Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [37]
They were happy to hear it.
He sat there, barely listening to them babble, wondering why he had spontaneously lied. Somehow he was not comfortable telling them about Hiroko. He assumed that she would want to stay concealed; perhaps that was it. Covering for her. . . .
He assured his associates that he was all right, and got off the phone. He pulled a chair into the kitchen and sat on it. Warmed soup and drank it in loud slurps, scalding his tongue. Frostbitten, scalded, shaky— slightly nauseous— once weeping— mostly stunned— despite all this, he was very, very happy. Sobered by the close call, of course, and embarrassed or even ashamed at his ineptitude, staying out, getting lost and so on— all very sobering indeed— and yet still he was happy. He had survived, and even better, so had Hiroko. Meaning no doubt that all of her group had survived with her, including the half dozen of the First Hundred who had been with her from the beginning, Iwao, Gene, Rya, Raul, Ellen, Evgenia. . . . Sax ran a bath and sat in the warm water, adding hotter water slowly as his body core warmed; and he kept returning to that wonderful realization. A miracle— well not a miracle of course— but it had that quality, of unexpected and undeserved joy.
When he found himself falling asleep in the bath he got out, dried off, limped on sensitive feet to his bed, crawled under the coverlet, and fell asleep, thinking of Hiroko. Of making love with her in the baths in Zygote, in the warm relaxed lubriciousness of their bathhouse trysts, late at night when everyone else was asleep. Of her hand clamped on his wrist, pulling him up. His left wrist was very sore. And that made him happy.
3
The next day he drove back up the great southern slope of Arsia, now covered with clean white snow to an amazingly high altitude, 10.4 kilometers above the datum to be exact. He felt a strange mix of emotions, unprecedented in their strength and flux, although they somewhat resembled the powerful emotions he had felt during the synaptic stimulus treatment he had taken after his stroke— as if sections of his brain were actively growing— the limbic system, perhaps, the home of the emotions, linking up with the cerebral cortex at last. He was alive, Hiroko was alive, Mars was alive; in the face of these joyous facts the possibility of an ice age was as nothing, a momentary swing in a general warming pattern, something like the almost-forgotten Great Storm. Although he did want to do what he could to mitigate it.
Meanwhile, in the human world there were still fierce conflicts going on everywhere, on both worlds. But it seemed to Sax that the crisis had somehow gotten beyond war. Flood, ice age, population boom, social chaos, revolution; perhaps things had gotten so bad that humanity had shifted into some kind of universal catastrophe rescue operation, or, in other words, the first phase of the postcapitalist era.
Or maybe he was just getting overconfident, buoyed by the events on Daedalia Planitia. His Da Vinci associates were certainly very worried, they spent hours onscreen telling him every little thing about the arguments ongoing in east Pavonis. But he had no patience for that. Pavonis was going to become a standing wave of argument, it was obvious. And the Da Vinci crowd, worrying so— that was simply them. At Da Vinci if someone even raised his voice two decibels people worried that things were getting out of control. No. After his experience on Daedalia, these things simply weren’t interesting enough to engage him. Despite the encounter with the storm, or perhaps because of it, he only wanted to get back out into the country. He wanted to see as much of it as he could— to observe the changes wrought by the removal of the mirrors— to talk to various terraforming teams about how to compensate for it. He called Nanao in Sabishii, and asked him if he could come visit and talk it over with the university crowd. Nanao was agreeable.
“Can I bring some of my associates?” Sax asked.
Nanao was agreeable.
And all of a sudden Sax found he had plans, like little Athenas