Green Mars(19)

Hilali took a call on the wrist from Coyote, and led Nirgal into a lab, where they took a bit of skin from his finger. Then they made their way slowly back to the big cavern, and joined the crowd lining up by the kitchen windows at the back.

After eating a big spicy meal of beans and potatoes, they began to party in the cavern room. A huge undisciplined steel-drum band with a fluctuating membership played rhythmic staccato melodies, and people danced to them for hours, pausing from time to time to drink an atrocious liquor called kavajava, or join a variety of games on one side of the room. After trying the kavajava, and swallowing a tab of an omegendorph given to him by Coyote, Nirgal ran in place while playing a bass drum with the band, then sat on top of a small grassy mound in the center of the chamber, feeling too drunk to stand. Coyote had been drinking steadily but had no such problem; he was dancing wildly, hopping high off his toes and laughing. “You’ll never know the joy of your own g, boy!” he shouted at Nirgal. “You’ll never know!”

People came by and introduced themselves, sometimes asking Nirgal to exhibit his warming touch— a group of girls his age put his hands to their cheeks, which they had chilled with their drinks, and when he warmed them up they laughed round-eyed, and invited him to warm other parts of them; he got up and danced with them instead, feeling loose and dizzy, running in little circles to discharge some of the energy in him. When he returned to the knoll, buzzing, Coyote came weaving over and sat heavily beside him. “So fine to dance in this g, I never get over it.” He regarded Nirgal with a cross-eyed glare, his gray dreadlocks falling all over his head, and Nirgal noticed again that his face seemed to have cracked somehow, perhaps been broken at the jaw, so that one side was broader than the other. Something like that. Nirgal gulped at the sight.

Coyote took him by the shoulder and shook him hard. “It seems that I am your father, boy!” he exclaimed.

“You’re kidding!” An electric flush ran down Nirgal’s spine and out his face as the two of them stared at each other, and he marveled at how the white world could shock the green one so thoroughly, like lightning pulsing through flesh. They clutched each other.

“I am not kidding!” Coyote said.

They stared at each other. “No wonder you’re so smart,” Coyote said, and laughed hilariously. “Ah ha ha ha! Ka wow! I hope it’s okay with you!”

“Sure,” Nirgal said, grinning but uncomfortable. He didn’t know Coyote well, and the concept of father was even vaguer to him than that of mother, so he wasn’t really sure what he felt. Genetic inheritance, sure, but what was that? They all got their genes somewhere, and the genes of ectogenes were transgenic anyway, or so they said.

But Coyote, though he cursed Hiroko in a hundred different ways, seemed to be pleased. “That vixen, that tyrant! Matriarchy my ass— she’s crazy! It amazes me the things she does! Although this has a certain justice to it. Yes it does, because Hiroko and I were an item back in the dawn of time, when we were young in England. That’s the reason I’m here on Mars at all. A stowaway in her closet, my whole fucking life long.” He laughed and clapped Nirgal on the shoulder again. “Well, boy, you will know better how you like the idea later on.”

He went back out to dance, leaving Nirgal to think it over. Watching Coyote’s gyrations, Nirgal could only shake his head; he didn’t know what to think, and at the moment thinking anything at all was remarkably difficult. Better to dance, or seek out the baths.

But they had no public baths. He ran around in circles on the dance floor, making his running a kind of dance, and later he returned to the same mound, and a group of the locals gathered around him and Coyote. “Like being the father of the Dalai Lama, eh? Don’t you get a name for that?”

“To hell with you, man! Like I was saying, Ann says they stopped digging these seventy-five-degree moholes because the lithosphere is thinner down here.” Coyote nodded portentously. “I want to go to one of the decommissioned moholes and start up its robots again, and see if they dig down far enough to start a volcano.”

Everyone laughed. But one woman shook her head. “If you do that they’ll come down here to check it out. If you’re going to do it, you should go north and hit one of the sixty-degree moholes. They’re decommissioned too.”

“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.”