air, pure oxygen they said. Ely asked again
about going down, as Nirgal was shivering slightly. “No no,” said Nirgal. “I’m
good with cold, this water isn’t that cold. Besides I’ve already filled the
suit with sweat.”

The other divers nodded, sweating themselves. Getting ready was
hard work. The actual swimming was easier; down a ladder and, ah, yes, out of
the crush of the g, into something very like Martian g, or lighter still; such
a relief! Nirgal breathed in the cold bottled oxygen happily, almost weeping at
the sudden freedom of his body, floating down through a comfortable dimness. Ah
yes—his world on Earth was underwater.

Down deeper, things were as dark and amorphous as they had been on
the screen, except for within the cones of light emanating from the other two
men’s headlamps, which were obviously very strong. Nirgal followed above and
behind them, getting the best view of all. The estuary water was cool, about
285 K Nirgal judged, but very little of it seeped in at the wrists and around
the hood, and the water trapped inside the suit was soon so hot with his
exertions that his cold hands and face (and left ribs) actually served to keep
him from overheating.

The two cones of light shot this way and that as the two divers
looked around. They were swimming along a narrow street. Seeing the buildings
and the curbs, the sidewalks and streets, made the murky gray water look
uncannily like the mist up on the surface.

Then they were floating before a three-story brick building,
filling a narrow triangular space that pointed into an angled intersection of
streets. Kev gestured for Nirgal to stay outside, and Nirgal was happy to
oblige. The other diver had been holding a cable so thin it was scarcely
visible, and now he swam into a doorway, pulling it behind him. He went to work
attaching a small pulley to the doorway, and lining the cable through it. Time
passed; Nirgal swam slowly around the wedge-shaped building, looking in
second-story windows at offices, empty rooms, flats. Some furniture floated
against the ceilings. A movement inside one of these rooms caused him to jerk
away; he was afraid of the cable; but it was on the other side of the building.
Some water seeped into his mouthpiece, and he swallowed it to get it out of the
way. It tasted of salt and mud and plant life, and something unpleasant. He
swam on.

Back at the doorway Kev and the other man were helping a small
metal safe through the doorway. When it was clear they kicked upright, in
place, waiting, until the cable rose almost directly overhead. Then they swam
around the intersection like a clumsy ballet team, and the safe floated up to
the surface and disappeared. Kev swam back inside, and came out kicking hard,
holding two small bags. Nirgal kicked over and took one, and with big luxurious
kicks pulsed up toward the boat. He surfaced into the bright light of the mist.
He would have loved to go back down, but Ely did not want them in any longer,
and so Nirgal threw his fins in the boat and climbed the ladder over the side.
He was sweating as he sat on one bench, and it was a relief to strip the hood
off his head, despite the way his hair was yanked back. The clammy air felt good
against his skin as they helped him peel the wet suit off.

“Look at his chest will you, he’s like a greyhound.”

“Breathing vapors all his life.”

The mist almost cleared, dissipating to reveal a white sky, the
sun a brighter white swath across it. The weight had come back into him, and he
breathed deeply a few times to get his body back into that work rhythm. His
stomach was queasy, and his lungs hurt a little at the peak of each inhalation.
Things rocked a bit more than the slosh of the ocean surface would account for.
The sky turned to zinc, the sun’s quadrant a harsh blinding glare. Nirgal
stayed sitting, breathed faster and shallower. “Did you like it?”

“Yes!” he said. “I wish it felt like that everywhere.” They
laughed at the thought. “Here have a cup.”

Perhaps going underwater had been a mistake. After that the g
never felt right again. It was hard to breathe. The air down in the warehouse
was so wet that he felt he could clench a fist and drink water from his hand.
His throat hurt, and his lungs. He drank cup after cup of tea, and still he was
thirsty. The gleaming walls dripped, and nothing the people said was
comprehensible, it was all ay and eh and lor and da, nothing like Martian
English. A different language. Now they all spoke different languages.
Shakespeare’s plays had not prepared him for it.

He slept again in the little bed on Ely’s boat. The next day the
escort gave the okay, and they motored out of Sheer-ness, and north across the
Thames estuary, in a pink mist even thicker than the day before.

Out in the estuary there was nothing visible but mist and the sea.
Nirgal had been in clouds before, especially on the west slope of Tharsis,
where fronts ran up the rise of the bulge; but never of course while on water.
And every time before the temperatures had been well below freezing, the clouds
a kind of flying snow, very white and dry and fine, rolling over the land and
coating it with white dust. Nothing at all like this liquid world, where there
was very little difference between the choppy water and the mist gusting over
it, the liquid and the gaseous phasing back and forth endlessly. The boat
rocked in a violent irregular rhythm. Dark objects appeared in the margins of
the mist, but Ely paid them no attention, keeping a sharp eye ahead through a
window beaded with water to the point of opacity, and also watching a number of
screens under the window.

Suddenly Ely killed the engine, and the boat’s rocking changed to
a vicious side-to-side yaw. Nirgal held the side of the cabin and peered
through the watery window, trying to see what had caused Ely to stop. “That’s a
big ship for Southend,” Ely remarked, motoring on very slowly. “Where?”

“Port beam.” He pointed to a screen, then off to the left. Nirgal
saw nothing.

Ely brought them into a long low pier, with many boats moored to
it on both sides. The pier ran north through the mist to the town of
Southend-on-Sea, which ran up and disappeared in the mist covering a slope of
buildings.