Green Mars(20)

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, 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 fuck 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 bastard. Me my name is Desmond, you call me 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.