Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [122]
“I talked with two of the people who were on it, yeah. One night in Burroughs at the Pingo Bar, in fact. You couldn’t get them to shut up about it.”
“Did anything happen near the end of their flight?”
“The end? Well, yeah— someone died. I guess some woman got a hand crushed when they were evacuating Clarke, and Phyllis was the closest thing they had to a doctor, so Phyllis took care of her through the whole trip, and thought she was going to make it, but I guess they ran out of something, the two telling me the story weren’t too clear on it, and she took a turn for the worse. Phyllis called a prayer meeting for her and prayed for her, but she died anyway, a couple of days before they came into the Terran system.”
“Ah,” Sax said. Then: “Phyllis doesn’t seem all that . . . religious anymore.”
Desmond snorted. “She was never religious, if you ask me. Hers was the religion of business. You visit real Christians like the folks down in Christianopolis, or Bingen, and you don’t find them talking profits at breakfast, and lording it over you with that horrible unctuous righteousness they have. Righteousness, good Lord— it is a most unpleasant quality in a person. You know it has to be a house built on sand, eh? But the demimonde Christians are not like that. They’re gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha’i Rastafarians, whatever— the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I’ve traded with everybody. So helpful. And no airs about being best friends with Jesus. They’re tight with Hiroko, and the Sufis as well. Some kind of mystic networking going on down there.” He cackled. “But Phyllis, now, and all those business fundamentalists— using religion to cover extortion, I hate that. Actually I never heard Phyllis speak in a religious manner after we landed.”
“Did you have much opportunity to hear Phyllis speak after we landed?”
Another laugh. “More than you might think! I saw more than you did in those years, Mister Lab Man! I had my little hidey-holes everywhere.”
Sax made a skeptical noise, and Desmond shouted a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder. “Who else could tell you that you and Hiroko were an item in the Underhill years, eh?”
“Hmm.”
“Oh yes, I saw a lot. Of course you could make that particular observation about practically any man in Underhill and be right. That vixen was keeping us all as a harem.”
“Polyandry?”
“Two-timing, goddammit! Or twenty-timing.”
“Hmm.”
Desmond laughed at him.
• • •
Just after dawn they caught sight of a white column of smoke, obscuring the stars over a whole quadrant of the sky. For a while this dense cloud was the only anomaly they could see in the landscape. Then, as they flew on and the terminator of the planet rolled under them, a broad swath of bright ground appeared on the eastern horizon ahead— an orange strip, or trough, running roughly northeast to southwest across the land, obscured by smoke that poured out of one section of it. The trough under the smoke was white and turbulent, as if a small volcanic eruption were confined to that one spot. Above it stood a beam of light— a beam of illuminated smoke, rather, so tight and solid that it was like a physical pillar, extending straight up and becoming less distinct as the cloud smoke thinned, and disappearing where the smoke reached its maximum height of around ten thousand meters.
At first there was no sign of the origin of this beam in the sky— the aerial lens was some four hundred kilometers overhead, after all. Then Sax thought he saw something like the ghost of a cloud, soaring very far above. Maybe that was it, maybe it wasn’t. Desmond wasn’t sure.
At the foot of the pillar of light, however, there was no question of visibility— the pillar of light had a kind of biblical presence, and the melted rock under it was truly incandescent, a very brilliant white. That was what 5000Âdeg;K looked like, exposed to the open air. “We have to be careful,” Desmond said. “We fly into that beam and it would be like a moth in a flame.”
“I’m sure the smoke is very turbulent as well.”
“Yes. I plan to stay windward