LITMIR.BIZ

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Jackie’s cold upper arm. He saw himself back into the dream, felt himself swimming through the sky. Heat from the fingertips. The white world in the green.

      He searched for the spot in his middle that was always warm, even now when he was so cold. As long as he was alive it would be there. He found it, and with every breath he pushed it outward through his flesh. It was hard but he could feel it working, the warmth travelling out into his ribs like a fire, down his arms, down his legs, into his hands and feet. It was his left hand holding onto Jackie, and he glanced at her bare body with its white goosepimpled skin, and concentrated on sending the heat into her. He was shivering slightly now, but not from the cold.

      “You’re warm,” Jackie exclaimed.

      “Feel it,” he said to her, and for a few moments she leaned into his grip. Then with an alarmed look she pulled free, and stepped down into the bath. Nirgal stood on the edge until his shivering stopped.

      “Wow,” Nadia said. “That’s some kind of metabolic burn. I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never seen it.”

      “Do you know how you do it?” Sax asked him. He and Nadia and Michel and Rya were staring at him with a curious expression, which he did not want to meet.

      Nirgal shook his head. He sat down on the concrete coping of the bath, suddenly exhausted. He stuck his feet in the water, which felt like liquid flame. Fish in water, sloshing free, out in the air, the fire within, white in the green, alchemy, soaring with eagles … thunderbolts from his fingertips!

      People looked at him. Even the Zygotes gave him sidelong looks, when he laughed or said something unusual, when they thought he wouldn’t see. It was easiest just to ignore it, and pretend he didn’t notice. But that was hard with the occasional visitors, who were more direct. “Oh, you’re Nirgal,” one short red-haired woman said. “I’ve heard you’re bright.” Nirgal, who was constantly crashing against the limits of his understanding, blushed and shook his head while the woman calmly surveyed him. She made her judgement and smiled and shook his hand. “I’m glad to meet you.”

      One day when they were five Jackie brought an old lectern to school with her, on a day when Maya was teaching. Ignoring Maya’s glare, she showed it to the others. “This is my grandfather’s AI. It has a lot of what he said in it. Kasei gave it to me.” Kasei was leaving Zygote to move to one of the other sanctuaries. But not the one where Esther lived.

      Jackie turned the lectern on. “Pauline, play back something my grandfather said.”

      “Well, here we are,” said a man’s voice.

      “No, something different. Play back something he said about the hidden colony.”

      The man’s voice said, “The hidden colony must still have contacts with surface settlements. There’s too many things they can’t manufacture while hiding. Nuclear fuel rods for one, I should think. Those are controlled pretty well, and it could be that records would show where they’ve been disappearing.”

      The voice stopped. Maya told Jackie to put the lectern away, and she started another history lesson, the nineteenth century told in Russian sentences so short and harsh that her voice shook. And then more algebra. Maya was very insistent that they learn their math well. “You’re getting a horrible education,” she would say, shaking her head darkly. “But if you learn your math you can catch up later.” And she would glare at them and demand the next answer.

      Nirgal stared at her, remembering when she had been their Bad Witch. It would be strange to be her, so fierce sometimes and so cheerful others. With most of the people in Zygote, he could look at them and feel what it would be like to be them. He could see it in their faces, just like he could see the second colour inside the first; it was that kind of gift, or like his hyper-acute sense of temperature. But he didn’t understand Maya.

      In the winter they made forays onto the surface, to the nearby crater where Nadia was building a shelter, and the dark ice-spangled dunes beyond. But when the fog hood lifted they had to stay under the dome, or at most go out to the window gallery. They weren’t to be seen from above. No one was sure if the police were still watching from space or not, but it was best to be safe. Or so the issei said. Peter was often away, and his travels had led him to believe that the hunt for hidden colonies must be over. And that the hunt was hopeless in any case. “There are resistance settlements that aren’t hiding at all. And there’s so much noise now thermally and visually, and even over the radio,” he said. “They could never check all the signals they’re getting.”

      But Sax only said, “Algorithmic search programs are very effective,” and Maya insisted on keeping out of sight, and hardening their electronics, and sending all their waste heat deep into the heart of the polar cap. Hiroko agreed with Maya on this, and so they all complied. “It’s different for us,” Maya said to Peter, looking haunted.

      There was a mohole, Sax told them one morning at school, about two hundred kilometres to the north-west. The cloud they sometimes saw in that direction was its plume—big and still on some days, on others whipping off east in thin tatters. The next time Coyote came through they asked him at dinner if he had visited it, and he told them that he had and that the mohole’s shaft penetrated to very near the centre of Mars, and that its bottom was nothing but bubbling molten fiery lava.

      “That’s not true,” Maya said dismissively. “They only go down ten or fifteen kilometres. Their floors are hard rock.”

      “But hot rock,” Hiroko said. “And twenty kilometres now, I hear.”

      “And so they do our work for us,” Maya complained to Hiroko. “Don’t you think we are parasites on the surface settlements? Your viriditas wouldn’t get far without their engineering.”

      “It will prove to be a symbiosis,” Hiroko said calmly. She stared at Maya until Maya got up and walked away. Hiroko was the only one in Zygote who could stare Maya down.

      Hiroko, Nirgal thought as he regarded his mother after this exchange, was very strange. She talked to him and to everyone else as an equal, and clearly to her everyone was an equal; but no one was special. He remembered very keenly when it had been different, when the two of them had been like two parts of a whole. But now she only took the same interest in him that she took in everyone else, her concern impersonal and distant. She would be the same no matter what happened to him, he thought. Nadia, or even Maya, cared for him more. And yet Hiroko was mother to them all. And Nirgal, like most of the rest of the regulars in Zygote, still went down to her little stand of bamboo when he was in need of something he couldn’t find from ordinary people—some solace, or advice …

      But as often as not, when he did that he would find her and her little inner group “being silent”, and if he wanted to stay he would have to stop talking. Sometimes this lasted for days at a time, until he stopped dropping by. Then again he might arrive during the areophany, and be swept up in the ecstatic chanting of the names of Mars, becoming an integral part of that tight little band, right in the heart of the world, with Hiroko herself at his side, her arm around him, squeezing hard.

      That was love of a sort, and he cherished it; but it was not as it had been in the old days, when they had walked the beach together.

      One morning he went into the school and came on Jackie and Dao in the coatroom. They jumped as he entered, and by the time he had got his coat off and gone into the schoolroom he knew they had been kissing.

      After school he circled the lake in the bluewhite glow of a summer afternoon, watching the wave machine rise and pulse down, like the clamping sensations in his chest. Pain curved through him like the swells moving over the water. He couldn’t help it, even though it was ridiculous and he knew it. There was a lot of kissing going on among them these days in the bathhouse, as they splashed and tugged and pushed and tickled. The girls kissed each other and said it was “practice kissing” that didn’t count, and sometimes they turned this practice on the boys; Nirgal had been kissed by Rachel many times, and also by Emily and Tiu and Nanedi, and once the latter two had held him and kissed his ears in an attempt to embarrass

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