Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [162]
Every day they woke to an alarm set for an hour before sunset, and spent the last light of day eating a spare breakfast, and watching the garish alpenglow colors spread with the shadows over the rugged landscape. Then every night they drove, without ever being able to use the autopilot, navigating the broken terrain kilometer by kilometer. Nirgal and Art took the graveyard shift together on most nights, and continued their long conversations. Then as the stars faded, and dawn’s pure violet light stained the eastern sky, they found places where the boulder car would be inconspicuous— in this latitude the work of a moment, almost just a matter of stopping, as Art said— and ate a leisurely supper, watching the sharp blast of sunrise and its sudden creation of great fields of shadow. A couple of hours later, after a planning session, and occasional trips out, they would darken the windshield, and sleep through the day.
At the end of another long night’s conversation about their respective childhoods, Nirgal said, “I suppose it wasn’t until Sabishii that I realized that Zygote was . . .”
“Unusual?” Coyote said from his sleeping mat behind them. “Unique? Bizarre? Hirokolike?”
Nirgal was not surprised to discover that Coyote was awake; the old man slept poorly, and often muttered a dreamy commentary to Nirgal and Art’s narrative, which they generally ignored, as he was mostly asleep. But now Nirgal said, “Zygote reflects Hiroko, I think. She’s very inward.”
“Ha,” Coyote said. “She didn’t use to be.”
“When was that?” Art pounced, swiveling in his chair to include Coyote in their little circle of talk.
“Oh, back before the beginning,” Coyote said. “In prehistoric times, back on Earth.”
“Is that when you met her?”
Coyote grunted affirmatively.
This was where he always stopped, when he was talking to Nirgal. But now with Art there, with just the three of them awake in all the world, in a little circle lit by the infrared imager, Coyote’s thin crooked face had a different expression than its usual mulish dismissal, and Art leaned over him and said firmly, “So just how did you get to Mars, anyway?”
“Oh God,” Coyote said, and rolled onto his side, propping his head up on one hand. “It’s hard to remember something that long ago. It’s almost like an epic poem I memorized once, and can barely recite anymore.”
He glanced up at them, then closed his eyes, as if recalling the opening lines. The two younger men stared down at him, waiting.
“It was all due to Hiroko, of course. She and I were friends. We met young, when we were students at Cambridge. We were both cold in England, so we warmed each other. This was before she met Iwao, and long before she became the great mother goddess of the world. And back then we shared a lot of things. We were outsiders at Cambridge, and we were good at the work. And so we lived together for a couple of years there. Very much like what Nirgal has been saying about Sabishii. Even what he said about Jackie. Although Hiroko . . .”
He closed his eyes, as if trying to see it in his mind.
“You stayed together?” Art asked.
“No. She went back to Japan, and I went with her for a while, but I had to go back to Tobago when my father died. So things changed. But she and I stayed in touch, and met at scientific conferences, and when we met we fought, or promised to love each other forever. Or both. We didn’t know what we wanted. Or how we could get it,