Green Mars(227)

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Coyote helped a lot in the early part of this period. He was not the same, Maya thought— subdued by the takeover of Sabishii, even worried. He wouldn’t answer their questions about Hiroko and the hidden colonists; he said “I don’t know” so often that she began to believe him, especially when his face finally twisted up into a recognizably human expression of distress, the famous invulnerable insouciance finally shattered. “I truly don’t know whether they got out or not. I was already out in the mound maze when the takeover started, and I got out in a car as fast as I could, thinking I could help the most from outside. But no one else came out from that exit. But I was on the north side, and they could have gotten out to the south. They were staying in the mound maze too, and Hiroko has emergency shelters just like I do. But I just don’t know.”

“Then let’s go see if we can find out,” she said.

So he drove them north, at one point going under the Sheffield-Burroughs piste, using a long tunnel just bigger than his car; they spent the night in this black slot, restocking from recessed closets and sleeping the uneasy sleep of spelunkers. Near Sabishii they descended into another hidden tunnel, and drove for several kilometers until they came into a small cave of a garage; it was part of the Sabishiians’ mound maze, and the squared stone caves behind it were like Neolithic passage tombs, now lit with strip lighting and warmed from vents. They were greeted down there by Nanao Nakayama, one of the issei, who seemed just as cheerful as ever. Sabishii had been returned to them, more or less, and though there were UNTA police in town and especially at the gates and the train station, the police were still unaware of the full extent of the mound complexes, and so not able to completely stop Sabishii’s efforts to help the underground. Sabishii was no longer an open demimonde, as he put it, but they were still working.

And yet he, too, did not know what had happened to Hiroko. “We didn’t see the police take any of them away,” he said. “But we didn’t find Hiroko and her group down here either, after things had calmed down. We don’t know where they went.” He tugged at his turquoise earring, obviously mystified. “I think they are probably off on their own. Hiroko was always careful to have a bolthole everywhere she went, that is what Iwao told me once when we drank a lot of sake down at the duck pond. And it seems to me that disappearance is a habit of Hiroko’s, but not of the Transitional Authority. So we can infer that she chose to do this. But come on— you must want a bath and some food, and then if you could talk to some of the sansei and yonsei who have gone into hiding with us, that would be good for them.”

So they stayed in the maze for a week or two, and Maya met with several groups of the newly disappeared. She spent most of her time encouraging them, assuring them that they would be able to reemerge onto the surface, even into Sabishii itself, quite soon; security was hardening, but the nets were simply too permeable, and the alternative economy too large, to allow for total control. Switzerland would give them new passports, Praxis would give them jobs, and they would be back in business. The important thing was to coordinate their efforts, and to resist the temptation to lash out too early.

Nanao told her after one such meeting that Nadia was making similar appeals in South Fossa, and that Sax’s team was begging them for more time; so there was some agreement on the policy, at least among the old-timers. And Nirgal was working closely with Nadia, supporting the policy as well. So it was the more radical groups that they would have to work hardest to rein in, and here Coyote had the most influence. He wanted to visit some of the Red refuges in person, and Maya and Michel went with him, to catch a ride up to Burroughs.

The region between Sabishii and Burroughs was saturated with crater impacts, so that they wound through the nights between flat-topped circular hills, stopping every dawn at small rim shelters crowded with Reds who were none too hospitable to Maya and Michel. But they listened to Coyote very attentively, and traded news with him about scores of places Maya had never heard of. On the third night of this they came down the steep slope of the Great Escarpment, through an archipelago of mesa islands, and abruptly onto the smooth plain of Isidis. They could see down the slope of the basin for a long way, all the way out to where a mound like the Sabishiians’ mohole mound ran across the land, in a great curve from Du Martheray Crater on the Great Escarpment, north-west toward Syrtis. This was the new dike, Coyote told them, built by a robot collection pulled from the Elysium mohole. The dike was truly massive, and looked like one of the basalt dorsa of the south, except that its velvety texture revealed it to be excavated regolith rather than hard volcanic rock.