Part 20 (1/2)

”Why?” Nirgal said.

Sax nodded.

Nirgal felt his cheeks burn as an electric flush of acute relief ran through his skin, and he leaped up and gave the little man a hard hug. ”You do understand!”

”Well,” Art was saying, ”they did it as a kind of gesture. It was Fort's idea, the guy who founded Praxis. 'Maybe they'll come back,' he supposedly said to the Praxis people in Sheffield. I don't know if he thought out the practicalities or not.”

”This Fort is strange,” Coyote said, and Sax nodded again.

”True,” Art said. ”But I wish you could meet him. He reminds me of the stories you tell about Hiroko.”

”Does he know we're out here?” Spencer asked.

Nirgal's pulse leapt, but Art showed no sign of discomfort. ”I don't know. He suspects. He wants you to be out here.”

”Where does he live?” Nirgal asked.

”I don't know.” Art described his visit to Fort. ”So I don't know exactly where he is. Somewhere on the Pacific. But if I could get word to him...”

No one responded.

”Well, maybe later,” Art said.

Sax was looking out the rover's low winds.h.i.+eld at the distant rock fin, at the tiny line of lit windows marking the labs behind them, empty and silent. Coyote reached out and squeezed his neck. ”You want it back, don't you.”

Sax croaked something.

On the empty plain of Amazonis there were few settlements of any kind. This was the back country, and they rolled rapidly south through it, night after night, and slept in the darkened cabin of the car through the days. Their biggest problem was finding adequate hiding places. On flat open plains the boulder car stood out like a glacial erratic, and Amazonis was almost nothing but flat open plain. They usually tucked into the ap.r.o.n of ejecta around one of the few craters they pa.s.sed. After the dawn meals Sax sometimes exercised his voice, croaking incomprehensible words, trying to communicate with them and failing. This upset Nirgal even more than it seemed to bother Sax himself, who, though clearly frustrated, did not seem pained. But then he had not tried to talk to Simon in those last weeks....

Coyote and Spencer were pleased with even this much progress, and they spent hours asking Sax questions, and running him through tests they got out of the AI lectern, trying to figure out just what the problem was. ”Aphasia, obviously,” Spencer said. ”I'm afraid his interrogation caused a stroke. And some strokes cause what they call nonfluent aphasia.”

”There's such a thing as fluent fluent aphasia?” Coyote said. aphasia?” Coyote said.

”Apparently. Nonfluent is where the subject can't read or write, and has difficulty speaking or finding the right words, and is very aware of the problem.”

Sax nodded, as if to confirm the description.

”In fluent aphasia the subjects talk at great length, but are unaware that what they're saying makes no sense.”

Art said, ”I know a lot of people with that problem.”

Spencer ignored him. ”We've got to get Sax down to Vlad and Ursula and Michel.”

”That's what we're doing.” Coyote gave Sax a squeeze on the arm before retiring to his mat.

On the fifth night after leaving the Bogdanovists, they approached the equator, and the double barrier of the fallen elevator cable. Coyote had pa.s.sed the barrier in this region before, using a glacier formed by one of the aquifer outbursts of 2061, in Mangala Vallis. During the unrest water and ice had poured down the old arroyo for a hundred and fifty kilometers, and the glacier left behind when the flood froze had buried both pa.s.ses of the fallen cable, at 152 longitude. Coyote had located a route over an unusually smooth stretch of this glacier, which had taken him across the two pa.s.ses of the cable.

Unfortunately, when they approached Mangala Glacier- a long tumbled ma.s.s of gravel-covered brown ice, filling the bottom of a narrow valley- they found that it had changed since Coyote had last been there. ”Where's that rampway?” he kept demanding. ”It was right here.”

Sax croaked, then made kneading motions with his hands, staring all the while through the winds.h.i.+eld at the glacier.

Nirgal had a difficult time comprehending the glacier's surface; it was a kind of visual static, all patches of dirty white and gray and black and tan, tumbled together until it was hard to distinguish size, shape, or distance. ”Maybe it isn't the same place,” he suggested.

”I can tell,” Coyote said.

”Are you sure?”

”I left markers. See, there's one there. That trail duck on the lateral moraine. But beyond it should be a rampway up onto smooth ice, and it's nothing but a wall of icebergs. s.h.i.+t. I've been using this trail for ten years.”

”You're lucky you had it that long,” Spencer said. ”They're slower than Terran glaciers, but they still flow downhill.”

Coyote only grunted. Sax croaked, then tapped at the inner lock door. He wanted to go outside.

”Might as well,” Coyote muttered, looking at a map on the screen. ”We'll have to spend the day here anyway.”

So in the predawn light Sax wandered the rubble plowed up by the glacier's pa.s.sage: a little upright creature with a light s.h.i.+ning out of his helmet, like some deep-sea fish poking about for food. Something in the sight made Nirgal's throat tighten, and he suited up and went outside to keep the old man company.

He wandered through the lovely chill gray morning, stepping from rock to rock, following Sax in his winding course through the moraine. Illuminated one by one in the cone of Sax's headlamp were eldritch little worlds, the dunes and boulders interspersed with spiky low plants, filling cracks and hollows under rocks. Everything was gray, but the grays of the plants were shaded olive or khaki or brown, with occasional light spots, which were flowers- no doubt colorful in the sun, but now light luminous grays, glowing among thick furry leaves. Over his intercom Nirgal could hear Sax clearing his throat, and the little figure pointed at a rock. Nirgal crouched to inspect it. In cracks on the rock were growths like dried mushrooms, with black dots all over their shriveled cups, and sprinkled with what looked like a layer of salt. Sax croaked as Nirgal touched one, but he could not say what he wanted. ”R-r-r...”

They stared at each other. ”It's okay,” Nirgal said, stricken again by the memory of Simon.

They moved to another patch of foliage. The areas that supported plants appeared like little outdoor rooms, separated by zones of dry rock and sand. Sax spent about fifteen minutes in each frosty fellfield, stumbling around awkwardly. There were a lot of different kinds of plants, and only after they had visited several glens did Nirgal begin to see some that appeared again and again. None of them resembled the plants he had grown up with in Zygote, nor were they like anything in the arboretums of Sabis.h.i.+. Only the first-generation plants, the lichens, mosses, and gra.s.ses, looked at all familiar, like the ground cover in the high basins above Sabis.h.i.+.

Sax didn't try to speak again, but his headlamp was like a pointed finger, and Nirgal often trained his headlamp on the same area, doubling the illumination. The sky turned rosy, and it began to feel like they were in the planet's shadow, with sunlight just overhead.

Then Sax said, ”Dr-!” and aimed his headlamp at a steep slope of gravel, over which a network of woody branches grew, like a mesh put there to hold the rubble in place. ”Dr-!” ”Dr-!”

”Dryad,” Nirgal said, recognizing it.

Sax nodded emphatically. The rocks under their feet were covered with light green patches of lichen, and he pointed at a patch, and said, ”Ap-ple. Red. Map. Moss.”

”Hey,” Nirgal said. ”You said that really well.”

The sun rose, throwing their shadows over the gravel slope. Suddenly the dryad's little flowers were picked out by the light, the ivory petals cupping gold stamens. ”Dry-ad,” Sax croaked. Their headlamp beams were now invisible, and the flowers blazed with daylight color. Nirgal heard a sound over the intercom and looked into Sax's helmet, and saw that the old man was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

Nirgal pored over maps and photos of the region. ”I have an idea,” he said to Coyote. And that night they drove to Nicholson Crater, four hundred kilometers to the west. The falling cable had to have landed across this large crater, at least on its first pa.s.s, and it seemed to Nirgal that there might be some kind of break or gap near the rim.

Sure enough, when they rolled up the low flat-topped hill that was the crater's north ap.r.o.n, they came to the eroded rim and saw the weird vision of a black line, crossing the middle of the crater some forty kilometers away, looking like an artifact of some long-forgotten race of giants. ”Big Man's...” Coyote began.

”Hair strand,” Spencer suggested.

”Or black dental floss,” Art said.

The inner wall of the crater was much steeper than the outer ap.r.o.n, but there were a number of rim pa.s.ses to choose from, and they drove without trouble down the stabilized slope of an ancient landslide, then crossed the crater floor, following the curve of the western inner wall. As they approached the cable, they saw that it emerged from a depression it had crushed in the rim, and drooped gracefully to the crater floor, like the suspension cable of a buried bridge.