Green Mars Part 3

"But the lithosphere up there is thicker, Ann says."

"Sure, but the moholes are deeper too."

"Hmm," Coyote said.

And the conversation moved on to more serious matters, mostly the inevitable topics of shortages, and developments in the north. But at the end of that week, when they left Vishniac, by way of a different and longer tunnel, they headed north, and all Coyote's previous plans had been thrown out the window. "That's the story of my life, boy."

On the fifth night of driving over the jumbled highlands of the south, Coyote slowed the rover, and circled the edge of a big old crater, subdued almost to the level of the surrounding plain. From a defile in the ancient rim one could see that the sandy crater floor was marred by a giant round black hole. This, apparently, was what a mohole looked like from the surface. A plume of thin frost stood in the air a few hundred meters over the hole, appearing from nothing like a magician's trick. The edge of the mohole was beveled so that there was a band of concrete funneling down at about a forty-five-degree angle; it was hard to say how big this coping band was, because the mohole made it seem like no more than a strip. There was a high wire fence at its outer edge. "Hmm," Coyote said, staring out the windshield. He backed up in the defile and parked, then slipped into a walker. "Back soon," he said, and hopped into the lock.

It was a long, anxious night for Nirgal. He barely slept, and was in an intensifying agony of worry the next morning when he saw Coyote appear outside the boulder car lock, just before seven a.m. when the sun was about to rise. He was ready to complain about the length of this disappearance, but when Coyote got inside and got his helmet off it was obvious he was in a foul temper. While they sat out the day he tapped away at his AI in an absorbed conference, cursing vilely, oblivious to his hungry young charge. Nirgal went ahead and heated meals for them both, and then napped uneasily, and woke when the rover jerked forward. "I'm going to try going in through the gate," Coyote said. "That's quite the security they have on that hole. One more night should see it either way." He circled the crater and parked on the far rim, and at dusk once again left on foot.

Again he was gone all night, and again Nirgal found it very difficult to sleep. He wondered what he was supposed to do if Coyote didn't return.

And indeed he was not back by dawn. The day that followed was the longest of Nirgal's life without a question, and at the end of it he had no idea what he was going to do. Try to rescue Coyote; try to drive back to Zygote, or Vishniac; go down to the mohole, and give himself up to whatever mysterious security system had eaten up Coyote: all seemed impossible.

But an hour after sunset Coyote tapped the car with his tik-tik-tik tik-tik-tik, and then he was inside, his face a furious mask. He drank a liter of water and then most of another, and blew out his lips in disgust. "Let us get the f.u.c.k out of here," he said.

After a couple of hours of silent driving Nirgal thought to change the subject, or at least enlarge it, and he said, "Coyote, how long do you think we will have to stay hidden?"

"Don't call me Coyote! I'm not Coyote. Coyote is out there in the back of the hills, breathing the air already and doing what he wants, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Me my name is Desmond, you call me Desmond Desmond, understand?"

"Okay," Nirgal said, afraid.

"As for how long we will have to stay hiding, I think it will be forever."

They drove back south to Rayleigh mohole, where Coyote (he didn't seem to be a Desmond) had thought to go in the first place. This mohole was truly abandoned, an unlit hole in the highlands, its thermal plume standing over it like the ghost of a monument. They could drive right into the empty sand-covered parking lot and garage at its rim, between a small fleet of robot vehicles shrouded by tarpaulins and sand drifts. "This is more like it," Coyote muttered. "Here, we've got to take a look down inside it. Come on, get into your walker."

It was strange to be out in the wind, standing on the rim of such an enormous gap in things. They looked over a chest-high wall and saw the beveled concrete band that rimmed the hole, dropping at an angle for about two hundred meters. In order to see down the shaft proper, they had to walk about a kilometer down a curving road cut into the concrete band. There they could stop at last, and look over the road's edge, down into blackness. Coyote stood right on the edge, which made Nirgal nervous. He got on his hands and knees to look over. No sign of a bottom; they might as well have been looking into the center of the planet. "Twenty kilometers," Coyote said over the intercom. He held a hand out over the edge, and Nirgal did too. He could feel the updraft. "Okay, let's see if we can get the robots going." And they hiked back up the road.

Coyote had spent many of their daytime hours studying old programs on his AI, and now, with the hydrogen peroxide from their trailer pumped into two of the robot behemoths in the parking lot, he plugged into their control panels and went at it. When he was done he was satisfied they would perform as required at the bottom of the mohole, and they watched the two, with wheels four times as tall as Coyote's car, roll off down the curving road.

"All right," Coyote said, cheering up again. "They'll use their solar-panel power to process their own peroxide explosives, and their own fuel as well, and go at it slow and steady until maybe they hit something hot. We just may have started a volcano!"

"Is that good?"

Coyote laughed wildly. "I don't know! But no one's ever done it before, so it has that at least to recommend it."

They returned to their scheduled travel, among sanctuaries both hidden and open, and Coyote went around saying, "We started up Rayleigh mohole last week, have you seen a volcano yet?"

No one had seen it. Rayleigh seemed to be behaving much as before, its thermal plume undisturbed. "Well, maybe it didn't work," Coyote would say. "Maybe it will take some time. On the other hand if that mohole was now floored with molten lava, how would you be able to tell?"

"We could tell," people said. And some added: "Why would you do something as stupid as that? You might as well call up the Transitional Authority and tell them to come down here to look for us."

So Coyote stopped bringing it up. They rolled on from sanctuary to sanctuary: Mauss Hyde, Gramsci, Overhangs, Christianopolis.... At each stop Nirgal was made welcome, and often people knew of him in advance, by reputation. Nirgal was very surprised by the variety and number of sanctuaries, forming together their strange world, half secret and half exposed. And if this world was only a small part of Martian civilization as a whole, what must the surface cities of the north be like? It was beyond his grasp- although it did seem to him that as the marvels of the journey continued, one after the next, his grasp was getting a bit larger. You couldn't just explode from amazement, after all.

"Well," Coyote would say as they drove (he had taught Nirgal how), "we may have started a volcano and we may not have. But it was a new idea in any case. That's one of the greatest things about this, boy, this whole Martian project. It's all new new."

They headed south again, until the ghostly wall of the polar cap loomed over the horizon. Soon they would be home again.

Nirgal thought of all the sanctuaries they had visited. "Do you really think we'll have to hide forever, Desmond?"

"Desmond? Desmond? Who's this Desmond? Desmond?" Coyote blew out his lips. "Oh, boy, I don't know. No one can know for sure. The people hiding out here were shoved out at a strange time, when their way of life was threatened, and I'm not so sure it's that way anymore in the surface cities they're building in the north. The bosses on Earth learned their lesson, maybe, and people up there are more comfortable. Or maybe it's just that the elevator hasn't been replaced yet."

"So there might not be another revolution?"

"I don't know."

"Or not until there's another s.p.a.ce elevator?"

"I don't know! But the elevator's coming, and they're building some big new mirrors out there, you can see them shining at night sometimes, or right around the sun. So anything might happen, I guess. But revolution is a rare thing. And a lot of them are reactionary anyway. Peasants have their tradition, you see, the values and habits that allow them to get by. But they live so close to the edge that rapid change can push them over it, and in those times it's not politics, but survival. I saw that myself when I was your age. Now the people sent here were not poor, but they did have their own tradition, and like the poor they were powerless. And when the influx of the 2050s. .h.i.t, their tradition was wiped out. So they fought for what they had. And the truth is, they lost. You can't fight the powers that be anymore, especially here, because the weapons are too strong and our shelters are too fragile. We'd have to arm ourselves pretty good, something. So, you know. We're hiding, and they're flooding Mars with a new kind of crowd, people who were used to really tough conditions on Earth, so that things here don't strike them so bad. They get the treatment and they're happy. We're not seeing so many people trying to get out into the sanctuaries, like we did in the years before sixty-one. There's some, but not many. As long as people have their entertainments, their own little tradition, you know, they aren't going to lift a finger."

"But..." Nirgal said, and faltered.

Coyote saw the expression on his face and laughed. "Hey, who knows? Pretty soon now they'll have another elevator in place up on Pavonis Mons, and then very likely they'll start to screw things up all over again, those greedy b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. And you young folks, maybe you won't want Earth calling the shots here. We'll see when the time comes. Meanwhile we're having fun, right? We're keeping the flame."

That night Coyote stopped the car, and told Nirgal to suit up. They went out and stood on the sand, and Coyote turned him around so that he was facing north. "Look at the sky."

Nirgal stood and watched; and saw a new star burst into existence, there over the northern horizon, growing in a matter of seconds to a long white-tailed comet, flying west to east. When it was about halfway across the sky the blazing head of the comet burst apart, and bright framents scattered in every direction, white into black.

"One of the ice asteroids!" Nirgal exclaimed.

Coyote snorted. "There's no surprising you, is there boy! Well, I'll tell you something you didn't know; that was ice asteroid 2089 C, and did you see how it blew up there at the end? That was a first. They did that on purpose. Blowing them up when they enter the atmosphere allows them to use bigger asteroids without endangering the surface. And that was my idea! I told them to do that myself, I put an anonymous suggestion in the AI at Greg's Place when I was in there messing with their comm system, and they jumped on it. They're going to do them that way all the time now. There'll be one or two every season like that, they're thickening the atmosphere pretty fast. Look at how the stars are trembling. They used to do that all the nights of Earth. Ah, boy... It'll happen here all the time too, someday. Air you can breathe like a bird in the sky. Maybe that will help us to change the order of things on this world. You can never tell about things like that."

Nirgal closed his eyes, and saw red afterimages of the ice meteor score his eyelids. Meteors like white fireworks, holes boring straight into the mantle, volcanoes.... He turned and saw the Coyote hopping over the plain, small and thin, his helmet strangely large on him as if he were a mutant or a shaman wearing a sacred animal head, doing a changeling dance over the sand. This was the Coyote, no doubt about it. His father!

Then they had circ.u.mnavigated the world, albeit high in the southern hemisphere. The polar cap rose over the horizon and grew, until they were under the overhang of ice, which did not seem as tall as it had at the start of the journey. They circled the ice to home, and drove into the hangar, and got out of the little boulder car that had become so well known to Nirgal in the previous two weeks, and walked stiffly through the locks and back down the long tunnel into the dome, and suddenly they were among all the familiar faces, being hugged and cosseted and questioned. Nirgal shrank shyly from the attention, but there was no need, Coyote told all their stories for him, and he only had to laugh, and deny responsibility for what they had done. Glancing past his kin, he saw how small his little world really was; the dome was less than 5 kilometers across, and 250 meters high out over the lake. A small world.

When the homecoming was over he walked out in the early-morning glow, feeling the happy nip of the air and looking closely at the buildings and bamboo stands of the village, in its nest of hills and trees. It all looked so strange and small. Then he was out on the dunes and walking out to Hiroko's place, with the gulls wheeling overhead, and he stopped frequently just to see things. He breathed in the chill kelp-and-salt scent of the beach; the intense familiarity of the scent triggered a million memories at once, and he knew he was home.

But home had changed. Or he had. Between the attempt to save Simon and the trip with Coyote, he had become a youth apart from the rest; the distinguishing adventures that he had so longed for had come, and their only result was to exile him from his friends. Jackie and Dao hung together more tightly than ever, and acted like a shield between him and all the younger sansei. Quickly Nirgal realized that he hadn't really wanted to be different after all. He only wanted to melt back into the closeness of his little pack, and be one with his siblings.

But when he came among them they went silent, and Dao would lead them off, after the most awkward encounters imaginable. And he was left to return to the adults, who began to keep him with them in the afternoons, as a matter of course. Perhaps they meant to spare him some of his pack's hard treatment, but it only had the effect of marking him even more. There was no cure for it. One day, walking the beach unhappily in the gray and pewter twilight of a fall afternoon, it occurred to him that his childhood was gone. That was what this feeling was; he was something else now, neither adult nor child, a solitary being, a foreigner in his own country. The melancholy realization had a peculiar pleasure to it.

One day after lunch Jackie stayed behind with him and Hiroko, who had come in for the day to teach, and demanded to be included in her afternoon lesson. "Why should you teach him and not me?"

"No reason," Hiroko said impa.s.sively. "Stay if you want. Get out your lectern and call up Thermal Engineering, page one oh five oh. We'll model Zygote Dome for example. Tell me what is the warmest point under the dome?"

Nirgal and Jackie attacked the problem, competing and yet side by side. He was so happy she was there that he could hardly remember the problem, and Jackie raised a finger before he had even organized his thinking about it. And she laughed at him, a bit scornful but also pleased. Through all these enormous changes in them both there remained in Jackie that capacity for infectious joy, that laughter from which it was so painful to be exiled....

"Here is a question for next time," Hiroko said to them. "All the names for Mars in the areophany are names given to it by Terrans. About half of them mean fire star fire star in the languages they come from, but that is still a name from the outside. The question is, what is Mars's own name for itself?" in the languages they come from, but that is still a name from the outside. The question is, what is Mars's own name for itself?"

Several weeks later Coyote came through again, which made Nirgal both happy and nervous. Coyote took a morning teaching the children, but fortunately he treated Nirgal the same as all the rest. "Earth is in very bad shape," he told them as they worked on vacuum pumps from the liquid-sodium tanks in the Rickover, "and it will only get worse. That makes their control over Mars all the more dangerous to us. We'll have to hide until we can cut ourselves free of them entirely, and then stand safe to the side while they descend into madness and chaos. You remember my words here, this is a prophecy as true as truth."

"That isn't what John Boone said," Jackie declared. She spent many of her evening hours exploring John Boone's AI, and now she pulled out the box from her thigh pocket, and with only the briefest search for a pa.s.sage, the friendly voice from the box was saying, "Mars will never be truly safe until Earth is too."

Coyote laughed raucously. "Yes, well, John Boone was like that, wasn't he. But you note he is dead, while I'm still here."

"Anyone can hide," Jackie said sharply. "But John Boone got out there and led. That's why I'm a Boonean."

"You're a Boone and and a Boonean!" Coyote exclaimed, teasing her. "And Boonean algebra never did add up. But look here, girl, you have to understand your grandfather better than that if you want to call yourself a Boonean. You can't make John Boone into any kind of dogma and be true to what he was. I see other so-called Booneans out there doing just that, and it makes me laugh when it doesn't make me foam at the mouth. Why, if John Boone were to meet you and talk to you for even just an hour, then at the end of that time he would be a Jackie-ist. And if he met Dao and talked to him, then he would become a Daoist, maybe even a Maoist. That's just the way he was. And that was a Boonean!" Coyote exclaimed, teasing her. "And Boonean algebra never did add up. But look here, girl, you have to understand your grandfather better than that if you want to call yourself a Boonean. You can't make John Boone into any kind of dogma and be true to what he was. I see other so-called Booneans out there doing just that, and it makes me laugh when it doesn't make me foam at the mouth. Why, if John Boone were to meet you and talk to you for even just an hour, then at the end of that time he would be a Jackie-ist. And if he met Dao and talked to him, then he would become a Daoist, maybe even a Maoist. That's just the way he was. And that was good good, you see, because what it did was put the responsibility for thinking back onto us. It forced us to make a contribution, because without that Boone couldn't operate. His point was not just that everyone can do it, but that everyone should do it."

"Including all the people on Earth," Jackie replied.

"Not another quick one!" Coyote cried. "Oh you girl, why don't you leave these boys of yours and marry me now, I got a kiss like this vacuum pump, here, come on," and he waved the pump at her and Jackie knocked it aside and shoved him back and ran, just for the fun of the chase. She was now the fastest runner in Zygote bar none, even Nirgal with all his endurance could not sprint the way she did, and the kids laughed at Coyote as he skipped after her; he was pretty swift himself for an ancient, and he turned and jinked and went after them all, growling and ending up at the bottom of a pile-on, crying "Oh my leg, oh I'm going to get you for that, you boys are just jealous of me because I'm going to steal your girl away, oh! Stop! Oh!"

This kind of teasing made Nirgal uncomfortable, and Hiroko didn't like it either. She told Coyote to stop, but he just laughed at her. "You're the one that's gone and made yourself a little incest camp," he said. "What are you going to do, neuter them?" He laughed at Hiroko's dark expression. "You're going to have to farm them out soon, that's what you're going to have to do. And I might as well get some of them."

Hiroko dismissed him, and soon after that he was off on a trip again. And the next time Hiroko taught, she took all the kids to the bathhouse and they got in the bath after her and sat on the slick tiles in the shallow end, soaking in the hot steamy water while Hiroko spoke. Nirgal sat next to Jackie's long-limbed naked body which he knew so well, including all its dramatic changes of the past year, and he found that he was unable to look at her.

His ancient naked mother said, "You know how genetics works, I've taught you that myself. And you know that many of you are half brothers and sisters, uncles and nieces and cousins and so forth. I am mother or grandmother to many of you, and so you should not mate and have children together. It's as simple as that, a very simple genetic law." She held up a palm, as if to say, This is our shared body.

"But all living things are filled with viriditas," she went on, "the green force, patterning outward. And so it is normal that you will love each other, especially now that your bodies are blooming. There is nothing wrong with that, no matter what Coyote says. He is only joking in any case. And in one thing he is right; you will soon be meeting many other people your age, and they will eventually become mates and partners and coparents with you, closer to you even than your tribe kin, whom you know too well to ever love as an other. We here are all pieces of your self; and true love is always for the other."

Nirgal kept his eyes on his mother's, his gaze blank. Still he knew exactly when Jackie had brought her legs together, he had felt the minute change in temperature in the water swirling between them. And it seemed to him that his mother was wrong in some of what she had said. Although he knew Jackie's body so well, she was still in most ways as distant as any fiery star, bright and imperious in the sky. She was the queen of their little band, and could crush him with a glance if she cared to, and did fairly often even though he had been studying her moods all his life. That was as much otherness as he cared to handle. And he loved her, he knew he did. But she didn't love him back, not in the same way. Nor did she love Dao in that way, he thought, at least not anymore; which was a small comfort. It was Peter she watched in the way that he watched her. But Peter was away most of the time. So she loved no one in Zygote the way Nirgal loved her. Perhaps for her it was already as Hiroko had said, and Dao and Nirgal and the rest were simply too well known. Her brothers and sisters, no matter the genes involved.

Then one day the sky fell in earnest. The whole highest part of the water ice sheet cracked away from the CO2, collapsing through the mesh and into the lake and all over the beach and the surrounding dunes. Luckily it happened in the early morning when no one was down there, but in the village the first booms and cracks were explosively loud, and everyone rushed to their windows and saw most of the fall: the giant white sections of ice dropping like bombs or spinning down like skipped plates, and then the whole surface of the lake exploding and spilling out over the dunes. People came charging out of their rooms, and in the noise and panic Hiroko and Maya herded the kids into the school, which had a discrete air system. When a few minutes had pa.s.sed and it appeared that the dome itself was going to hold, Peter and Michel and Nadia ran off through the debris, dodging and jumping over the shattered white plates, around the lake to the Rickover to make sure it was all right. If it wasn't it would be a deadly mission for the three of them, and mortal danger to everyone else. From the school window Nirgal could see the far sh.o.r.e of the lake, which was cluttered with icebergs. The air was aswirl with screaming gulls. The three figures twisted along the narrow high path just under the edge of the dome, and disappeared into the Rickover. Jackie chewed her knuckles in fear. Soon they phoned back a report: all was well. The ice over the reactor was supported by a particularly close-meshed framework, and it had held.

So they were safe, for the moment. But over the next couple of days, spent in the village in an unhappy state of tension, an investigation into the cause of the fall revealed that the whole ma.s.s of dry ice over them had sagged ever so slightly, cracking the layer of water ice and sending it down through the mesh. Sublimation on the surface of the cap was apparently speeding up to a remarkable degree, as the atmosphere thickened and the world warmed.

During the next week the icebergs in the lake slowly melted, but the plates scattered over the dunes were still there, melting ever so slowly. The youngsters weren't allowed on the beach anymore; it wasn't clear how stable the remainder of the ice layer was.

The tenth night after the collapse they had a village meeting in the dining hall, all two hundred of them. Nirgal looked around at them, at his little tribe; the sansei looked frightened, the nisei defiant, the issei stunned. The old ones had lived in Zygote for fourteen Martian years, and no doubt it was hard for them to remember any other life; impossible for the children, who had never known anything else.

It did not need saying that they would not surrender themselves to the surface world. And yet the dome was becoming untenable, and they were too large a group to impose themselves on any of the other hidden sanctuaries. Splitting up would solve that problem, but it wasn't a happy solution.

It took an hour's talk to lay all this out. "We could try Vishniac," Michel said. "It's big, and they'd welcome us."

But it was the Bogdanovists' home, not theirs. This was the message on the faces of the old ones. Suddenly it seemed to Nirgal that they were the most frightened of all.

He said, "You could move back farther under the ice."

Everyone stared at him.

"Melt a new dome, you mean," Hiroko said.

Nirgal shrugged. Having said it, he realized he disliked the idea.

But Nadia said, "The cap is thicker back there. It will be a long time before it sublimes enough to trouble us. By that time everything will have changed.""Shikata ga nai," Maya said sardonically. Maya said sardonically. There is no other choice There is no other choice. Of course there were other choices. But she looked pleased at the prospect of a big new project, and so did Nadia. And the rest of them looked relieved that they had an option that kept them together, and hidden. The issei, Nirgal saw suddenly, were very frightened of exposure. He sat back, wondering at that, thinking of the open cities he had visited with Coyote.

There was a silence, and then Hiroko said, "It's a good idea. We can hold on here while a new dome is being melted, and move things over as s.p.a.ce becomes available. It should only take a few months."

They used steam hoses powered by the Rickover to melt another tunnel to the hangar, and then a long tunnel under the cap, until the ice above was three hundred meters deep. Back there they began subliming a new round domed cavern, and digging a shallow lakebed for a new lake. Most of the CO2 gas was captured, refrigerated to the outside temperature, and released; the rest was broken down into oxygen and carbon, and stored for use.

While the excavation went on they dug up the shallow runner roots of the big snow bamboos, and cantilevered them out of the ground and hauled them on their largest truck down the tunnel to the new cave, sc.r.a.ping leaves all the way. They disa.s.sembled the village's buildings, and relocated them. The robot bulldozer and trucks ran all hours of the day and night, scooping up the battered sand of the old dunes and carting it back down into the new cave; there was too much bioma.s.s in it (including Simon) to leave behind. In essence they were taking everything inside the sh.e.l.l of Zygote dome along with them. When they were done, the old cave was nothing but an empty bubble at the bottom of the polar cap, sandy ice above, icy sand below, the air in it nothing but the ambient Martian atmosphere, 170 millibars of mostly CO2 gas, at 240 Kelvin. Thin poison.

One day Nirgal went back with Peter to take a look at the old place. It was shocking to see the only home he had ever had reduced to such a sh.e.l.l- the ice all cracked above, the sand all torn up, the raw root holes of the village gaping like horrible wounds, the lakebed sc.r.a.ped clear even of its algae. It looked small and ramshackle, some desperate animal's den. Moles in a hole, Coyote had said. Hiding from vultures. "Let's get out of here," Peter said sadly, and they walked together down the long bare poorly lit tunnel to the new dome, stepping along the concrete road Nadia had built, now all ratcheted with treadmarks.

They laid out the new dome in a new pattern, with the village away from the tunnel lock, near an escape tunnel that ran far under the ice, to an exit in upper Chasma Australe. The greenhouses were set nearer the perimeter lights, and the dune crests were higher than before, and the weather equipment was set right next to the Rickover. There were any number of small improvements of that sort, which kept it from being a replica of their old home. And every day they were so busy with the work of constructing it that there was no time to think much about the change; morning cla.s.ses in the schoolhouse had been canceled since the fall, and now the kids were merely a rotating work crew, a.s.signed to whoever needed help the most on that particular day. Sometimes the adult overseeing them would try to make their work into a lesson- Hiroko and Nadia were especially good at this- but they had little time to spare, and only added an explanatory sentence to instructions that were too simple to need explanation in any case: tightening wall modules with Allen wrenches, carrying around planters and algae jars in the greenhouses, and so on. It was just work- they were part of the workforce, which was too small for the task even so, despite the versatile robots that looked like rovers stripped of their exteriors. And running around, doing the work, Nirgal was for the most part happy.

But once as he left the schoolhouse and saw the dining hall, rather than the big shoots of Creche Crescent, the sight brought him up short. His old familiar world was gone, gone forever. That was how time worked. It sent a pang through him that brought tears to his eyes, and he spent the rest of that day somewhat stunned and distant, as if always a step or two behind himself, watching everything that happened drained of emotion, detached as he had been after Simon's death, exiled to the white world one step outside the green. There was nothing to indicate that he would ever come out of such a melancholy state, and how could he know if he ever would? All those days of his childhood were gone, along with Zygote itself, and they would never come back, and this day too would pa.s.s and disappear, this dome too slowly sublime away and crash in on itself. Nothing would last. So what was the point? For hours at a time this question plagued him, taking the taste and color out of everything, and when Hiroko noticed how subdued he was, and inquired what was wrong, he simply asked her outright. There was that advantage to Hiroko; you could ask her anything, including the fundamental questions. "Why do we do all this, Hiroko? When it all goes white no matter what?"

She stared at him, birdlike, her head c.o.c.ked to one side. He thought he could see her affection for him in that c.o.c.k of the head, but he wasn't sure; as he got older he felt he understood her (along with everyone else) less and less.

She said, "It is sad the old dome is gone, isn't it. But we must focus on what is coming. This too is viriditas. To concentrate not on what we have created, but what we will create. The dome was like a flower which wilts and falls, but contains the seed of a new plant, which grows and then there are new flowers and new seeds. The past is gone. Thinking about it will only make you melancholy. Why, I was a girl in j.a.pan once, on Hokkaido Island! Yes, as young as you! And I can't tell you how far gone that is. But here we are now, you and me, surrounded by these plants and these people, and if you pay attention to them, and how you can make them increase and prosper, then the life comes back into things. You feel the kami kami inside all things, and that is all you need. This moment itself is all we ever live in." inside all things, and that is all you need. This moment itself is all we ever live in."

"And the old days?"

She laughed at that. "You're growing up. Well, you must remember the old days from time to time. They were good ones, weren't they? You had a happy childhood; that is a blessing. But so will these days be good. Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What now is lacking? Hmmm?... Coyote says that he wants you and Peter to go along with him on another trip. Maybe you should go and get out under the sky again, what do you say?"

So preparations for another trip with Coyote were made, and they continued to work on the new Zygote, informally rechristened Gamete. At night in the relocated dining hall the adults talked for a long time about their situation. Sax and Vlad and Ursula, among others, wanted back into the surface world. They couldn't do their real work properly in the hidden sanctuaries; they wanted back into the full flood of medical science, terraforming, construction. "We'll never be able to disguise ourselves," Hiroko said. "No one can change their genomes."

"It's not our genomes we should change, but the records," Sax said. "That's what Spencer has done. He's gotten his physical characteristics into a new record ident.i.ty."

"And we did cosmetic surgery on his face," Vlad said.

"Yes, but it was minimal because of our age, right? We none of us look the same. Anyway, if you do something like what he did, we could take on new ident.i.ties."

Maya said, "Did Spencer really get into all all the records?" the records?"

Sax shrugged. "He was left behind in Cairo, and had the chance to get into some of the ones being used now for security purposes. That has been enough. I'd like to try something similar. Let's see what Coyote says about it. He's not in any records at all, so he must know how he did it."

"He's been hidden from the beginning," Hiroko said. "That's different."

"Yes, but he might have some ideas."

"We could just move into the demimonde," Nadia pointed out, "and stay off the records entirely. I think I'd like to try that."