trusting the automatic pilot,” Coyote said, irritated. “It’s bad luck to discuss it.”
The car rolled down the road. After more than an hour’s descent there was a beep from the instrument panel, and the car turned into the curving wall of rock to their left. And there was a garage tube, clanking against their outer lock door.
Inside the garage a group of twenty or so people greeted them, and took them past a line of tall rooms to a cavernlike chamber. The rooms that the Bogdanovists had excavated into the side of the mohole were big, much bigger than those at Prometheus. The back rooms were ten metres high as a rule, and in some cases two hundred metres deep; and the main cavern rivalled Zygote itself, with big windows facing out onto the hole. Looking sideways through the window Nirgal saw that the glass seen from the outside looked like the rock face; the filtered coatings must have been clever indeed, because as the morning arrived, its light poured in very brightly. The windows’ view was limited to the far wall of the mohole, and a gibbous patch of sky above—but they gave the rooms a wonderful sense of spaciousness and light, a feeling of being under the sky that Zygote could not match.
Through that first day Nirgal was taken in hand by a small dark-skinned man named Hilali, who led him through rooms and interrupted people at their work to introduce him. People were friendly— “You must be one of Hiroko’s kids, eh? Oh, you’re Nirgal! Very nice to meet you! Hey John, Coyote’s here, party tonight!” —and they showed him what they were doing, leading him back into smaller rooms behind the ones fronting the mohole, where there were farms under bright light, and manufactories that seemed to extend back into the rock forever; and all of it very warm, as in a bathhouse, so that Nirgal was constantly sweating. “Where did you put all the excavated rock?” he asked Hilali, for one of the convenient things about cutting a dome under the polar cap, Hiroko had said, was that the excavated dry ice had simply been gassed off.
“It’s lining the road near the bottom of the mohole,” Hilali told him, pleased at the question. He seemed pleased with all Nirgal’s questions, as did everyone else; people in Vishniac seemed happy in general, a rowdy crowd who always partied to celebrate Coyote’s arrival—one excuse among many, Nirgal gathered.
Hilali took a call on the wrist from Coyote, and led Nirgal into a lab where they took a bit of skin from his finger. Then they made their way slowly back to the big cavern, and joined the crowd lining up by the kitchen windows at the back.
After eating a big spicy meal of beans and potatoes, they began to party in the cavern room. A huge undisciplined steel drum band with a fluctuating membership played rhythmic staccato melodies, and people danced to them for hours, pausing from time to time to drink an atrocious liquor called kavajava, or join a variety of games on one side of the room. After trying the kavajava, and swallowing a tab of an omegendorph given to him by Coyote, Nirgal ran in place while playing a bass drum with the band, then sat on top of a small grassy mound in the centre of the chamber, feeling too drunk to stand. Coyote had been drinking steadily but had no such problem; he was dancing wildly, hopping high off his toes and laughing. “You’ll never know the joy of your own g, boy!” he shouted at Nirgal. “You’ll never know!”
People came by and introduced themselves, sometimes asking Nirgal to exhibit his warming touch—a group of girls his age put his hands to their cheeks, which they had chilled with their drinks, and when he warmed them up they laughed round-eyed, and invited him to warm other parts of them; he got up and danced with them instead, feeling loose and dizzy, running in little circles to discharge some of the energy in him. When he returned to the knoll, buzzing, Coyote came weaving over and sat heavily beside him. “So fine to dance in this g, I never get over it.” He regarded Nirgal with a cross-eyed glare, his grey dreadlocks falling all over his head, and Nirgal noticed again how his face seemed to have cracked somehow, perhaps been broken at the jaw, so that one side was broader than the other. Something like that. Nirgal gulped at the sight.
Coyote took him by the shoulder and shook him hard. “It seems that I am your father, boy!” he exclaimed.
“You’re kidding!” An electric flush ran down Nirgal’s spine and out of his face as the two of them stared at each other, and he marvelled at how the white world could shock the green one so thoroughly. They clutched each other.
“I am not kidding!” Coyote said.
They stared at each other. “No wonder you’re so smart,” Coyote said, and laughed hilariously. “Ah ha ha ha! Ka wow! I hope it’s okay with you!”
“Sure,” Nirgal said, grinning but uncomfortable. He didn’t know Coyote well, and the concept of father was even vaguer to him than that of mother, so he wasn’t really sure what he felt. Genetic inheritance, sure, but what was that? They all got their genes somewhere, and the genes of ectogenes were transgenic anyway, or so they said.
But Coyote, though he cursed Hiroko in a hundred different ways, seemed to be pleased. “That vixen, that tyrant! Matriarchy my ass—she’s crazy! It amazes me the things she does! Although this has a certain justice to it. Yes it does, because Hiroko and I were an item back in the dawn of time, when we were young in England. That’s the reason I’m here on Mars at all. A stowaway in her closet, my whole fucking life long.” He laughed and clapped Nirgal on the shoulder again. “Well, boy, you will know better how you like the idea later on.”
He went back out to dance, leaving Nirgal to think it over. Watching Coyote’s gyrations, Nirgal could only shake his head; he didn’t know what to think, and at the moment thinking anything at all was remarkably difficult. Better to dance, or seek out the baths.
But they had no public baths. He ran around in circles on the dance floor, and later he returned to the same mound, and a group of the locals gathered around him and Coyote. “Like being the father of the Dalai Lama, eh? Don’t you get a name for that?”
“To hell with you man! Like I was saying, Ann says they stopped digging these 75° moholes because the lithosphere is thinner down here.” Coyote nodded portentously. “I want to go to one of the decommissioned moholes and start up its robots again, and see if they dig down far enough to start a volcano.”
Everyone laughed. But one woman shook her head. “If you do that they’ll come down here to check it out. If you’re going to do it, you should go north and hit one of the 60° moholes. They’re decommissioned too.”
“But the lithosphere up there is thicker, Ann says.”
“Sure, but the moholes are deeper too.”
“Hmm,” Coyote said.
And the conversation moved on to more serious matters, mostly the inevitable topics of shortages, and developments in the north. But at the end of that week, when they left Vishniac, by way of a different and longer tunnel, they headed north, and all Coyote’s previous plans had been thrown out the window. “That’s the story of my life, boy.”
On the fifth night of driving over the jumbled highlands of the south, Coyote slowed the rover, and circled the edge of a big old crater, subdued almost to the level of the surrounding plain. From a defile in the ancient rim one could see that the sandy crater floor was marred by a giant round black hole. This, apparently, was what a mohole looked like from the surface. A plume of thin frost stood in the air a few hundred metres over the hole, appearing from nothing like a magician’s trick. The edge of the mohole was bevelled so that there was a band of concrete funnelling down at about a 45° angle; it was hard to say how big this coping band was, because the mohole made it seem like no more than a strip. There was a high wire fence at its outer edge. “Hmm,” Coyote said, staring out the windshield. He backed up in the defile and parked, then slipped into a walker. “Back soon,” he said, and hopped in the lock.
