Green Mars(4)
By this time she and Nirgal were alone, the other kids running around the dunes or up and down the strand. Nirgal bent down to touch a wave as it stalled out next to their feet, leaving behind a white lace of foam, “It’s two seventy-five and a little over.”
“You’re so sure.”
“I can always tell.”
“Here,” she said, “do I have a fever?”
He reached up and held her neck. “No, you’re cool.”
“That’s right. I’m always about half a degree low. Vlad and Ursula can’t figure out why.”
“It’s because you’re happy.”
Hiroko laughed, looking just like Jackie, suffused with joy. “I love you, Nirgal.”
Inside he warmed as if a heating grate were in there, Half a degree at least. “And I love you.”
And they walked down the beach hand in hand, silently following the sandpipers.
• • •
Coyote returned, and Hiroko said to him, “Okay. Let’s take them outside.”
And so the next morning when they met for school, Hiroko and Coyote and Peter led them through the locks and down the long white tunnel that connected the dome to the outside world. At its far end were located the hangar and the cliff gallery above it. They had run the gallery with Peter in the past, looking out the little polarized windows at the icy sand and the pink sky, trying to see the great wall of dry ice that they stood in— the south polar cap, the bottom of the world, which they lived in to escape the notice of people who would put them in jail.
Because of that they had always stayed inside the gallery. But on this day they went into the hangar locks and put on tight elastic jumpers, rolling up sleeves and legs; then heavy boots, and tight-gloves, and finally helmets, with bubble windows on their front side. Getting more excited every moment, until the excitement became something very like fright, especially when Simud started crying and insisting she didn’t want to go. Hiroko calmed her with a long touch. “Come on. I’ll be there with you.”
They huddled together speechlessly as the adults herded them into the lock. There was a hissing noise, and then the outer door opened. Clutching the adults, they walked cautiously outside, bumping together as they moved.
It was too bright to see. They were in a swirling white mist. The ground was dotted with intricate ice flowers, all aglint in the bath of light. Nirgal was holding Hiroko and Coyote by the hand, and they propelled him forward and let go of his hands. He staggered in the onslaught of white glare. “This is the fog hood,” Hiroko’s voice said over an intercom in his ear. “It lasts through the winter. But now it’s Ls 205, springtime, when the green force pushes hardest through the world, fueled by the sun’s light. See it!”
He could see nothing but it: a white coalescing fireball. Sudden sunlight pierced this ball, transforming it into a spray of color, turning the frosty sand to shaved magnesium, the ice flowers to incandescent jewels. The wind pushed at his side and rent the fog; gaps in it appeared, and the land gaped off into the distance, making him reel. So big! So big— everything was so big— he went to one knee on the sand, put his hands on his other leg to keep his balance. The rocks and ice flowers around his boots glowed as if under a microscope. The rocks were dotted with round scales of black and green lichen.
Out on the horizon was a low flat-topped hill. A crater. There in the gravel was a rover track, nearly filled with frost, as if it had been there a million years. Pattern pulsing in the chaos of light and rock, green lichen pushing into the white. . . .
Everyone was talking at once. The other children were beginning to race around giddily, shrieking with delight as the fog opened up and gave them a glimpse of the dark pink sky Coyote was laughing hard. “They’re like winter calves let out of the barn in spring, look at them tripping, oh you poor dear things, ah ha ha, Roko this no way to make them live,” cackling as he lifted kids off the sand and set them on their feet again.
Nirgal stood, bounced experimentally. He felt he might float away, he was glad the boots were so heavy. There was a long mound, shoulder high, snaking away from the ice cliff. Jackie was walking its crest and he ran to join her, staggering at the incline, at the jumbled rock on the ground. He got onto the ridge and got into his running rhythm, and it felt as if he were flying, as if he could run forever.
He stood by her side. They looked back at the ice cliff, and shouted with a fearful joy; it rose up forever into the fog. A shaft of morning light poured over them like molten water. They turned away, unable to face it. Blinking away floods of tears, Nirgal saw his shadow cast against the fog scraping over the rocks below them. The shadow was surrounded by a bright circular band of rainbow light. He shouted loudly and Coyote raced up to them, his voice in Nirgal’s ear crying, “What’s wrong! What is it?”