Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [146]
There a Nicosia-class tent town called Tharsis Tholus was located on the black flank of its namesake. The town was part of the demimonde: most of its citizens were living ordinary lives in the surface net, but many of them were Bogdanovists, who helped support Bogdanovist refuges in the area, as well as Red sanctuaries in Mareotis and on the Great Escarpment; and they helped other people in the town who had left the net, or been off it since birth. The biggest med clinic in town was Bogdanovist, and served many of the underground.
So they drove right up to the tent, and plugged into its garage, and got out. And soon a little ambulance car came and rushed Sax to the clinic, near the center of town. The rest of them walked down the grassy main street after him, feeling the roominess after all those days in the cars. Art goggled at their open behavior, and Nirgal briefly explained the demimonde to him as they walked to a café with some safe rooms upstairs, across from the clinic.
At the clinic itself they were already at work on Sax. A few hours after their arrival, Nirgal was allowed to clean up and change into sterile clothes, and then to go in to sit with him.
They had him on a ventilator, which was circulating a liquid through his lungs. One could see it in the clear tubes and the mask covering his face, looking like clouded water. It was an awful thing to see, as if they were drowning him. But the liquid was a perfluorocarbon-based mixture, and it transferred to Sax three times as much oxygen as air would have, and flushed out the gunk that had been accumulating in his lungs, and reinflated collapsed airways, and was spiked with a variety of drugs and medicines. The med tech working on Sax explained all this to Nirgal as she worked. “He had a bit of edema, so it’s kind of a paradoxical treatment, but it works.”
And so Nirgal sat, his hand on Sax’s arm, watching the fluid inside the mask that was taped to Sax’s lower face, swirling in and out of him. “It’s like he’s back in an ectogene tank,” Nirgal said.
“Or,” the med tech said, looking at him curiously, “in the womb.”
“Yes. Being reborn. He doesn’t even look the same.”
“Keep that hand on him,” the tech advised, and went away. Nirgal sat and tried to feel how Sax was doing, tried to feel that vitality struggling in its own processes, swimming back up into the world. Sax’s temperature fluctuated in alarming little swoops and dives. Other medical people came in and held instruments against Sax’s head and face, talking among themselves in low voices. “Some damage. Anterior, left side. We’ll see.”
The same tech came in a few nights later when Nirgal was there, and said, “Hold his head, Nirgal. Left side, around the ear. Just above it, yeah. Hold it there and . . . yeah, like that. Now do what you do.”
“What?”
“You know. Send heat into him.” And she left hastily, as if embarrassed to have made such a suggestion, or frightened.
Nirgal sat and collected himself. He located the fire within, and tried running some of it into his hand, and across into Sax. Heat, heat, a tentative jolt of whiteness, sent into the injured green . . . then feeling again, trying to read the heat of Sax’s head.
Days passed, and Nirgal spent most of them at the clinic. One night he was coming back from the kitchens when the young tech came running down the hall to him, grabbing him by the arm and saying, “Come on, come on,” and the next thing he knew he was down in the room, holding Sax’s head, his breath short and all his muscles like wires. There were three doctors in there and some more techs. One doctor put out an arm toward Nirgal, and the young tech stepped in between them.
He felt something inside Sax stir, as if going away, or coming back— some passage. He poured into Sax every bit of viriditas he could muster, suddenly terrified, stricken with memories of the clinic in Zygote, of sitting with Simon. That look on Simon’s face, the night he died.