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. It’s a vertical shaft a kilometer across, dug straight down into the bedrock. There were four moholes started around the seventy-five-degree 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 favorite 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 eggplant black of night; they were on a steep~road, apparently spiraling 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 immense. “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 meters high as a rule, and in some cases two hundred meters deep; and the main cavern rivaled 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 center 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 gray dreadlocks falling all over his head, and Nirgal noticed again that 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 his face as the two of them stared at each other, and he marveled at how the white world could shock the green one so thoroughly, like lightning pulsing through flesh. They clutched each other.

“I am not kidding!” Coyote said.

They stared at each other. “No wonder you’re so smart,” Coyote said, and laughed hilariously. “Ah ha ha ha! Ka wow! I hope it’s okay with you!”

“Sure,” Nirgal said, grinning but uncomfortable. He didn’t know Coyote well, and the concept of father was even vaguer to him than that of mother, so he wasn’t really sure what he felt. Genetic inheritance, sure, but what was that? They all got their genes somewhere, and the genes of ectogenes were transgenic anyway, or so they said.

But Coyote, though he cursed Hiroko in a hundred different ‘ways, seemed to be pleased. “That vixen, that tyrant! Matriarchy my ass — she’s crazy! It amazes me the things she does! Although this has a certain justice to it. Yes it does, because Hiroko and I were an item back in the dawn of time, when we were young in England. That’s the reason I’m here on Mars at all. A stowaway in her closet, my whole fucking life long.” He laughed and clapped Nirgal on the shoulder again. “Well, boy, you will know better how you like the idea later on.”

He went back out to dance, leaving Nirgal to think it over. Watching Coyote’s gyrations, Nirgal could only shake his head; he didn’t know what to think, and at the moment thinking anything at all was remarkably difficult. Better to dance, or seek out the baths.