Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [164]
At that thought he frowned, then pointed a finger at Nirgal. “This is why we will have to come out eventually, and fight in the open. This is why I got you to go to Sabishii.”
“What? You told me I shouldn’t go! You said it would ruin me!”
“That was how I got you to go.”
• • •
They kept up this nocturnal, conversational life for the better part of a week, and at the end of it they approached a small settled region surrounding the mohole that had been dug in the midst of craters Hipparchus, Eudoxus, Ptolemaeus, and Li Fan. There were some uranium mines on the aprons of these craters, but Coyote did not suggest any sabotage attempts, and they drove hard past the Ptolemaic mohole, getting away from the region as quickly as possible. Soon they came to the Thaumasia Fossae, the fifth or sixth big fracture system they had encountered on their trip. Art found this curious, but Spencer explained to him that the Tharsis bulge was surrounded by fracture systems caused by its uplift, and as they were in effect circumnavigating the bulge, they kept running into them. Thaumasia was one of the biggest of these systems, and the location of the large town of Senzeni Na, which had been founded next to another of the 40° latitude moholes, one of the first moholes to be dug, and still one of the deepest. At this point they had been traveling for over two weeks, and they needed to restock at one of Coyote’s caches.
They drove south of Senzeni Na, and near dawn were weaving between rocky ancient hillocks. But when they came to the bottom end of a landslide coming off a low broken scarp, Coyote started cursing. The ground was marked by rover tracks, and a scattering of crushed gas cylinders, food boxes and fuel containers.
They stared at the sight. “Your cache?” Art asked, which provoked another outburst of swearing.
“Who were they?” Art asked. “Police?”
No one answered immediately. Sax went to one of the drivers’ seats to check supply gauges. Coyote continued cursing furiously, plopping meanwhile into the other driver’s seat. Finally he said to Art, “It wasn’t police. Not unless they’ve started using Vishniac rovers. No. These thieves were from the underground, damn them. Probably an outfit I know based in Argyre. I can’t think of anyone else who would do it. But this crowd knows where some of my old caches were, and they’ve been mad at me ever since I sabotaged a mining settlement in the Charitums, because it closed down after that, and they lost their main source of supplies.”
“You folks should try to stay on the same side,” Art said.
“Fuck off,” Coyote advised him.
Coyote started up the boulder car and drove away. “It’s the same old story,” he said bitterly. “The resistance begins fighting itself, because that’s the only thing it can beat. Happens every time. You can’t get any movement larger than five people without including at least one fucking idiot.”
He went on in that vein for quite some time. Finally Sax tapped at one of the gauges, and Coyote said roughly, “I know!”
It was full daylight, and he stopped the car in a cleft between two of the ancient hillocks, and they blacked the windows, and lay in the dark on their narrow mattresses.
“So how many underground groups are there?” Art asked.
“No one knows,” Coyote said.
“You’re kidding.”
Nirgal answered before Coyote started in again. “There’s about forty in the southern hemisphere. And some long-standing disagreements among them are getting nasty. There are some tough groups out there. Radical Reds, Schnelling splinter groups, different kinds of fundamentalists . . . it’s causing trouble.”
“But aren’t you all working for the same thing?”
“I don’t know.” Nirgal recalled all-night arguments in Sabishii, sometimes quite violent, among students who were basically friends. “Maybe not.”
“But haven’t you talked it over?”
“Not in any formal way, no.”
Art looked surprised. “You should do that,” he said.
“Do