Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [169]
“Your ex-boss?” Maya said.
“Sure,” Art said with an easy smile. “I’m my own boss now.”
“You could say you are our prisoner,” Maya pointed out sharply.
“When you’re the prisoner of anarchists it’s the same thing, right?”
Nadia and Nirgal laughed, but Maya scowled and turned away.
Nadia said, “I think a meeting would be a good idea. We’ve let Coyote run the network for too long.”
“I heard that!” Coyote called from the next table.
“Don’t you like the idea?” Nadia asked him.
Coyote shrugged. “We have to do something, no doubt of that. They know we’re down here now.”
This caused a thoughtful silence.
“I’m going north next week,” Nadia said to Art. “You can come with me if you like— Nirgal, you too if you want. I’m going to drop in on a lot of sanctuaries, and we can talk to them about a meeting.”
“Sure,” Art said, looking pleased. And Nirgal’s mind was still racing as he thought of the possibilities. Being in Gamete again brought dormant parts of his mind back alive, and he saw clearly the two worlds in one, the white and the green, split into different dimensions, folded through each other— like the underground and the surface world, joined clumsily in the demimonde. A world out of focus. . . .
• • •
So the next week Art and Nirgal joined Nadia, and drove north. Because of Sax’s arrest Nadia did not want to risk staying in any of the open towns along their way, and she did not even seem to trust the other hidden sanctuaries; she was one of the most conservative of the old ones in terms of secrecy. Over the years of hiding she, like Coyote, had built a whole system of small shelters of her own, and now they drove from one to the next, spending the short days sleeping and waiting in relative comfort. They could not drive during the winter days because the fog hood had been lessening in thickness and area for several years now, and this year was often no more than a light mist, or patchy low clouds, swirling over the rough lumpy land. Once they were descending a rough drop in a foggy morning, after a 10 A.M. dawn, and Nadia was explaining that Ann had identified it as the remnant of an earlier Chasma Australe—”She says there are literally scores of fossil Chasma Australes down here, cut at different angles during earlier points in the cycle of precession”— and the fog swept away, and they could suddenly see for many kilometers, all the way to the shaggy ice walls at the mouth of the present Chasma Australe, gleaming in the distance. They were exposed— then the clouds closed over them again, very swiftly, enveloping them in murky flowing white, as if they were traveling in a snowstorm in which the snowflakes were so fine that they defied gravity, and blew about in suspension forever.
Nadia hated that kind of exposure, no matter how brief, and so she continued to hide through the days. They looked out the little windows of her shelters onto swirling clouds, which sometimes caught the light in sparkling arrays, so bright it hurt to look at them. Sunbeams cut through gaps between clouds, striking the long ridges and scarps of the blindingly white land. Once they even experienced a full whiteout, when all shadows disappeared, and everything else: a pure white world, in which it was impossible to make out even the horizon.
On other days icebows threw curves of pale pastel color against the intense whites, and once when the sun broke through, low over the land, it was surrounded by a ring of light as bright as it was. The landscape blazed white under this display, not uniformly but in patches, all shifting rapidly in the ceaseless winds. Art laughed to see it, and he never stopped exclaiming over the ice flowers, now as large as shrubs, and studded with spikes and lacy fans, and growing into each other at their edges, so that in many areas the ground itself completely disappeared, and they drove across a crackling surface of