But Nadia said, “The cap is thicker back there. It will be a long time before it sublimes enough to trouble us. By that time everything will have changed.”
There was a silence, and then Hiroko said, “It’s a good idea. We can hold on here while a new dome is being melted, and move things over as space becomes available. It should only take a few months.”
“Shikata ga nai,” Maya said sardonically. Of course there were other choices. But she looked pleased at the prospect of a big new project, and so did Nadia. And the rest of them looked relieved that they had an option which kept them together, and hidden. The issei, Nirgal saw suddenly, were very frightened of exposure. He sat back, wondering at that, thinking of the open cities he had visited with Coyote.
They used steam hoses powered by the Rickover to melt another tunnel to the hangar, and then a long tunnel under the cap, until the ice above was three hundred metres deep. Back there they began subliming a new round domed cavern, and digging a shallow lakebed for a new lake. Most of the CO2 gas was captured, refrigerated to the outside temperature, and released; the rest was broken down into oxygen and carbon, and stored for use.
While the excavation went on they dug up the shallow runner roots of the big snow bamboos, and cantilevered them out of the ground and hauled them on their largest truck down the tunnel to the new cave, scraping leaves all the way. They disassembled the village’s buildings, and relocated them. The robot bulldozer and trucks ran all hours of the day and night, scooping up the battered sand of the old dunes and carting it back down into the new cave; there was too much biomass in it (including Simon) to leave behind. In essence they were taking everything inside the shell of Zygote dome along with them. When they were done, the old cave was nothing but an empty bubble at the bottom of the polar cap, sandy ice above, icy sand below, the air in it nothing but the ambient Martian atmosphere, 170 millibars of mostly CO2 gas, at 240° Kelvin. Thin poison.
One day Nirgal went back with Peter to take a look at the old place. It was shocking to see the only home he had ever had, reduced to such a shell—the ice all cracked above, the sand all torn up, the raw root holes of the village gaping like horrible wounds, the lakebed scraped clear even of its algae. It looked small and ramshackle, some desperate animal’s den. Moles in a hole, Coyote had said. Hiding from vultures. “Let’s get out of here,” Peter said sadly, and they walked together down the long bare poorly-lit tunnel to the new dome, stepping along the concrete road Nadia had built, now all ratcheted with treadmarks.
They laid out the new dome in a new pattern, with the village away from the tunnel lock, near an escape tunnel that ran far under the ice, to an exit in upper Chasma Australe. The greenhouses were set nearer the perimeter lights, and the dune crests were higher than before, and the weather equipment was set right next to the Rickover. There were any number of small improvements of that sort, which kept it from being a replica of their old home. And every day they were so busy with the work of constructing it that there was no time to think much about the change; morning classes in the schoolhouse had been cancelled since the fall, and now the kids were merely a rotating work crew, assigned to whoever needed help the most on that particular day. Sometimes the adult overseeing them would try to make their work into a lesson—Hiroko and Nadia were especially good at this—but they had little time to spare, and only added an explanatory sentence to instructions that were too simple to need explanation in any case: tightening wall modules with alien wrenches, carrying around planters and algae jars in the greenhouses, and so on. It was just work—they were part of the work force, which was too small for the task even so, despite the versatile robots that looked like rovers stripped of their exteriors. And running around, doing the work, Nirgal was for the most part happy.
But once as he left the schoolhouse and saw the dining hall, rather than the big shoots of Crèche Crescent, the sight brought him up short. His old familiar world was gone, gone forever. That was how time worked. It sent a pang through him that brought tears to his eyes, and he spent the rest of that day somewhat stunned and distant, as if always a step or two behind himself, watching everything that happened drained of emotion, detached as he had been after Simon’s death, exiled to the white world one step outside the green. There was nothing to indicate that he would ever come out of such a melancholy state, and how could he know if he ever would? All those days of his childhood were gone, along with Zygote itself, and they would never come back, and this day too would pass and disappear, this dome too slowly sublime away and crash in on itself. Nothing would last. So what was the point? For hours at a time this question plagued him, taking the taste and colour out of everything, and when Hiroko noticed how subdued he was, and asked him what was wrong, he simply asked her outright. There was that advantage to Hiroko; you could ask her anything, including the fundamental questions. “Why do we do all this, Hiroko? When it all goes white no matter what?”
She stared at him, birdlike, her head cocked to one side. He thought he could see her affection for him in that cock of the head, but he wasn’t sure; as he got older he felt he understood her (along with everyone else) less and less.
She said, “It is sad the old dome is gone, isn’t it? But we must focus on what is coming. This too is viriditas. To concentrate not on what we have created, but what we will create. The dome was like a flower which wilts and falls, but contains the seed of a new plant, which grows and then there are new flowers and new seeds. The past is gone. Thinking about it will only make you melancholy. Why, I was a girl in Japan once, on Hokkaido Island! Yes, as young as you! And I can’t tell you how far gone that is. But here we are now, you and me, surrounded by these plants and these people, and if you pay attention to them, and how you can make them increase and prosper, then the life comes back into things. You feel the kami inside all things, and that is all you need. This moment itself is all we ever live in.”
“And the old days?”
She laughed at that. “You’re growing up. Well, you must remember the old days from time to time. They were good ones, weren’t they? You had a happy childhood, that is a blessing. But so will these days be good. Take this moment right here, and ask yourself, What now is lacking? Hmmm? … Coyote says that he wants you and Peter to go along with him on another trip. Maybe you should go and get out under the sky again, what do you say?”
So preparations for another trip with Coyote were made, and they continued to work on the new Zygote, informally rechristened Gamete. At night in the relocated dining hall the adults talked for a long time about their situation. Sax and Vlad and Ursula, among others, wanted back into the surface world. They couldn’t do their real work properly in the hidden sanctuaries, they wanted back into the full flood of medical science, terraforming, construction. “We’ll never be able to disguise ourselves,” Hiroko said. “No one can change their genomes.”
“It’s not our genomes we should change, but the records,” Sax said. “That’s what Spencer has done. He’s got his physical characteristics into a new record identity.”
“And we did cosmetic surgery on his face,” Vlad said.
“Yes, but it was minimal because of our age, right? We none of us look the same. Anyway, if you do something like what he did, we could take on new identities.”
Maya said, “Did Spencer really get into all the records?”
Sax shrugged. “He was left behind in Cairo, and had the chance to get into some of the ones being used now for security purposes. That has been enough. I’d like to try something similar. Let’s see what Coyote says about it. He’s not in any records at all, so he must know how he did it.”
“He’s been hidden from the beginning,” Hiroko said. “That’s different.”
“Yes, but he might have some ideas.”
“We could just move into the demi-monde,” Nadia pointed out, “and stay off the records entirely. I think I’d like to try that.”
Maya nodded.
Night after night they talked these matters over. “Well, a little change of appearance might be in order, you know Phyllis is back, we have to remember that.”
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