Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [167]
They were almost out of battery power, to the point that the car was slowing down. But Gamete was just a few kilometers clockwise around the polar cap. And so just after dawn, Coyote guided the halting car into the outlying garage in Nadia’s crater rim complex. They walked the last stretch, crunching over new frost in the raw long-shadowed morning light, under the great white overhang of dry ice.
5
Gamete gave Nirgal the same feeling it always did, that he was trying to fit into old clothes that were much too small. But this time Art was there with him, and so the visit had the interest of showing a new friend an old home. Every day Nirgal took him around, explaining features of the place and introducing him to people. As he watched the range of expressions plainly exposed on Art’s face, from surprise to amazement to disbelief, the whole enterprise of Gamete began to strike Nirgal as truly odd. The white ice dome; its winds, mists, birds; the lake; the village, always freezing, weirdly shadowless, its white-and-blue buildings dominated by the crescent of bamboo treehouses . . . it was a strange place. And Art found all of the issei equally amazing; he shook their hands, saying, “I’ve seen you on the vids, very pleased to meet you.” After introductions to Vlad and Ursula, Marina and Iwao, he muttered to Nirgal, “It’s like a wax museum.”
Nirgal took him down to meet Hiroko, and she was her usual benign, distant self, treating Art with about the same reserved friendliness she gave to Nirgal. Mother goddess of the world. . . . They were in her labs, and feeling obscurely annoyed by her, Nirgal took Art by the ectogene tanks, and explained what they were. Art’s eyes went perfectly round when he was surprised, and now they were like big white-and-blue marbles. “They look like refrigerators,” he said, and stared closely at Nirgal. “Was it lonesome?”
Nirgal shrugged, looked down at the small clear windows, like portholes. Once he had floated in there, dreaming and kicking. . . . It was hard to imagine the past, hard to believe in it. For billions of years he had not existed, and then one day, inside this little black box . . . a sudden appearance, green in the white, white in the green.
“It’s so cold here,” Art remarked when they went back outside. He was wearing a big borrowed fiberfill coat, with the hood over his head.
“We have to keep a water ice layer coating the dry ice, so the air stays good. So it’s always a little under freezing, but not much. I like it myself. It strikes me as the best temperature of all.”
“Childhood.”
“Yeah.”
• • •
They visited Sax every day, and he would croak “Hello” or “Good-bye” in greeting, and try his best to talk. Michel was spending several hours a day working with him. “It’s definitely aphasia,” he told them. “Vlad and Ursula did a scan, and the damage is in the left anterior speech center. Nonfluent aphasia, sometimes called Broca’s aphasia. He has trouble finding the word, and sometimes he thinks he’s got it, but what comes out will be synonyms, or antonyms, or taboo words. You should hear the way he can say Bad results. It’s frustrating for him, but improvement from this particular injury is often good. Slow, however. Essentially, other parts of the brain have to learn to take over the functions of the damaged part. So— we work on it. It’s nice when it goes well. And it could be worse, obviously.”
Sax, who had been staring at them through this, nodded quizzically. He said, “I want to teach. To speech.”
• • •
Of all the people in Gamete to whom Nirgal introduced Art, the one Art hit it off with best was Nadia. They were drawn to each other instantly, to Nirgal’s surprise. But it pleased him to see it, and he watched his old teacher fondly as she made her own kind of confession in response to Art’s question barrage, her face looking very ancient except for her startling light brown eyes, with the green flecks around the pupil— eyes that radiated friendly interest and intelligence, and amusement at Art’s interrogation.
The three of them ended up spending