Green Mars(99)
“So we reward them by stealing from them.”
“You’re the one who went to work for Biotique. Maybe you should change jobs.”
“No.”
“Do you think you can get these materials from one of Subarashii’s firms?”
“No.”
“But you could from Biotique.”
“Probably. Security is pretty tight.”
“But you could do it.”
“Probably.” Sax thought about it. “I want something in return.”
“Yes?”
“Will you fly me out to have a look at this soletta burn zone?”
“Certainly! I would like to see it again myself.”
• • •
So the next afternoon they left Burroughs and trained south up the Great Escarpment, getting off at Libya Station, some seventy kilometers from Burroughs. There they slipped into the basement and their closet door, down their tunnel and out into the rocky countryside. Down in a shallow graben they found one of Desmond’s cars, and when night came they drove east along the Escarpment to a small Red hideout in the rim of Du Martheray Crater, next to a stretch of flat bedrock the Reds used as an airstrip. Desmond did not identify Sax to their hosts. They were led into a little cliffside hangar, where they got into one of Spencer’s old stealth planes and taxied out to the bedrock, then took off in an undulant acceleration down the runway. Once in the air they flew east slowly through the night.
They flew in silence for a while. Sax saw lights on the dark surface of the planet only three times: once a station in Escalante Crater, once the tiny moving line of lights of a round-the-world train, and the last an unidentified blink in the rough land behind the Great Escarpment. “Who do you think that is?” Sax asked.
“No idea.”
After a few minutes more Sax said, “I ran into Phyllis.”
“Really! Did she recognize you?”
“No.”
Desmond laughed. “That’s Phyllis for you.”
“A lot of old acquaintances haven’t recognized me.”
“Yeah, but Phyllis . . . Is she still president of the Transitional Authority?”
“No. She didn’t seem to think it was a powerful post, anyway.”
Desmond laughed again. “A silly woman. But she did get that group on Clarke back to civilization, I’ll give her that. I thought they were goners, myself.”
“Do you know much about that?”
“I talked with two of the people who were on it, yeah. One night in Burroughs at the Pingo Bar, in fact. You couldn’t get them to shut up about it.”
“Did anything happen near the end of their flight?”
“The end? Well, yeah— someone died. I guess some woman got a hand crushed when they were evacuating Clarke, and Phyllis was the closest thing they had to a doctor, so Phyllis took care of her through the whole trip, and thought she was going to make it, but I guess they ran out of something, the two telling me the story weren’t too clear on it, and she took a turn for the worse. Phyllis called a prayer meeting for her and prayed for her, but she died anyway, a couple of days before they came into the Terran system.”
“Ah,” Sax said. Then: “Phyllis doesn’t seem all that . . . religious anymore.”
Desmond snorted. “She was never religious, if you ask me. Hers was the religion of business. You visit real Christians like the folks down in Christianopolis, or Bingen, and you don’t find them talking profits at breakfast, and lording it over you with that horrible unctuous righteousness they have. Righteousness, good Lord— it is a most unpleasant quality in a person. You know it has to be a house built on sand, eh? But the demimonde Christians are not like that. They’re gnostics, Quakers, Baptists, Baha’i Rastafarians, whatever— the most agreeable people in the underground if you ask me, and I’ve traded with everybody. So helpful. And no airs about being best friends with Jesus. They’re tight with Hiroko, and the Sufis as well. Some kind of mystic networking going on down there.” He cackled. “But Phyllis, now, and all those business fundamentalists— using religion to cover extortion, I hate that. Actually I never heard Phyllis speak in a religious manner after we landed.”
“Did you have much opportunity to hear Phyllis speak after we landed?”
Another laugh. “More than you might think! I saw more than you did in those years, Mister Lab Man! I had my little hidey-holes everywhere.”
Sax made a skeptical noise, and Desmond shouted a laugh and slapped him on the shoulder. “Who else could tell you that you and Hiroko were an item in the Underhill years, eh?”
“Hmm.”
“Oh yes, I saw a lot. Of course you could make that particular observation about practically any man in Underhill and be right. That vixen was keeping us all as a harem.”