Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [363]
waves were breaking completely over the final cape into the sea beyond. So every time we rose up the gigantic face of each wave, the pilot of the Ascension turned the township south, and it slid across the face of the wave for some distance before losing the crest and falling back into the next trough. On each wave we moved a little faster and farther, for as we approached the point of the island the wave faces grew steeper and bigger. The very tip of the point curves off to the east, so that the waves were breaking left to right as we looked ahead, crashing onto the rocks and then onto the reef offshore. On our final wave the Ascension was pitched down the steep face of the wave. At the bottom of the face the pilot turned the township right, and the great raft made the cut at the bottom and drifted back up onto the face, moving across it at a speed we could not calculate. It was like flying. Yes— we were surfing a hundred-meter-high wave, on a raft as big as a village, just over the rocks of the reef below. For a second we flew in the tube of the breaking wave. Then we were out, onto the shoulder of the wave, which was back in deep water, and no longer breaking. And so we passed the island. So the doctor says, how do you know? How? So pretty. Yes, it was a moment to remember. I’m going to take my fund and retire, it just ain’t the same anymore. These people are thugs. Heard she went out on one of those starships, that’s what I heard. You really saw her? You got to get you a better translator, I did not say Never mind doctor I am feeling better. What the hell kind of machine. Waiter! Villages just like the ones back home, except no caste. If they want caste they have to carry it in their heads. Some issei try but the nisei go feral. The way I heard it is that the little red people finally got sick of all our nonsense, and they were hot to do something having recently domesticated the red ant, and they started this whole campaign so that they could come charging to the rescue when the Terrans invaded. You might think they were being overconfident, but you have to remember that the biomass of red ants on this planet is closing in on a meter thick if averaged, so much biomass they’re going to throw us out of orbit they should try ants on Mercury, and every ant has a whole tribe of the little people riding around on it in howdah cities or whatever, and so they weren’t so overconfident after all. There’s strength in numbers. So they deliberately made the government act stupid to spark this confrontation. I wondered what excuse those fools had, they need an excuse, why it is that people go to Mangala and immediately turn into rapacious corrupt morons, it’s a mystery to me. Went down for us. Why is it always the little red people, whatever happened to Big Man, I hate these little red people and their twee little folktales, if you’re going to be so stupid as to tell folktales at all, the truth being much more interesting, then at least they could be big tall tales, Titans and Gorgons duking it out with spiral galaxies like razor-edged boomerangs, zip, zip, zip! Hey watch it there, slow down, guy, slow down. Waiter, get this motormouth some kava, will you? He needs to mellow. Be calm, agitated sir. Be calm. Throwing nova bombs back and forth! Boom! Kapow! KA BOOM! Hey! Hey! Calm oneself oh agitated one. I’m sick of these little people. Get your hands off me. It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power. I told them to stick with tents, no global government, so there wouldn’t be so much power to suck, but did they listen to me? They did not. You told them. Yeah I told them, I was there. Nirgal, sure. Nirgal and I go way back. What do you mean, honored old one, are you not the Stowaway? Why yes, I am. So you are Nirgal’s father, you should go way back as you say. Yeah well in Zygote it didn’t always work that way. I tell you that bitch pulled the wool over your eyes your whole life if you let her. Have you living in a closet for years on end. Ah come on, you’re