Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [158]
Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. “Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. “I’m afraid his interrogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”
“There’s such a thing as fluent aphasia?” Coyote said.
“Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can’t read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”
Sax nodded, as if to confirm the description.
“In fluent aphasia the subjects talk at great length, but are unaware that what they’re saying makes no sense.”
Art said, “I know a lot of people with that problem.”
Spencer ignored him. “We’ve got to get Sax down to Vlad and Ursula and Michel.”
“That’s what we’re doing.” Coyote gave Sax a squeeze on the arm before retiring to his mat.
• • •
On the fifth night after leaving the Bogdanovists, they approached the equator, and the double barrier of the fallen elevator cable. Coyote had passed the barrier in this region before, using a glacier formed by one of the aquifer outbursts of 2061, in Mangala Vallis. During the unrest water and ice had poured down the old arroyo for a hundred and fifty kilometers, and the glacier left behind when the flood froze had buried both passes of the fallen cable, at 152° longitude. Coyote had located a route over an unusually smooth stretch of this glacier, which had taken him across the two passes of the cable.
Unfortunately, when they approached Mangala Glacier— a long tumbled mass of gravel-covered brown ice, filling the bottom of a narrow valley— they found that it had changed since Coyote had last been there. “Where’s that rampway?” he kept demanding. “It was right here.”
Sax croaked, then made kneading motions with his hands, staring all the while through the windshield at the glacier.
Nirgal had a difficult time comprehending the glacier’s surface; it was a kind of visual static, all patches of dirty white and gray and black and tan, tumbled together until it was hard to distinguish size, shape, or distance. “Maybe it isn’t the same place,” he suggested.
“I can tell,” Coyote said.
“Are you sure?”
“I left markers. See, there’s one there. That trail duck on the lateral moraine. But beyond it should be a rampway up onto smooth ice, and it’s nothing but a wall of icebergs. Shit. I’ve been using this trail for ten years.”
“You’re lucky you had it that long,” Spencer said. “They’re slower than Terran glaciers, but they still flow downhill.”
Coyote only grunted. Sax croaked, then tapped at the inner lock door. He wanted to go outside.
“Might as well,” Coyote muttered, looking at a map on the screen. “We’ll have to spend the day here anyway.”
So in the predawn light Sax wandered the rubble plowed up by the glacier’s passage: a little upright creature with a light shining out of his helmet, like some deep-sea fish poking about for food. Something in the sight made Nirgal’s throat tighten, and he suited up and went outside to keep the old man company.
He wandered through the lovely chill gray morning, stepping from rock to rock, following Sax in his winding course through the moraine. Illuminated one by one in the cone of Sax’s headlamp were eldritch little worlds, the dunes and boulders interspersed with spiky low plants, filling cracks and hollows under rocks. Everything was gray, but the grays of the plants were shaded olive or khaki or brown, with occasional light spots, which were flowers— no doubt colorful in the sun,