Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [159]
“It’s just what Vlad and Ursula said!”
“Maybe so.”
The tea helped. After a while his equilibrium returned. They talked about other things, the great storm, the great hard plinth they lived on. Late that night he asked if they had heard of the coyote, but they hadn’t. They did know stories about a creature they called the “hidden one,” the last survivor of an ancient race of Martians, a wizened thing who wandered the planet helping endangered wanderers, rovers, settlements. It had been spotted at the water station in Chasma Borealis last year, during an ice fall and subsequent power outage.
“It’s not Big Man?” John asked.
“No, no. Big Man is big. The hidden one is like us. Its people were Big Man’s subjects.”
“I see.”
But he didn’t, not really. If Big Man stood for Mars itself, then maybe the story of the hidden one had been inspired by Hiroko. Impossible to say. He needed a folklorist, or a scholar of myths, someone who could tell him how stories were born; but he had only these Sufis, grinning and weird, story creatures themselves. His fellow citizens in this new land. He had to laugh. They laughed with him and took him off to bed. “We say a bedtime prayer from the Persian poet Rumi Jalaluddin,” the old woman told him, and recited it:
I
died as mineral and became a plant,
I
died as plant and rose to animal.
I
died as animal and I was human.
W
hy should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Y
et once more I shall die human,
T
o soar with angels blessed above.
A
nd when I sacrifice my angel soul
I
shall become what no mind ever conceived.
“Sleep well,” she said into his drowsing mind. “This is all our path.”
The next morning he climbed stiffly in his rover, wincing with soreness and determined to eat some omeg as soon as he got on his way. The same woman was there to see him off, and he bumped his faceplate against hers affectionately.
“Whether it be of this world or of that,” she said, “your love will lead us yonder in the end.”
7
The transponder road led him through the brown wind-torn days, crossing the broken land south of Margaritifer Sinus. John would have to drive it again some other time to see any of it, for in the storm it was nothing but flying chocolate, pierced by momentary golden shafts of light. Near Bakhuysen Crater he stopped at a new settlement called Turner Wells; here they had tapped into an aquifer that was under such hydrostatic pressure at its lower end that they were going to generate power by running the artesian flow through a series of turbines. The water released would be poured into molds, frozen, and then hauled by robot to dry settlements all over the southern hemisphere. Mary Dunkel was working there, and she showed John around the wells, the power plant, and the ice reservoirs. “The exploratory drilling was actually scary as hell. When the drill hit the liquid part of the aquifer it was blasted back out of the well, and it was touch and go whether we were going to be able to control the gusher or not.”
“What would have happened if you hadn’t?”
“Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of water down there. If it broke the rock around the well, it might have gone like the big outflow channels in Chryse.”
“That big?”
“Who knows? It’s possible.”
“Wow.”
“That’s what I said! Now Ann has started an investigation into methods for determining aquifer pressures by the echoes they give back in the seismic tests. But there are people who would like to release an aquifer or two, see? They leave messages on the bulletin boards in the net. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sax is among them. Big floods of water and ice, lots of sublimation into the air, why shouldn’t he cheer?”
“But floods like those old ones would be as destructive to the landscape as dropping asteroids on it.”
“Oh, more destructive! Those channels downslope from the chaoses were incredible outbreaks. The best Terran analogy is the scab-lands in eastern Washington, have you heard of