Kane stood up.The adrenaline leveled the room and kept him on his feet.“We need him.Where’s this cave you were talking about? Could you find it?”
“No way.And neither could you.There’s a dust storm blowing up out there. If we launch right now, we should still be okay. If we wait around we’re going to get stuck here.”
Kane pushed past her into the empty living room and started to open the front door.The resistance against his pull reminded him that he needed a mask and he looked around for one.
“Don’t do this, Kane.”
He saw the tank lying in a corner by the door and slung it under his arm.“I’ll be back,” he said.
Night had nearly fallen; a swollen, refracted sun oozed through an orange cloud that covered the horizon. Most of the window boxes along the west wall were occupied, but the colonists showed only a minimal interest in the approaching storm.They’d seen it all before, Kane thought.To them it would be as dull as rain in the tropics of Earth.At least half of them looked drunk or sedated, their faces slack and accepting.The adrenaline made Kane feel like a blur of light in a slow motion film.
He followed his voices to the south airlock, moved in a near frenzy through the neatly stacked helmets and life-support packs.That afternoon he thought he’d seen an infrared helmet, the only sure way he had of tracking Reese through the dust and darkness.
Assuming he was right, assuming Reese was with the kids in the cave. But he had to be.That was the Pattern.
Some of the rx suits still lay sprawled on the floor like blast victims; under one of them, Kane found the helmet. He slipped it over his head and powered up.The room shifted into cool yellows and greens, Kane’s handprints showing like orange bruises on the suit he’d just turned over.
He took off the helmet and suited up; the dexterity of his fingers unable to keep up with the urgency screaming in his brain. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he opened the locker where he’d left his hipari and took out the Colt .38.
A gift from Morgan, he now realized, with a hypnotic or implanted instruction to forget it until the subliminals had turned on his software in Deimos space. He still wasn’t quite sure what he was to do with it, but that too, he felt confident, would come to him.
This time he thought to check the cylinder of the gun; dull brass showed in five of the chambers, with the last, under the hammer, empty. Kane threw out a can of emergency rations and fitted the pistol into his chest pack, barely getting the velcro fasteners closed over it.
He was raising the helmet into place when he saw the blood.
Three coin-sized splatters lay on the floor under the airlock controls; a long smear, carrying a single thumbprint, stretched across the edge of the airlock door. Kane did not doubt for an instant that it was Reese’s.
He sealed the O-rings on his helmet and crossed through the airlock, into the desert. Heat puffed out in yellow clouds around him as he stepped out onto the dark green regolith.Arsia Mons was preternaturally clear in the infrared screen of the helmet, sharply profiled in shades of yellow-green.As he moved toward the mountain, he began to see Reese’s footprints as faintly lighter splotches on the cold green ground. Then, behind a tall vertical outcrop, he saw the edges of a metal airlock, glowing an inviting red.
The wind around him was strong enough to lift particles of sand, meaning a wind velocity of close to a hundred miles an hour, but the air itself was so thin that he could barely feel its resistance.The electronics of his helmet divided the last blue-white light of the sunset into quantified brightness bands, the pattern distorted by the turbulence of the upper atmosphere.
The eerie, digitally-processed beauty of the night had only a peripheral effect on Kane; it was a stage set, a cyclorama, for a play in which he had been completely consumed by his role.
His voices sang to him as he climbed the shining mountain.
His last throw of the I Ching had given Reese hexagram 56, La, the Wanderer.“Strange lands and separation are the wanderer’s lot.”“Fire on the mountain” was the image, and Reese pictured Arsia Mons blazing in volcanic splendor, the way it must have looked hundreds of thousands of years ago.
He put the coins in the pocket of his pants, a final, sentimental gesture, and put the book into the duffel under his bed. He could not seem to get warm. He knew it was the hypothermia of dread, his central nervous system desensitizing him for imminent disaster.
Takahashi sat in the next room, programming some complex swindle into the main computer. Reese didn’t want to interrupt, but time was running out.
He stood behind Takahashi’s chair and watched the cursor shooting across lines of programming.“Listen, man,” he said.“There’s trouble.”
“What kind?” Takahashi’s concentration did not waver; his fingers rattled the keyboard like a maraca.
“Russians.”
“Have they landed yet?”
I shouldn’t be surprised, Reese thought. He’s known everything else. “Half of them here, half still in orbit, with a laser.”
Takahashi nodded and fed his program to the compiler.“Are they going to use it, you think?”
“Yeah,” Reese said.“I think they are.They gave Curtis until midnight, but I don’t think Curtis is going to play.”
“Curtis is an asshole.What does this do to your plans?”
“My plans?” Reese said.
“I’m not stupid, Reese. I know what those kids have. I heard the same tape you did, and others besides. I know what was in that base camp on Deimos—an astrometry unit. I could see the diskette under your shirt yesterday and today it’s gone.”
“Don’t try to stop me,Takahashi.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, turning back to scan for errors.
“I don’t get you. If Morgan knew—”
“Morgan doesn’t know. I didn’t send him any message last night. The last he heard we were heading down toward the surface yesterday morning.”Takahashi almost smiled.“I expect he’s half out of his mind.”
“What kind of game are you playing? I thought you were Morgan’s man, all the way.”
“I’m a company man,”Takahashi said.“There’s a difference. But none of that is important now.You get on out of here, and I’ll do what I can about the Russians.”
“Takahashi, I—”
Takahashi shook his head.“Good luck,” he said.
Reese took his hand.“Thanks,” he said, and left him there.
In the long afternoon under the dome the Martians were carrying on with their fishbowl lives. By now Molly would be huddled with Curtis, no doubt trying to talk him out of some desperate cowboy-and-Indian shootout with the Russians. He’d already said goodbye to her anyway, as best he could. He would have liked to have seen Kane one more time, to somehow divest himself of the responsibility he felt for Kane’s being here, to shed the paternal role he’d never wanted.
But maybe it would be easier this way.
He recognized the dark clouds boiling out of the south and thought they could only make it easier for him to get away from the dome. He could feel his emotions pulling back deeper inside him, the way the heat of his body had pulled back toward the core, cutting him off from the rest of the world, severing the connections. Soon, he thought, he would look like one of the zombie farmers, with no recognition left in his eyes.
He fought not to respond to the colors of the evening, so rich that he could almost smell them through his oxygen mask: the damp ground of the fields, the sharp yellows and browns of pineapples, the soft pinks of flowering cacti. All things are full of weariness, he told himself, a man cannot utter it. He thought instead of the narrow, filmy rings of Uranus, of the green, staring eye of the planetary nebula in Lyra.
He went into the south changing room and closed the door.
Something had happened here earlier today; the suits and helmets had been badly knocked around. Reese ignored the damage, took an extra large suit from the far end of the rack, and started to take his shoes off.