Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [96]
So he was feeling very benevolent toward them when he stepped onto the terrace and then burst into the station, where he began immediately steaming; and when he walked over to his group of escorts and the other passengers who were waiting next to the little train, he was beaming so completely, he was so high, that the impatient frowns of the group (he saw that they had been kept waiting) cracked, and they looked at each other and laughed, shaking their heads as if to say to each other, What can you do? You could only grin and let it happen— they had all been young in the high Alps for the first time, one sunny summer day, and had felt that same enthusiasm— they remembered what it was like. And so they shook his hand, they embraced him— they led him onto the little train and got going, for no matter the event, it was not good to keep a train waiting— and once under way they remarked on his hot hands and face, and asked him where he had gone, and told him how many kilometers that was, and how many vertical meters. They passed him a little hip flask of schnapps. And then as the train went by the little side tunnel that ran out onto the north face of the Eiger, they told him the story of the failed rescue attempt of the doomed Nazi climbers, excited, moved that he was so impressed. And after that they settled into the lit compartments of the train, squealing down through its rough granite tunnel.
Nirgal stood at the end of one car, looking out at the dynamited rock as it flashed past, and then as they burst back into sunlight, up at the looming wall of the Eiger overhead. A passenger walked by him on the way to the next car, then stopped and stared: “Amazing to see you here, I must say.” He had a British accent of some kind. “I just ran into your mother last week.”
Confused, Nirgal said, “My mother?”
“Yes, Hiroko Ai. Isn’t that right? She was in England, working with people at the mouth of the Thames. I saw her on my way here. Quite a coincidence running into you too, I must say. Makes me think I’ll start seeing little red men any second now.”
The man laughed at the thought, began to move on into the next car.
“Hey!” Nirgal called. “Wait!”
But the man only paused—”No no,” he said over his shoulder, “didn’t want to intrude— all I know, anyhow. You’ll have to look her up— in Sheerness perhaps—”
And then the train was squealing into the station at Klein Scheidegg, and the man hopped out an opening door in the next car, and as Nirgal went to follow him other people got in the way, and his escorts came to explain to him that he needed to descend to Grindelwald immediately if he wanted to get home that night. Nirgal couldn’t deny them. But looking out the window as they rolled out of the station, he saw the British man who had spoken to him, walking briskly down a trail into the dusky valley below.
3
He landed at a big airport in southern England, and was driven north and east to a town the escorts called Faversham, beyond which the roads and bridges were flooded. He had arranged to come unannounced, and his escort here was a police team that reminded him more of UNTA security units back home than of his Swiss escort: eight men and two women, silent, staring, full of themselves. When they had heard what he wanted to do, they had wanted to hunt for Hiroko by bringing people in to ask about her; Nirgal was sure that would put her in hiding, and he