Blue Mars(80)

“Eh Karnasingh, eh Bly. Lovely day out innit?”

“Yeah.”

“Care for some scrod?”

The next big room was a kitchen, and a dining area jammed with tables and benches. Perhaps fifty people had sat down to eat, and Karna cried “Hey!” and loudly introduced Nirgal. Indistinct murmurs greeted him. People were busy eating: big bowls of fish stew, ladled out of enormous black pots that looked like they had been in use continuously for centuries. Nirgal sat to eat; the stew was good. The bread was as hard as the tabletop. The faces were rough, pocked, salted, reddened when not brown; Nirgal had never seen such vivid ugly countenances, banged and pulled by the harsh existence in Earth’s heavy drag. Loud chatter, waves of laughter, shouts; the generators could scarcely be heard. Afterward people came up to shake his hand and look at him. Several had met the Asian woman and her friends, and they described her enthusiastically. She hadn’t ever given them a name. Her English was good, slow and clear. “I thought she were Paki. Her eyes dint look quite Oriental if you know what I mean. Not like yours, you know, no little fold in there next the nose.”

“Epicanthic fold, you ignorant bugger.”

Nirgal felt his heart beating hard. It was hot in the room, hot and steamy and heavy. “What about the people with her?”

Some of those had been Oriental. Asians, except for one or two whites.

“Any tall ones?” Nirgal asked. “Like me?”

None. Still . . . if Hiroko’s group had come back to Earth, it seemed possible the younger ones would have stayed behind. Even Hiroko couldn’t have talked all of them into such a move. Would Frantz leave Mars, would Nanedi? Nirgal doubted it. Return to Earth in its hour of need . . . the older ones would go. Yes, it sounded like Hiroko; he could imagine her doing it, sailing the new coasts of Terra, organizing a reinhabitation. . . .

“They went over to Southend. They were going to work their way up the coast.”

Nirgal looked at Bly, who nodded; they could cross too.

But Nirgal’s escorts wanted to check on things first. They wanted a day to arrange things. Meanwhile Bly and his friends were talking about underwater salvage projects, and when Bly heard about the bodyguards’ proposed delay, he asked Nirgal if he wanted to see one such operation, taking place the next morning—”though it’s not a pretty business of course.” Nirgal agreed; the escorts didn’t object, as long as some of them came along. They agreed to do it.

So they spent the evening in the clammy noisy submarine warehouse, Bly and his friends rummaging for equipment Nirgal could use. And spent the night on short narrow beds in Bly’s boat, rocking as if in a big clumsy cradle.

• • •



The next morning they puttered through a light mist the color of Mars, pinks and oranges floating this way and that over slack glassy mauve water. The tide was near ebb, and the salvage crew and three of Nirgal’s escorts followed Bly’s larger craft in a trio of small open motorboats, maneuvering between chimney tops and traffic signs and power-line poles, conferring frequently. Bly had gotten out a tattered book of maps, and he called out the street names of Sheerness, navigating to specific warehouses or shops. Many of the warehouses in the wharf area had already been salvaged, apparently, but there were more warehouses and shops scattered through the blocks of flats behind the seafront, and one of these was their morning’s target: “Here we go; Two Carleton Lane.” It had been a jewelry store, next to a small market. “We’ll try for jewels and canned food, a good balance you might say.”

They moored to the top of a billboard and stopped their engines. Bly threw a small object on a cord overboard, and he and three of the other men gathered around a small AI screen set on Bly’s bridge dash. A thin cable paid out over the side, its reel creaking woefully. On the screen, the murky color image changed from brown to black to brown.

“How do you know what you’re seeing ?” Nirgal asked.

“We don’t.”

“But look, there’s a door, see?”

“No.”

Bly tapped at a small keypad under the screen. “In you go, thing. There. Now we’re inside. This should be the market.”

“Didn’t they have time to get their things out?” Nirgal asked.

“Not entirely. Everyone on the east coast of England had to move at once, almost, so there wasn’t enough transport to take more than what you could carry in your car. If that. A lot of people left their homes intact. So we pull the stuff worth pulling.”

“What about the owners?”

“Oh there’s a register. We contact the register and find people when we can, and charge them a salvage fee if they want the stuff. If they’re not on the register, we sell it on the island. People are wanting furniture and such. Here, look— we’ll see what that is.”