“I want you to go out to the Uranian system,” Jackie was saying. “They’re just settling out there, and I want to get them early. You can pass along a word to the Galileans as well, they’re getting out of line.”
“I should do a co-op stint,” Zo said, “or it will become too obvious that it’s a front.”
After many years of running with a feral co-op based in Lunae, Zo had joined one of the co-ops that functioned in part as a front for Free Mars, allowing Zo and other operatives to do party work without it becoming obvious that that was their principal activity. The co-op Zo had joined built and installed crater screens, but she hadn’t worked for them in any real job for over a year.
Jackie nodded. “Put in some time, then take another leave. In a month or so.”
“Okay.”
Zo was interested in seeing the outer satellites, so it was easy to agree. But Jackie only nodded, showing no sign of awareness that Zo might not have agreed. Her mother was not a very imaginative person, when all was said and done. No doubt Zo’s father was the source of that quality in Zo, ka bless him. Zo did not want to know his identity, which at this point would only have been an imposition on her freedom, but she felt a surge of gratitude to him for his genes, her salvation from pure Jackieness.
Zo stood, too tired to take her mother any longer. “You look tired, and I’m beat,” she said. She kissed Jackie on the cheek as she went off to her room. “I love you. Maybe you should think about getting the treatment again.”
Her co-op was based in Moreux Crater, in the Protonilus Mensae, between Mangala and Bradbury Point. It was a big crater, puncturing the long slope of the Great Escarpment as it fell down toward the Boone’s Neck peninsula. The coop was always developing new varieties of molecular netting to replace earlier nets, and the old tent fabrics; the mesh they had installed over Moreux was the latest thing, the polyhydroxybutyrate plastic of its fibers harvested from soybean plants, engineered to produce the PHB in the plants’ chlbroplasts. The mesh held in the equivalent of a daily inversion layer, which made the air inside the crater about thirty percent thicker and considerably warmer than the outside air. Nets like this one made it easier to get biomes through the tough transition from tent to open air, and when permanently installed, they created nice meso-climates at higher altitudes or latitudes. Moreux extended up to forty-three degrees north, and winters outside the crater were always going to be fairly severe. With the mesh in place they were able to sustain a warm high-altitude forest, srjorting an exotic array of plants engineered from the East African volcanoes, New Guinea, and the Himalayas. Down on the crater floor in the summer the days were seriously hot, and the weird blooming spiky trees as fragrant as perfume.
The crater’s inhabitants lived in spacious apartments dug into the northern arc of the rim, in four set-back levels of balconies and broad window walls, overlooking the green fronds of the Kilimanjaro slope forest underneath them. The balconies baked in the sun in the winter, and rested under vine-covered trellises in the summer, when daytime temperatures soared to 305 K, and people muttered about changing to a coarser mesh to allow more hot air to escape, or even working up a system where they could simply roll off the mesh during the summer.
Zo spent most of every day working on the outer apron or under it, grinding out as much of a full work stint as she could before it came time to leave for the outer satellites.
The work this time was interesting, involving long trips underground in mining tunnels, following veins and layers in the crater’s old splosh apron. The impact brecciation had created all kinds of useful metamorphic rock, and greenhouse-gas minerals were a common secondary find throughout the apron. The co-op was therefore working on new methods of mining, as well as extracting some feedstocks for mesh looms, hoping to make marketable improvements in mining methods that would leave the surface undisturbed while the regolith under it was still being mined intensively. Most of the underground work was of course robotic, but there were various human-optimum tasks still, as there always would be in mining. Zo found it very satisfying to spelunk in the dim submartian world, to spend all day in the bowels of the planet between great plates of rock, in caves with their close rough black walls gleaming with crystals, the powerful lights exploding off them; to check samples, and explore newly cut galleries, in a forest of dull magnesium uprights jammed into place by the robot excavators; to work like a troglodyte, seeking rare treasure underground; and then to emerge from the elevator car, blinking madly at the sudden sunlight of late afternoon, the air bronze or salmon or amber as the sun blazed through the purpling sky like an old friend, warming them as they trudged up the slope of the apron to the rim gate, where the round forest of Moreux lay below them, a lost world, home to jaguars and vultures. Once inside the mesh there was a cable car that dropped on looping wires to the settlement, but Zo usually went instead to the gatehouse and got her birdsuit out of its locker, and slipped into it and zipped up, and ran off a flier’s platform and spread her wings, and flew in lazy spirals down to the north rim town, to dinner on one of the dining terraces, watching parrots and cockatiels and lorikeets dart about trying to scavenge a meal. For work it was not bad. She slept well.
One day a group of atmospheric engineers came by to see how much air was escaping through the Moreux mesh in the midday summer heat. There were a lot of old ones in the group, people with the blasted eyes and diffuse manner of the longtime field areologist. One of these issei was Sax Russell himself, a small bald man with a crooked nose, and skin as wrinkled as that of the tortoises clomping around the crater floor. Zo stared and stared at the old man, one of the most famous people in Martian history; it was bizarre to have such a figure out of the books saying hello to her, as if George Washington or Archimedes might dodder by next, the dead hand of the past still there living among them, perpetually dumbfounded by all the latest developments.
Russell certainly appeared dumbfounded; he looked thoroughly stunned through the whole orientation meeting, and left the atmospheric inquiries to his associates, and spent his time staring down at the forest below the town. When someone at dinner introduced Zo to him, he blinked at her with a tortoise’s dim cunning. “I taught your mother once.”
“Yes,” Zo said.
“Will you show me the crater floor?” he asked.
“I usually fly over it,” Zo said, surprised.
“I was hoping to walk,” he said, and looked at her, blinking.
The novelty value was so great that she agreed to join him.
They started out in the cool of the morning, following the shade under the eastern rim. Balsa and saal trees intersected overhead, forming a high canopy through which lemurs howled and leaped. The old man walked slowly along, peering at the heedless creatures of the forest, and he spoke seldom, mostly to ask if Zo knew the names of the various ferns and trees. All she could identify for him were the birds. “The names of plants go in one ear and out the other, I’m afraid,” she admitted cheerfully.
His forehead wrinkled at this.
“I think that helps me to see them better,” she added.
“Really.” He looked around again, as if trying it. “Does that mean you don’t see the birds as well as the plants?”
“They’re different. They’re my brothers and sisters, they have to have names. It’s part of them. But this stuff” — she gestured at the green fronds around them, giant ferns under spiky flowering trees — “this stuff is nameless, really. We make up names, but they don’t really have them.”