Blue Mars (53 page)

In the early dawn he woke suddenly
. He sat against the wail of his platform,
surprised that the whole evening had not turned out to be a dream. He looked
over the edge; the ground was far, far below. It was like being in the crow’s
nest of an enormous ship; it reminded him of his high bamboo room in Zygote,
but everything here was vastly bigger, the starry dome of the sky, the
horizon’s distant jagged black line. All the land was a rumpled dark blanket,
with the water of the reservoir a squiggle of silver inlaid into it.

He made his way down the stairs; four hundred of them. The tree
was perhaps 150 meters tall, standing over the 150-meter drop of the canyon
cliff. In the presunrise light he looked down on the wall over which they had
tried to drive the antelope, saw the ravine they had crashed down, the clear
dam, the mass of water behind it.

He went back to the henge. A few of the hunters were up, coaxing
the fire back to life, shivering in the dawn chill. Nirgal asked them if they
were moving on that day. They were; north through the Juventa Chaos, then on
toward the southwest shore of the Chryse Gulf. After that they didn’t know.

Nirgal asked if he could join them for a while. They looked
surprised; surveyed him; spoke among themselves in a language he didn’t
recognize. While they talked, Nirgal wondered that he had asked. He wanted to
see the diana again, yes. But it was more than that. Nothing in his lung-gom-pa
had been like that last half hour of the hunt. Of course the running had set
the stage for the experience— the hunger, the weariness—but then it had
happened, something new. Snowy forest floor, the pursuit through the primeval
trees—the dash down the ravine—the scene under the dam....

The early risers were nodding at him. He could come along.

All that day they hiked north, threading a complicated path
through the Juventa Chaos. That evening they came to a small mesa, its whole
cap covered by an apple orchard. A ramp road led the way up to this grove. The
trees had been pruned to the shape of cocktail glasses, and now new shoots rose
straight up from the gnarled older branches. Through the afternoon they pulled
ladders around from tree to tree, pruning the thin shoots away and thereby
harvesting some hard, tart, unripe little apples, which they saved.

In the center of the grove was a open-walled round-roofed
structure. A disk house, they called it. Nirgal walked through it, admiring the
design. The foundation was a round slab of concrete, polished to a finish like
marble. The roof was also round, held up by a simple T of interior walls, a
diameter and a radius. In the open semicircle were kitchen and living space; on
the other side, bedrooms and bathroom. The circumference, now open to the air,
could be closed off in inclement weather by clear walls of tenting material,
drawn around the circle like drapes.

There were disk houses all over Lunae, the woman who had butchered
the antelope told Nirgal. Other groups used the same set of houses, tending the
orchards when they passed through. They were all part of a loose co-op, working
out a nomad life, with some agriculture, some hunting, some gathering. Now one
group was cooking down the little apples, making applesauce for preservation;
others were grilling antelope steaks over a fire outside, or working in a
smokehouse.

Two round baths right next to the disk house were now steaming,
and some of the group were shedding their clothes and hopping into the smaller
bath, to clean up before supper. They were very dirty; they had been in the
back country a long time. Nirgal followed the woman (her hands still spotted
with dried blood) and joined them in the bath, the hot water like another
world, like the heat of the fire transmuted to liquid that one could touch, in
which one could immerse one’s body.

They woke at dawn and lazed around a fire, brewing coffee and
kava, talking, stitching clothes, working around the disk house. After a while
they gathered their few traveling possessions and killed the fire and moved
out. Everyone carried a backpack or waistpack, but most of them traveled as
lightly as Nirgal or more so, with nothing but thin sleeping rolls and some
food, and a few with spears or bows and arrows slung over a shoulder. They
walked hard through the morning, then split into smaller groups to gather pine
nuts, acorns, meadow onions, wild corn; or hunt for marmots or rabbits or
frogs, or perhaps larger game. They were lean people; their ribs showed, their
faces were thin. We like to stay a little hungry, the woman told him. It makes
the food taste better. And indeed every night of this extended walk Nirgal
bolted his food as during his runs, shaky and ravenous; and everything tasted
like ambrosia. They walked a long distance every day, and during their big
hunts they often ended up in terrain that would have been a disaster to run in,
terrain so rough that it was often four or five days before they all managed to
find each other again, at the next disk house in its orchard. Since Nirgal
didn’t know where these were, he had to stick close to one or another of the
group. Once they had him take the four children in the group on an easier route
across Lunae Planum’s cratered terrain, and the children told him what
direction to take every time they had to make a choice; and they were the first
to reach the next disk house. The kids loved it. Often they were consulted by
the larger group as to when they should leave a disk house. “Hey you kids, is
it time to go?” They would answer yes or no very firmly within seconds, in
concert. Once two adults got in a fight and afterward they had to present their
cases to the four kids, who decided against one of them. The butcher woman
explained to Nirgal: “We teach them, they judge us. They’re hard but fair.”

They harvested some of the yield of the orchards: peaches, pears,
apricots, apples. If a crop was getting overripe they harvested everything and
cooked it down and bottled it as sauces or chutneys, leaving it in big pantries
under the disk houses for other groups, or for themselves on their next time
through. Then they were off again, north over Lunae until it fell down the
Great Escarpment, here very dramatically, dropping from Lunae’s high plateau
five thousand meters down to the Chryse Gulf, in only just over a hundred
horizontal kilometers.

The way was difficult across this tilted country, the land ripped
and corrugated by a million small deformations. No trails had been constructed
here, and there was no good way through; it was up and down and over and back
and up and down again; and nothing much to hunt; and no disk houses nearby; and
not much food to be found. And one of the youngsters slipped while they were crossing
a line of coral cactus, seaming the land like a living barbed-wire fence, and
he fell on one knee into a nest of spines. The magnesium poles served then as a
stretcher frame, and on they went north carrying the crying boy, the best
hunters out on the flanks of the group with bows and arrows, to see- if they
could shoot anything flushed by their passage. Nirgal saw several misses, then
one long flight of an arrow that hit a running jackrabbit, which tumbled and
flopped until they killed it—a tremendous shot, it had them all leaping around
shrieking. They burned more calories celebrating the shot than they ever got
back from eating the tiny shreds of rabbit meat that were each person’s share,
and the butcher woman was contemptuous. “Ritual cannibalism of our rodent
brother,” she scoffed as she ate her shred. “Don’t ever tell me there’s no such
thing as luck.” But the hothead spear thrower just laughed at her, and the
others seemed cheered by their mouthful of meat.

Then later that same day they came on a young caribou bull, off on
his own, looking disoriented. Their food problems were solved, if they could
catch him. But he was wary despite his confused air, and he kept beyond the
reach of even the longest bow shot, heading away from the group, down the Great
Escarpment with all the hunters in view on the slope above.

Eventually everyone got on their hands and knees, and began to
crawl laboriously over the hot rock of midday, trying to traverse quick enough
to circle the caribou. But the wind blew from behind them, and the caribou
moved skittishly downslope or traversed north, grazing as he went, and looking
back at his pursuers more and more curiously, as if wondering why they
continued with such a charade. Nirgal too began to wonder. And apparently he was
not alone; the caribou’s skepticism had infected them. A variety of subtle and
not-so-subtle whistles filled the air, in what was evidently an argument over
strategy. Nirgal understood then that hunting was hard, that the group failed
often. That they were perhaps not very good at it. Everyone was baking on the
rock, and they had not eaten properly for a couple of days. Part of life for
these people; but today too miserable to be fun.

Then as they continued, the horizon below them to the east seemed
to double: Chryse Gulf, gleaming blue and flat, still far below. As they
continued to follow the caribou downslope, the sea covered more and more of
their view of the globe; the Great Escarpment pitched so steeply here that even
Mars’s tight curvature did not bend fast enough to hide the long view, and they
could see out over Chryse Gulf for many kilometers. The sea, the blue sea!

Perhaps they could trap the caribou against the water. But now he
was trending north, traversing the slope of the escarpment. They crawled after
him, over a little ridge, and suddenly had a good view down to the coastline:
fringe of green forest flanking the water, small whitewashed buildings under
the trees. A white lighthouse on a bluff.

As they continued north a turn in the coast hove over the horizon.
Just beyond the point of the turn lay a seaside town, banked around a half-moon
bay on the southern side of what they now saw was a strait, or more accurately
a fjord, for across a narrow passage of water rose a wall even steeper than the
slope they were on: three thousand meters of red rock rearing out of the sea,
the giant cliff like the edge of a continent, its horizontal bands cut deep by
a billion years of wind. Nirgal realized suddenly where they were; that massive
cliff was the sea-facing escarpment of the Shar-anov Peninsula, and the fjord
therefore Kasei Fjord, and the harbor town therefore Nilokeras. They had come a
long way.

The whistles between the hunters got very noisy and expressive.
About half the group sat up—a crop of heads, sticking out over a field of
stones, looking at each other as if an idea had struck them all at once—and
then they stood and walked down the slope toward the town, abandoning the hunt
and leaving the caribou heedlessly munching. After a while they skipped and
hopped downslope, hooting and laughing, leaving the stretcher bearers and the
injured boy behind.

They waited lower down, however, under tall Hokkaido pines on the
outskirts of the town. When the stretcher group caught up, they descended
through the pines arjd orchards together, into the upper streets of the town. A
loud gang, passing fine window-fronted houses overlooking the crowded harbor,
straight to a medical clinic, as if they knew where they were going. They
dropped off the injured youth and then went to some public baths; and after a
quick bath they went to the curve of businesses backing the docks, and invaded
three or four adjacent restaurants with tables out under umbrellas, and strings
of bare incandescent light-bulbs. Nirgal sat at a table with the youngsters, in
a seafood restaurant; after a while the injured boy joined them, knee and calf
wrapped, and they all ate and drank in huge quantities—shrimp, clams, mussels,
trout, fresh bread, cheeses, peasant salad, liters of water, wine, ouzo—all in
such excess that they staggered away when they were done, drunk, their stomachs
taut as drums.

Some went immediately to what the butcher woman called their usual
hostel, to lie down or throw up. The rest limped on past the building to a
nearby park, where a performance of Tyndall’s opera Phyllis Boyle was to be
followed by a dance.

Nirgal lay sprawled on the grass with the park contingent, out at
the back of the audience. Like the rest he was awed by the facility of the
singers, the sheer lushness of orchestral sound as Tyndall used it. When the
opera was done some of the group had digested their feast enough to dance, and
Nirgal joined them, and after an hour of dancing joined the band as well, with
many other audience sit-ins; and he drummed away until his whole body was
humming like the magnesium of the pans.

But he had eaten too much, and when some of the group returned to
the hostel, he decided to go back with them. On their way back, some passersby
said something—”Look at the ferals,” or something like that—and the spear
thrower howled, and just like that he and some of the young hunters had pushed
the passersby against a wall, shoving them and shouting abuse: “Watch your
mouth or we’ll beat the shit out of you,” Spear Thrower shouted happily, “you
caged rats, you drug addicts, you sleepwalkers, you fucking earthworms, you
think you can take drugs and get what we get, we’ll kick your ass and then
you’ll feel some real feeling, you’ll see what we mean,” and then Nirgal was
pulling him back, saying “Come on, come on, don’t make trouble,” and the
passersby were on them with a roar, hard-fisted and -footed men who were not
drunk and were not amused, the young hunters had to retreat, then let
themselves be pulled away by Nirgal when the passersby were satisfied at having
driven them off; still shouting abuse, staggering up the street, holding their
bruises, laughing and snarling, completely full of themselves, “Fucking
sleepwalkers, wrapped in your gift boxes, we’ll kick your ass! Kick your ass
right out of your dollhouse into the drink! Stupid sheep that you are!”