Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [178]
“Ah,” said Zeyk. “A happy death.”
“I don’t think he thought so.”
The issei all laughed, briefly, then reached together for their empty cups, and made a small toast to their late friend. “I miss him,” Nadia said as she put her cup down. “I never thought I would say that.”
She went silent, and watching her Nirgal felt the night cosseting them, hiding them. He had never heard her speak of Frank Chalmers. A lot of her friends had died in the revolt. And her partner too, Bogdanov, whom so many people still followed.
“Angry to the last,” Zeyk said. “For Frank, a happy death.”
• • •
From Lyell they continued counterclockwise around the South Pole, stopping at sanctuaries or tent towns, and exchanging news and goods. Christianopolis was the largest tent town in the region, center of trade for all the smaller settlements south of Argyre. The sanctuaries in the area were mostly occupied by Reds. Nadia asked all the Reds they met to convey news of the congress to Ann Clayborne. “We’re supposed to have a phone link, but she’s not answering me.” A lot of the Reds clearly thought a meeting was a bad idea, or at least a waste of time. South of Schmidt Crater they stopped at a settlement of Bologna communists who lived in a hollowed-out hill, lost in one of the wildest zones of the southern highlands, a region very hard to travel in because of the many wandering scarps and dikes, which rovers could not negotiate. The Bolognese gave them a map marking some tunnels and elevators they had installed in the area, to allow passage through dikes, and up or down scarps. “If we didn’t have them our trips would be nothing but detours.”
Located next to one of their hidden dike tunnels was a small colony of Polynesians, living in a short lava tunnel, which they had floored with water and three islands. The dike was piled high with ice and snow on its southern flank, but the Polynesians, most of whom were from the island of Vanuatu, kept the interior of their refuge at homey temperatures, and Nirgal found the air so hot and humid that it was hard to breathe, even when just sitting on a sand beach, between a black lake and a line of tilting palm trees. Clearly, he thought as he looked around, the Polynesians could be counted among those trying to build a culture incorporating some aspects of their archaic ancestors. They also proved to be scholars of primitive government everywhere in Earth’s history, and they were excited at the idea of sharing what they had learned in these studies at the congress, so it was no problem getting them to agree to come.
To celebrate the idea of the congress they had gathered for a feast on the beach. Art, seated between Jackie and a Polynesian beauty named Tanna, beamed blissfully as he sipped from a half coconut shell filled with kava. Nirgal lay stretched out on the sand before them, listening as Jackie and Tanna talked animatedly about the indigenous movement, as Tanna called it. This was not any simple back-to-the-past nostalgia, she said, but rather an attempt to invent new cultures, which incorporated aspects of early civilizations into high-tech Martian forms. “The underground itself is a kind of Polynesia,” Tanna said. “Little islands in a great stone ocean, some on the maps, some not. And someday it will be a real ocean, and we’ll be out on the islands, flourishing under the sky.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Art said, and did. Clearly one part of the archaic Polynesian culture that Art hoped they were incorporating was their renowned sexual friendliness. But Jackie was mischievously complicating things by leaning on Art’s arm, either to tease him or to compete with Tanna. Art was looking happy but concerned; he had drunk