Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [219]
Only when he was successfully on the canyon floor did Nirgal look up again, to see that the canyon was filled by the forest he had barely seen from above. Trees stood high over a needle-strewn floor of old snow, big fir and pine, and then, upcanyon to the south, the unmistakably massive trunks of giant sequoias, big trees, trees so huge that the canyon suddenly seemed shallow, though the descent of the ravine had taken quite a while. These were the treetops that had stuck up over the canyon rim; engineered giant sequoias two hundred meters tall, towering like great silent saints, each one extending its arms in a broad circle over daughter trees, the fir and pine, the thin patchy snow and the brown needle beds.
The antelope had trotted upcanyon into this primeval forest, headed south, and with a few happy hoots the hunters followed them, darting past one huge trunk after another. The massive cylinders of riven red bark dwarfed everything else— they all looked like little animals, like mice, dashing over a snowy forest floor in the failing light. Nirgal’s skin tingled down his back and flanks, he was still adrenalated from the descent of the ravine, panting and light-headed. It was obvious that they could not catch the antelope, he didn’t understand what they were doing. Nevertheless he raced between the stupendous trees, following the lead hunters. The chase itself was all he wanted.
Then the sequoia towers became more scattered, as at the edge of a skyscraper district, until there were only a few left. And looking between the trunks of the last of the behemoths, Nirgal again hauled up short: on the other side of a narrow clearing, the canyon was blocked off by a wall of water. A sheer wall of water, filling the canyon right to the rim, hanging suspended over them in a smooth transparent mass.
Reservoir dam. Recently they had begun building them out of transparent sheets of diamond lattice, sunk in a concrete foundation; Nirgal could see this one running down both canyon walls and across the canyon floor, a thick white line.
The mass of water stood over them like the side of a great aquarium, turbid near the bottom, weeds floating in dark mud. Above them silver fish as big as the antelope flitted next to the clear wall, then receded into dark crystalline depths.
The three antelope pronged nervously back and forth before this barrier, the doe and fawn following the quick turns of the buck. As the hunters closed on them, the buck suddenly leaped away and crashed its head against the dam with a powerful thrust of its whole body— antlers like bone knives, thwack— Nirgal froze in fear, everyone froze at this violent gesture, so ferocious as to be human; but the buck bounced away, staggered. He turned and charged at them. Bola balls spun through the air and the line wrapped around his legs just above the hocks, and he crashed forward and down. Some of the hunters swarmed on him, others brought down doe and fawn in a hail of rocks and spears. A squeal cut off abruptly. Nirgal saw the doe’s throat cut with an obsidian-bladed dagger, the blood pouring onto the sand next to the foundation of the dam. The big fish flashed by overhead, looking down at them.
The woman with the green scarf was nowhere to be seen. Another hunter, a man wearing only necklaces, tilted his head back and howled, shattering