Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [222]
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