Blue Mars(146)

Open water was black, or the various purples of the sky. There was a lot of it— polynyas, leads, cracks, patches— perhaps a third of the sea’s surface now. Even more common were melt lakes lying on the surface of the ice, their water white and sky-colored both, which at times looked a brilliant light violet but other times separated out into the two colors; yes, it was another version of the green and the white, the infolded world, two in one. As always he found the sight of a double color disturbing, fascinating. The secret of the world.

Many of the big drilling platforms in Vastitas had been seized by Reds and blown up: black wreckage scattered over white ice. Other platforms were defended by greens, and being used now to melt the ice: large polynyas stretched to the east of these platforms, and the open water steamed, as if clouds were pouring up out of a submarine sky.

In the clouds, in the wind. The southern shore of the northern sea was a succession of gulfs and headlands, bays and peninsulas, fjords and capes, seastacks and low archipelagoes. Nirgal followed it for day after day, landing in the late afternoons at little new seaside settlements. He saw crater islands with interiors lower than the ice and water outside the rim. He saw some places where the ice seemed to be receding, so that bordering the ice were black strands, raked by parallel lines running down to ragged drift errata of jumbled rock and ice. Would these strands flood again, or would they grow wider still? No one in these seaside towns knew. No one knew where the coastline would stabilize. The settlements here were made to be moved. Diked polders showed that some people were apparently testing the newly exposed land’s fertility. Fringing the white ice, green crop rows.

North of Utopia he passed over a low peninsula that extended from the Great Escarpment all the way to the north polar island, the only break in the world-wrapping ocean. A big settlement on this low land, called Boone’s Neck, was half-tented and half in the open. The settlement’s occupants were engaged in cutting a canal through the peninsula.

A wind blew north and Nirgal followed it. The winds hummed, whooshed, keened. On some days they shrieked. Live beings, at war. In the sea on both sides of the long low peninsula were tabular ice shelfs. Tall mountains of jade ice broke through these white sheets. No one lived up here, but Nirgal was not searching anymore— he had given up, very near despair, and was just floating, letting the winds take him like a dandelion seed: over the ice sea, shattered white; over open purple water, lined by sun-bright waves. Then the peninsula widened to become the polar island, a white bumpy land in the sea ice. No sign of the primeval swirl pattern of melt valleys. That world was gone.

Over the other side of the world and the North Sea, over Orcas Island on the east flank of Elysium, down over Cimmeria again. Floating like a seed. Some days the world went black and white: icebergs on the sea, looking into the sun; tundra swans against black cliffs; black guillemots flying over the ice; snow geese. And nothing else in all the day.

Ceaseless wandering. He flew around the northern parts of the world two or three times, looking down at the land and the ice, at all the changes taking place everywhere, at all the little settlements huddling in their tents, or out braving the cold winds. But all the looking in the world couldn’t make the sorrow go away.

• • •



One day he came on a new harbor town at the entry to the long skinny fjord of Marwth Vallis, and found his Zygote crèche mates Rachel and Tiu had moved there. Nirgal hugged them, and over a dinner and afterward he stared at their oh-so-familiar faces with intense pleasure. Hiroko was gone but his brothers and sisters remained, and that was something; proof that his childhood was real. And despite all the years they looked just like they had when they were children; there was no real difference. Rachel and he had been friends, she had had a crush on him in the early years, and they had kissed in the baths; he recalled with a little shiver a time when she had kissed him in one ear, Jackie in the other. And, though he had almost forgotten it, he had lost his virginity with Rachel, one afternoon in the baths, shortly before Jackie had taken him out into the dunes by the lake. Yes, one afternoon, almost accidentally, when their kissing had suddenly become urgent and exploratory, a matter of their bodies moving outside their own volition.

Now she regarded him fondly— a woman his age, her face a map of laugh lines, cheery and bold. She may have recalled their early encounter as little as he did— hard to say what his siblings remembered of their shared bizarre childhood— but she looked like she remembered. She had always been friendly, and she was again now. He told her about his flights around the world, carried by the ceaseless winds, diving slowly against the blimp’s buoyancy down to one little habitation after another, asking after Hiroko.