digested the implications of this as they drove through the night. Coyote went on about the hydrogen peroxide standard and the nitrogen standard, a new system of Vlad and Marina’s, and Nirgal did his best to follow but found it hard going, either because the concepts were difficult or else because Coyote spent most of his explanations fulminating over the difficulties he encountered in certain sanctuaries. Nirgal decided to ask Sax or Nadia about it when he got home, and stopped listening.
The land they were crossing now was dominated by crater rings, the newer ones overlapping and even burying older ones. “This is called saturation cratering. Very ancient ground.” A lot of the craters had no raised rims at all, but were simply shallow flat-bottomed round holes in the ground. “What happened to the rims?”
“Worn away.”
“By what?”
“Ann says ice, and wind. She says as much as a kilometre was stripped off the southern highlands over time.”
“That would take away everything!”
“But then more came back. This is old land.”
In between craters the land was covered with loose rock, and it was unbelievably uneven; there were dips, rises, hollows, knolls, trenches, grabens, uplifts, hills and dales; never even a moment’s flatness, except on crater rims and occasional low ridges, both of which Coyote used as roads when he could. But the track he followed over this lumpy landscape was still tortuous, and Nirgal could not believe it was memorised. He said as much, and Coyote laughed. “What do you mean memorised? We’re lost!”
But not really, or not for long. A mohole plume appeared over the horizon, and Coyote drove for it.
“Knew it all along,” he muttered. “This is Vishniac mohole. There were four moholes started around the 75° latitude line, and two of them are no longer occupied, even by robots. Vishniac is one of the two, and it’s been taken over by a bunch of Bogdanovists who live down inside it.” He laughed. “It’s a wonderful idea, because they can dig into the side wall along the road to the bottom, and down there they can put out as much heat as they want and no one can tell that it’s not just more mohole outgassing. So they can build anything they like, even process uranium for reactor fuel rods. It’s an entire little industrial city now. Also one of my favourite places, very big on partying.”
He drove them into one of the many small trenches cutting the land, then braked and tapped at his screen, and a big rock swung out from the side of the trench, revealing a black tunnel. Coyote drove into the tunnel and the rock door closed behind them. Nirgal had thought he was beyond surprise at this point, but he watched round-eyed as they drove down the tunnel, its rough rock walls just outside the edges of the boulder car. It seemed to go on forever. “They’ve dug a number of approach tunnels, so that the mohole itself can look completely unvisited. We have about twenty kilometers to go.”
Eventually Coyote turned off the headlights. Their car rolled out into the dim aubergine black of night; they were on a steep road, apparently spiralling down the wall of the mohole. Their instrument panel lights were like tiny lanterns, and looking through his reflected image Nirgal could see that the road was four or five times as wide as the car. The full extent of the mohole itself was impossible to see, but by the curve of the road he could tell that it was a big hole, perhaps a kilometre across. “Are you sure we’re turning at the right speed?” he said anxiously.
“I am 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
