Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,155
more help.”
“Each in his way,” the man said quietly. “We’ll be going now. We’ll keep track to see what you do.”
“Tell Hiroko I want to talk to her.”
The five men looked at him, the young one intense and angry.
The thin-faced man smiled briefly. “If I see her I will.”
One of the crouching men held out a diaphanous blue mass—an aerogel sponge, barely visible under the night-running lights. The hand holding it made a fist. Yes, a drug. He lunged out and caught the young one unawares, clawed the youth’s bare neck and then fell, paralyzed.
When he came to they were gone. He had a headache. He fell back onto the bed, into an uneasy sleep. The dream about Frank made an improbable return, and John told him about the visitation. “You’re a fool,” Frank said. “You don’t understand.”
When he woke again it was morning, swirling a dim burnt umber outside the windshield. The winds had appeared to be lessening in the last month, but it was hard to be sure. Shapes in the dust clouds appeared briefly and then fell back into chaos, in little sensory-deprivation hallucinations. It really was sensory deprivation, this storm, and getting very claustrophobic indeed. He ate some omeg, suited up and went outside and walked around, breathing talcum and bending over to follow the tracks of his visitors. They crossed bedrock and disappeared. A difficult rendezvous, he would have thought; a lost rover at night, how had they found it?
But if they had been tracking him …
Back inside he called up the satellites. Radar and IR got nothing but his rover. Even walkers would have shown on the IR, so presumably they had a refuge nearby. Easy to hide in mountains like these. He called up his Hiroko map and drew a rough circle around his location, bulging it north and south in the mountains. He had several circles on the Hiroko map by now, but none of them had been searched by ground crews with any thoroughness, and probably they never would be, as most of them were in chaotic terrain, ravaged land the size of Wyoming or Texas. “It’s a big world,” he muttered.
He wandered around the inside of the car, looking at the floor. Then he remembered the last thing he had done. He looked under his fingernails;a little skin matter was stuck there, yes. He got a sample dish from the little auto-clave, and carefully scraped what was there onto the dish. Genome identification was far beyond the rover’s capabilities, but any big lab ought to be able to identify the youth, if his genome was on record. If not, that too would be useful information. And maybe Ursula and Vlad could identify him by parentage.
He relocated the transponder trail that afternoon, and came down into Hellas Basin late the next day. He found Sax there, attending a conference on the new lake, although it appeared that it was turning into a conference on agriculture under artificial lighting. The next morning John took him out in the clear tunnels between buildings, and they walked in a shifting yellow murk, the sun a saffron glow in the clouds to the east. “I think I met the coyote,” John said.
“Did you! Did he tell you where Hiroko is?”
“No.”
Sax shrugged. It appeared he was distracted by a talk he had to give that evening. So John decided to wait, and that evening he attended the talk with the rest of the lake station occupants. Sax assured the crowd that atmospheric, surface, and permafrost microbacteria were growing at a rate that was a significant fraction of their theoretical maximums—about at 2 percent, to be precise—and that they were going to have to be considering the problems of outdoor cultivation within a few decades. Applause at this announcement was nonexistent, because everyone there was absorbed by horrible problems engendered by the Great Storm, which they seemed to think had begun as a result of a miscalculation of Sax’s. Surface insolation was still 25 percent normal, as one of them waspishly pointed out, and the storm was showing no signs of ending. Temperatures had dropped, and tempers were rising. All the new arrivals had never seen more than a few meters around them, and psychological problems ranging from ennui to catatonia were pandemic.
Sax dismissed all that with a mild shrug. “It’s the last global storm,” he said. “It will go down in history as some kind of heroic age. Enjoy it while it lasts.”