Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [147]
The perfluorocarbon swirled. The overlit room hummed. The doctors worked at the machines and over Sax’s body, glancing at each other, at Nirgal. The word why became nothing but a sound, a kind of prayer. An hour passed and then more hours, slow and anxious, until they fell into a kind of timeless state, and Nirgal couldn’t have said whether it was day or night. Payment for our bodies, he thought. We pay.
• • •
One evening, about a week after their arrival, they pumped Sax’s lungs clear, and took the ventilator off. Sax gasped loudly, then breathed. He was an air-breather again, a mammal. They had repaired his nose, although it was now a different shape, almost as flat as it had been before his cosmetic surgery. His bruises were still spectacular.
About an hour after they took the ventilator off, he regained consciousness. He blinked and blinked. He looked around the room, then looked very closely at Nirgal, clutching his hand hard. But he did not speak. And soon he was asleep.
Nirgal went out into the green streets of the small town, dominated by the cone of Tharsis Tholus, rising in black and rust majesty to the north, like a squat Fuji. He ran in his rhythmic way, around and around the tent wall as he burned off some of his excess energy. Sax and his great unexplainable . . .
In rooms over the café across the street, he found Coyote hobbling restlessly from window to window, muttering and singing wordless calypso tunes. “What’s wrong?” Nirgal said.
Coyote waggled both hands. “Now that Sax is stabilized, we should get out of here. You and Spencer can tend to Sax in the car, while we drive west around Olympus.”
“Okay,” Nirgal said. “When they say Sax is ready.”
Coyote stared at him. “They say you saved him. That you brought him back from the dead.”
Nirgal shook his head, frightened at the very thought. “He never died.”
“I figured. But that’s what they’re saying.” Coyote regarded him thoughtfully. “You’ll have to be careful.
2
They drove by night, contouring around the slope of north Tharsis, Sax propped on the couch in the compartment behind the drivers. Within hours of their departure Coyote said, “I want to hit one of the mining camps run by Subarashii in Ceraunius.” He looked at Sax. “It’s okay with you?”
Sax nodded. His raccoon bruises were now green and purple.
“Why can’t you talk?” Art asked him.
Sax shrugged, croaked once or twice.
They rolled on.
From the bottom of the northern side of the Tharsis bulge there extends an array of parallel canyons called the Ceraunius Fossae. There are as many as forty of these fractures, depending on how you count them, as some of the indentations are canyons, while others are only isolated ridges, or deep cracks, or simply corrugations in the plain— all running north and south, and all cutting into a metallogenic province of great richness, a basalt mass rifted with all kinds of ore intrusions from below. So there were a lot of mining settlements and mobile rigs in these canyons, and now, as he contemplated them on his maps, Coyote rubbed his hands together. “Your capture set me free, Sax. Since they know we’re out here anyway, there’s no reason we shouldn’t put some of them out of business, and grab some uranium while we’re at it.”
So he stopped one night at the southern end of Tractus Catena, the longest and deepest of the canyons. Its beginning was a strange sight— the relatively smooth plain was disrupted by what looked like a ramp that cut into the ground, making a trench about three kilometers wide, and eventually about three hundred