Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [87]
“You’ll do better in Europe,” Maya told him.
Nirgal thought about the reception they had gotten. “They love you here,” he said. Overwhelmed as he had been, he had still noticed that the welcome of the duglas had been as enthusiastic for the other three ambassadors as for him; and Maya had been particularly cherished.
“They’re happy we survived,” Maya said, dismissing it. “We came back from the dead as far as they’re concerned, like magic. They thought we were dead, do you see? From sixty-one until just last year, they thought all the First Hundred were dead. Sixty-seven years! And all that time part of them was dead too. To have us come back like we have, and in this flood, with everything changing— yes. It’s like a myth. The return from underground.”
“But not all of you.”
“No.” She almost smiled. “They still have to sort that out. They think Frank is alive, and Arkady— and John too, even though John was killed years before sixty-one, and everyone knew it! For a while, anyway. But people are forgetting things. That was a long time ago. And so much has happened since. And people want John Boone to be alive. And so they forget Nicosia, and say that he is part of the underground still.” She laughed shortly, unsettled by this.
“Like with Hiroko,” Nirgal said, feeling his throat constrict. A wave of sadness like the one in Trinidad washed through him, leaving him bleached and aching. He believed, he had always believed, that Hiroko was alive, and hiding with her people somewhere in the southern highlands. This was how he had coped with the shock of the news of her disappearance— by being quite certain that she had slipped out of Sabishii, and would show up again when she felt the time was right. He had been sure of it. Now, for some reason he could not tell, he was no longer sure.
In the seat on the other side of Maya, Michel sat with a pinched expression on his face. Suddenly Nirgal felt like he was looking in a mirror; he knew his face held the same expression, he could feel it in his muscles. He and Michel both had doubts— perhaps about Hiroko, perhaps about other things. No way of telling. Michel did not seem inclined to speak.
And from across the plane Sax watched them both, with his usual birdlike gaze.
• • •
They dropped out of the sky paralleling the great north wall of the Alps, and landed on a runway among green fields. They were escorted through a cool Marslike building, downstairs and onto a train, which slid metallically up and out of the building, and across green fields; and in an hour they were in Bern.
In Bern the streets were mobbed by diplomats and reporters, everyone with an ID badge on their chest, everyone with a mission to speak to them. The city was small and pristine and rock solid: the feeling of gathered power was palpable. Narrow stone-flagged streets were flanked by thickly arcaded stone buildings, everything as permanent as a mountain, with the swift river Aare S-ing through it, holding the main part of town in one big oxbow. The people crowding that quarter were mostly Europeans: meticulous-looking white people, not as short as most Terrans, milling around absorbed in their talk, and always a good number of them clustering around the Martians and their escorts, who now were blue-uniformed Swiss military police.
Nirgal and Sax and Michel and Maya were given rooms in the Praxis headquarters, in a small stone building just above the Aare River. It amazed Nirgal how close to water the Swiss were willing to build; a rise in the river of even two meters would spell disaster, but they did not care; apparently they had the river under control that tight, even though it came out of the steepest mountain range Nirgal had ever seen! Terraforming, indeed; it was no wonder the Swiss were good on Mars.
The Praxis building was just a few streets