Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [165]
He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails;a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little auto-clave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.
• • •
He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out in the clear tunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east. “I think I met the coyote,” John said.
“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”
“No.”
Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums— about at 2 percent, to be precise— and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was nonexistent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still 25 percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.
Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”
This was poorly received. Sax, however, did not notice.
A few days later, Ann and Simon drove into the settlement with their boy Peter, who was now three. He had been, so far as they could tell, the thirty-third child born on Mars; the colonies established after the first hundred had been fairly prolific. John played with the boy on the floor as he and Ann and Simon caught up on news, and exchanged some of the thousand and one tales of the Great Storm. It seemed to John that Ann ought to be enjoying the storm and the horrendous knock it had put on the terraforming process, like some kind of planetary allergic response, the temperatures plummeting below the baseline, the reckless experimenters struggling with their puny clogged machines. . . . But she was not amused. Irritated as usual, in fact. “A dowsing team drilled into a volcanic vent in Daedalia and came up with a sample containing unicellular microorganisms significantly different from the cyanobacteria you released in the north. And the vent was pretty nearly encased in bedrock, and very far from any biotic release sites. They sent samples of the stuff up to Acheron for analysis, and Vlad studied it and declared that it looked like a mutant strain of one of their releases, perhaps injected into the sample rock by contaminated drilling equipment.” Ann poked John in the chest: “
‘Probably Terran,’ Vlad said. Probably Terran!”
“Probabry tewwan!” her little boy said, catching Ann’s intonation perfectly.
“Well, it probably is,