Green Mars(82)

And perhaps it made sense to pay attention to the individual careers of the people running the biggest transnationals, and the micropolitics of the jockeying for power among them. These were the current rulers of the world, after all. So Sax lay next to Phyllis, listening to her and making Stephen’s comments, trying to sort out all the names, wondering if the founder of Praxis really was a senile surfer, wondering if Shellalco would be taken over by Amexx, wondering why the transnat executive teams were so fiercely competitive, given that they already ruled the world, and had everything they could conceivably want in their personal lives. Perhaps sociobiology indeed had the answer, and it was all primate dominance dynamics, a matter of increasing one’s reproductive success in the corporate realm— which might not be a mere analogy, if one considered one’s company as one’s kin. And then again, in a world where one might live indefinitely, it could be simple self-protection. “Survival of the fittest,” which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order. . . .

And then Phyllis would roll over onto him and kiss him, and he would enter the realm of sex, where different rules seemed to obtain. For instance, though he liked Phyllis less and less as he got to know her better, his attraction to her did not correlate to this, but fluctuated according to mysterious principles of its own, no doubt pheromone-driven and hormonally based; so that sometimes he had to steel himself to accept her touches, while other times he felt alive with a lust that seemed all the stronger because it was so unmixed with affection. Or more senseless still, a lust actually heightened by dislike. This last reaction was rare, however, and as the stay at Arena went on, and the novelty of their affair wore off, Sax more and more frequently found himself distanced from their lovemaking, and inclined to fantasize during it, and fall very deeply into Stephen Lindholm, who appeared to be thinking about caressing women Sax did not know or had scarcely heard of, like Ingrid Bergman or Marilyn Monroe.



• • •

One dawn, after a disturbing night of that sort, Sax got up to go out on the ice, and Phyllis stirred and woke, and decided to come along.

They suited up and went out into a pure purple dawn, and hiked in silence down the near moraine to the side of the glacier, ascending it by a trail of steps cut into the ice. Sax took the southernmost flagged trail across the glacier, intending to climb the west lateral moraine as far upstream as he could go in a morning.

They made their way between knee-high crenellations of ice, all holed like Swiss cheese, and stained pink with snow algae. Phyllis was charmed as always by the fantastic jumble, and commented on the more unusual seracs, comparing those they passed this morning to a giraffe, the Eiffel Tower, the surface of Europa, etc. Sax stopped often to inspect chunks of jade ice that were shot through with an ice bacteria. In one or two places the jade ice sat exposed in suncups turned pink with snow algae; the effect was strange, like a vast field of pistachio ice cream.

So their progress was slow, and they were still on the glacier when a sequence of small tight whirlwinds popped into existence one after the next, like something out of a magic trick: brown dust devils, glittering with ice particulates, in a rough line that bore down the glacier toward them. Then the whirlwinds collapsed in some fluctuation, and with a clattery bang a gust struck them hard, whistling downslope with a surge so powerful they had to crouch into it to keep their balance. “What a gale!” Phyllis exclaimed in his ear.

“Katabatic wind,” Sax said, watching a knot of seracs disappear in the dust. “Falling off Tharsis.” Visibility was dropping. “We should try to get back to the station.”

So they set off back along the flagged trail, moving from one emerald dot to the next. But visibility continued to decrease, until they couldn’t see from one marker to the next. Phyllis said, “Here, let’s get into the shelter of those icebergs.”

She struck off toward the dim shape of an ice prominence, and Sax hurried after her, saying, “Be careful, a lot of seracs have crevasses at their base,” and reaching forward to take her hand, when she dropped as if falling through a trap door. He caught an upflung wrist and was jerked down hard, hitting his knees painfully on the ice. Phyllis was still falling, sliding down a chute at the end of a shallow crevasse; he should have let go of her but instinctively held on, and was dragged over the edge head first. Both of them slid down into the packed snow at the bottom of the crevasse, and the snow gave under them so that they dropped again; crashing onto frosty sand after a brief but terrifying free-fall.