Green Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [222]
When the storm ended, the tenting was fairly clear, but the land on both sides of Nirgal Vallis was deep in frozen mud, and the crews were soaked. They piled back into elevators and dropped to the canyon floor, exhausted and cold, and when they got out at the bottom they looked at each other, entirely black figures except for their faceplates. Nirgal pulled off his helmet and there he was, laughing hard, irrepressible, and when he scooped mud off his helmet and threw it at them, the fight was on. Most found it prudent to keep their helmets on, and it was a strange sight there on the dark floor of that canyon, blind muddy figures throwing clumps of mud at each other and running out into the stream, slipping-around as they wrestled and dove.
1
Maya Katarina Toitovna woke in a foul mood, disturbed by a dream that she deliberately forgot as she rolled out of bed. Like flushing the toilet after that first trip to the bathroom. Dreams were dangerous. She dressed with her back to the little mirror over the sink, then went downstairs to the dining common. All of Sabishii had been built in its signature Martian/Japanese style, and her neighborhood had the look of a Zen garden, all pine and moss scattered among polished pink boulders. It was beautiful in a spare way that Maya found unpleasant, a kind of rebuke to her wrinkles. She ignored it as best she could, and concentrated on breakfast. The dead boredom of the daily necessities. At another table Vlad and Ursula and Marina were eating with a group of the Sabishii issei. The Sabishiians had all shaved their heads, and in their work jumpers looked like Zen monks. One of them turned on a tiny screen over their table and a Terran news show began, a metanational production from Moscow that had the same relationship to reality that Pravda had once had. Some things never changed. This was the English-language version, the speaker’s English better than her own, even after all these years. “Now the latest on this fifth day of August, 2114.”
Maya stiffened in her chair. In Sabishii it was Ls 246, very near perihelion— the fourth day of 2 November— the days short, the nights warmish for this M-year 44. Maya had had no idea what the Terran date was, and hadn’t for years. But back there it was her birthday. Her— she had to calculate . . . her 130th birthday.
Feeling sick, she scowled and threw her half-eaten bagel on her plate, stared at it. Thoughts burst in her head like birds scattering out of a tree; she couldn’t track them; it was like being blank. What did it mean, this horrible unnatural age? Why had they turned on the screen at just that moment?
She left the half-moon of bread, which had taken on an ominous look, and walked outside into the autumn morning light. Down the lovely main boulevard of Sabishii’s old quarter, green with streetgrass, red with broad-topped fire maples— there was one maple blocking the low sun, and flaring scarlet. Across the plaza outside their dorm she saw Yeli Zudov, playing skittlebowl with a young child, perhaps Mary Dunkel’s great-great-granddaughter. There were a lot of the First Hundred in Sabishii now, it was working well as their demimonde, all of them tucked into the local economy and the old quarter, with false identities and Swiss passports— everything amazingly solid, enabling them to live surface lives. And all without the need for the kind of cosmetic surgery that had so altered Sax, because age had done that surgery for them: they were unrecognizable just as they were. She could walk the streets of Sabishii and people would see only one ancient crone among many others. If Transitional Authority officials stopped her they would identify one Ludmilla Novosibirskaya. But the truth was, they would not stop her.
She walked through the city, trying to get away from herself. From the north end of the tent she could see outside the town to the great mound of rock that had been