Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [152]
“Here, have some yourself,” Nirgal told him. “Everyone needs to join the toast, that’s the way they do it.”
Art took a sip from his cup, looking dubious at the liquid, which was blacker than coffee, and foul-smelling. He shuddered. “It’s like coffee with licorice mixed into it. Poisoned licorice.”
Vijjika laughed. “It’s kavajava,” she said, “a mixture of kava and coffee. Very strong and it tastes like hell. And hard to come by. But don’t give up on it. If you can get a cup down you’ll find it’s worth it.”
“If you say so.” Manfully he downed another swallow, shuddering again. “Horrible!”
“Yes. But we like it. Some people just extract the kavain from the kava, but I don’t think that’s right. Rituals should have some unpleasantness, or you don’t appreciate them properly.”
“Hmm,” Art said. Nirgal and Vijjika watched him. “I’m in a refuge of the Martian underground,” he said after a while. “Getting high on some weird awful drug, in the company of some of the most famous lost members of the First Hundred. As well as young natives never known to Earth.”
“It’s working,” Vijjika observed.
Coyote was talking to a woman, who, though sitting in the lotus position on one of the pillows, was just below his eye level as he stood before her. “Sure I’d like to have romaine lettuce seeds,” the woman said. “But you have to take fair for something so valuable.”
“They’re not that valuable,” Coyote said in his plausible style. “You’re already giving us more nitrogen than we can burn.”
“Sure, but you have to get nitrogen before you can give it.”
“I know that.”
“Get before you give, and give before you burn. And here we’ve found this enormous vein of sodium nitrate, it’s pure caliche blanco, and these badlands are stuffed with it. It looks like there’s a band of it between the tuff and the lava, about three meters thick and extending, well, we don’t even know how far yet. It’s a huge amount of nitrogen, and we’ve got to get rid of it.”
“Fine, fine,” Coyote said, “but that’s no reason to start potlatching on us.”
“We’re not potlatching. You’re going to burn eighty percent of what we give you—”
“Seventy.”
“Oh yeah, seventy, and then we’ll have these seeds, and we’ll finally be able to eat decent salads with our meals.”
“If you can get them to grow. Lettuce is delicate.”
“We’ll have all the fertilizer we need.”
Coyote laughed. “I guess so. But it’s still out of whack. Tell you what, we’ll give you the coordinates for one of those trucks of uranium we sent off into Ceraunius.”
“Talk about potlatching!”
“No no, because there’s no guarantee that you’ll be able to recover the stuff. But you’ll know where it is, and if you do recover it, then you can just burn another picobar of nitrogen, and we’ll be even. How about that?”
“It still seems like too much to me.”
“You’re going to be feeling like that all the time with this caliche blanco you’ve found. There’s really that much of it?”
“Tons of it. Millions of tons of it. These badlands are layered through and through with it.”
“All right, maybe we can get some hydrogen peroxide from you too. We’re going to need the fuel for the trip south.”
Art leaned toward them as if pulled by a magnet. “What’s caliche blanco?”
“It’s nearly pure sodium nitrate,” the woman said. She described the areology of the region. Rhyolitic tuff— the light-colored rock surrounding them— had been overlaid by the dark andesite lava that roofed the tableland. Erosion had carved the tuff wherever cracks in the andesite exposed it, forming the tunnel-bottomed ravines, and also revealing great seams of caliche, trapped between the two layers. “The caliche is loose rock and dust, cemented together with salts and the sodium nitrates.”
“Microorganisms must have laid