Blue Mars (32 page)

The next day she drove up Kasei Vallis
to the west, toward Echus Chasma. Up and
up she drove, on broad bench after bench, making easy progress, until she came
to where Kasei curved left and up onto the floor of Echus. The curve was one of
the biggest, most obvious water-carved features on the planet. But now she
found that the flat arroyo floor was covered by dwarf trees, so small they were
almost shrubs: black-barked, thorny, the dark green leaves as glossy and
razor-edged as holly leaves. Moss blanketed the ground underneath these black
trees, but very little else; it was a single-species forest, covering Kasei
Vallis from canyon wall to canyon wall, filling the great curve like some
oversized smut.

By necessity Ann drove right over top of the low forest, and the
rover tilted this way and that as the branches, tough as manzanita, stubbornly
gave under its wheels and then whipped back into place when they were freed. It
would be nearly impossible to walk through this canyon anymore, Ann thought,
this deep-walled canyon so narrow and rounded, a kind of Utah of the
imagination—or so it had been—now like the black forest of a fairy tale,
inescapable, filled with flying black things, and a white shape seen scuttling
in the dusk. . . . There was no sign of the UNTA security complex that had once
occupied the turn of the valley.

A curse on your house to the seventh generation, a curse on the
innocent land as well. Sax had been tortured here, and so he had sown fireseed
in the ground and torched the place, causing a thorn forest to sprout and cover
it. And they called scientists rational creatures! A curse on their house too,
Ann thought with teeth clenched, to the seventh generation and seven after
that.

She hissed and drove on, up Echus, toward the steep volcanic cone
of Tharsis Tholis. There was a town there, tucked on the side of the volcano
where the slope leveled off. The bear had told her Peter was headed there, and
so she avoided it. Peter, the land drowned; Sax, the land burned. Once he had
been hers. On this rock I will build. Peter Tempe Terra, the Rock of the Land
of Time. The new man, Homo martial. Who had betrayed them. Remember.

On she drove south, up the slope of the Tharsis Bulge, until the
cone of Ascraeus hove into view. A mountain continent, puncturing the horizon.
Pavonis had been infested and overgrown because of its equatorial position, and
the little advantage that that gave the elevator cable. But Ascraeus, just five
hundred kilometers northeast of Pavonis, had been left alone. No one lived
there; very few people had ever even ascended it. Just a few areologists now
and then, to study its lava and occasional pyroclastic ash flows, which were
both colored the red nearest black.

She drove onto its lower slopes, gentle and wavy. Ascraeus had
been one of the classic albedo feature names, as it was a mountain so big it
was easily visible from Earth. Ascraeus Lacus. This was during the canal mania,
and so they had decided it was a lake. Pavonis in that era had been called
Phoenicus Lacus, Phoenix Lake. Ascra, she read, was the birthplace of Hesiod,
“situated on the right of Mount Helicon, on a high and rugged place.” So though
they had thought it a lake, they had named it after a mountain place. Perhaps
their subconscious minds had understood the telescope images after all.
Ascraeus was in general a poetic name for the pastoral, Helicon being the
Boetian mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses. Hesiod had looked up from his
plow one day and seen the mountain, and found he had a story to tell. Strange
the birth of myths, strange the old names that they lived among and ignored,
while they continued to tell the old stories over and over again with their
lives.

It was the steepest of the big four volcanoes, but there was no
encircling escarpment, as around Olympus Mons; so she could put the rover in
low gear and grind on up, as if taking off into space, in slow motion. Lean
back in her seat and take a nap. Head on the headrest; relax. Wake up on
arrival, up at twenty-seven kilometers above sea level, the same height as all
the other three big ones; that was as high as a mountain could get on Mars,
basically, it was the isostatic limit, at which point the lithosphere began to
sag under the weight of all that rock; all of the big four had maxed out, they
could grow no higher. A sign of their size and their great age.

Very old, yes, but at the same time the surface lava of Ascraeus
was among the youngest igneous rock on Mars, weathered only slightly by wind
and sun. As the lava sheets had cooled they had stiffened in their descent,
leaving low curved bulges to ascend or bypass. A distinct trail of rover tracks
zigzagged up the slope, avoiding steep sections at the bottoms of these flows,
taking advantage of a big loose network of ramps and flowbacks. In any
permanent shade, spindrift had settled into banks of dirty hard-packed snow;
shadows were now a filmy blackened white, as if she drove through a
photographic negative, her spirits plummeting inexplicably as she drove ever
higher. Behind her she could see more and more of the conical northern flank of
the volcano, and north Tharsis beyond that, all the way to the Echus wall, a
low line over a hundred kilometers away. Much of what she could see was patchy
with snowdrifts, windslab, firn. Freckled white. The shady sides of volcanic
cones often became heavily glaciated.

There on a rockface, bright emerald moss. Everything was turning
green.

But as she continued to ascend, day after day, up and up beyond
all imagining, the snow patches became thinner, less frequent. Eventually she
was twenty kilometers above the datum—twenty-one above sea level—nearly seventy
thousand feet above the ice!—more than twice as high as Everest was above
Earth’s oceans; and still the cone of the volcano rose above her, a full seven
thousand meters more! Right up into the darkening sky, right up into space.

Far below scrolled a smooth flat layer of cloud, obscuring
Tharsis. As if the white sea were chasing her up the slope. Up at this level
there were no clouds, at least on this day; sometimes thunderheads would tower
up beside the mountain, other days cirrus clouds could be seen overhead,
slashing the sky with a dozen thin sickles. Today the sky above was a clear
purple indigo suffused with black, pricked with a few daytime stars at the
zenith, Orion standing faint and alone. Out to the east of the volcano’s summit
streamed a thin cloud, a peak banner, so faint she could see the dark sky
through it. There wasn’t much moisture up here, nor much atmosphere either.
There would always be a tenfold difference between the air pressure at sea
level and up here on the big volcanoes; pressure up here must therefore be
about thirty-five millibars, very little more than what had existed when they
had arrived.

Nevertheless she spotted tiny flecks of lichen in hollows on the
tops of rocks, in pits that caught some snow and then a lot of sun. They were
almost too small to see. Lichen: a symbiotic team of algae and fungus, working
together to survive, even in thirty millibars. It was hard to believe what life
would endure. So strange.

So strange, in fact, that she suited up and went out to look at
them. Up here one had to employ all the old careful habits: secure walker, lock
doors; out into the bright glare of low space.

The rocks that harbored the lichen were the kind of flat
sunporches on which marmots would have sunbathed, if they could have lived so
high. Instead, only little pinheads of yellow green, or battleship gray. Flake
lichen, the wrist-pad guide said. Bits of it torn away in storms, blown up
here, falling on rocks, sticking like little vegetable limpets. The kind of
thing only Hiroko could explain.

Living things. Michel had said that she loved stones and not men
because she had been mistreated, her mind damaged. Hippocampus significantly
smaller, strong startle reaction, a tendency toward dissociation. And so she
had found a man as much like a stone as she could. Michel too had loved that
quality in Simon, he told her—such a relief in the Underbill years to have even
one such charge, a man you could trust, quiet and solid, that you could heft in
your hand and feel the weight of.

But Simon wasn’t the only one in the world like that, j Michel had
pointed out. That quality rested in the others as well, intermixed and less
pure, but still there. Why could she not love that quality of obdurate
endurance in other people, in every living thing? They were only trying to
exist, like any rock or planet. There was a mineral stubbornness in all of
them.

Wind keened past her helmet and over the shards of lava, humming
in her air hose, drowning out the sound of her breath. The sky more black than
indigo here, except low on the horizon, where it was a hazy purple violet,
topped by a band of clear dark blue ... oh who could believe it would ever change,
up here on the slope of Ascraeus Mons, why hadn’t they settled up here to
remind themselves of what they had come to, of what they had been given by Mars
and then so profligately thrown away.

Back to the rover. She continued on up.

She was above silver cirrus clouds, just west of the volcano’s
diaphanous summit banner. In the lee of the jet stream. To ascend was to travel
into the past, above all lichen and bacteria. Though she had no doubt they were
still there, hiding inside the first layers of the rock. Chasmoen-dolithic
life, like the mythic little red people, the microscopic gods who had spoken to
John Boone, their own local Hesiod. So people said.

Life everywhere. The world was turning green. But if you couldn’t
see the greenness—if it made no difference to the land—surely it was welcome to
the task? Living creatures. Michel had said to her, you love stones because of
the stony quality that life has! It all comes back to life. Simon, Peter; on
this rock I will build my church. Why could she not love that stony quality in
every thing?

The rover rolled up the last concentric terraces of lava, working
less strenuously now as it curved over the asymptotic flattening of the broad
circular rim. Only slightly uphill, and less so every meter; and then onto the
rim itself. Then to the inner edge of the rim.

Overlooking the caldera. She got out of the car, her thoughts
flicking about like skuas.

Ascraeus’s nested caldera complex consisted of eight overlapping
craters, the newer ones collapsing down across the circumferences of the older
ones. The largest and youngest caldera lay out near the center of the complex,
and the older higher-floored calderas embayed its circumference like the petals
of a flower design. Each caldera floor was at a slightly different elevation,
and marked by a pattern of circular fractures. Walking along the rim changed
perspective so that distances shifted, and the floors’ heights seemed to
change, as if they were floating in a dream. Taken all in all, a beautiful
thing to witness. And eighty kilometers across.

Like a lesson in volcano throat mechanics. Eruptions down on the
outer flanks of the volcano had emptied the magma from the active throat of the
caldera, and so the caldera floor had slumped; thus all the circular shapes, as
the active throat moved around over the eons. Arcing cliffs: few places on Mars
exhibited such vertical slopes, they were almost true verticals. Basalt ring
worlds. It should have been a climbers’ mecca, but as far as she knew it was
not. Someday they would come.

The complexity of Ascraeus was so unlike the single great hole of
Pavonis. Why had Pavonis’s caldera collapsed in the same circumference every
time? Could its last drop have erased and leveled all the other rings? Had its
magma chamber been smaller, or vented to the sides less? Had Ascraeus’s throat
wandered more? She picked up loose rocks on the rim’s edge, stared at them.
Lava bombs, late meteor ejecta, ventifacts in the ceaseless winds.... These
were all questions that could still be studied. Nothing they did would ever
disturb the vulcanology up here, not enough to impede the study. Indeed the
Journal ofAreological Studies published many articles on these topics, as she
had seen and still occasionally saw. It was as Michel had said to her; the high
places would look like this forever. Climbing the great slopes would be like
travel into the prehuman past, into pure areology, into the areophany itself
perhaps, with Hi-roko or not. With the lichen or not. People had talked of
securing a dome or a tent over these calderas, to keep them completely sterile;
but that would only make them zoos, wilderness parks, garden spaces with their
walls and their roofs. Empty greenhouses. No. She straightened up, looked out
over the vast round landscape, held up and offering itself to space. To the
chasmoendolithic life that might be struggling up here, she waved a hand. Live,
thing. She said the word and it sounded odd: “Live.”

Mars forever, stony in the sunlight. But then she glimpsed the
white bear in the corner of her eye, slipping behind a jagged rim boulder. She
jumped; nothing there. She returned to the rover, feeling that she needed its
protection. She climbed inside; but then all afternoon on the screen of the
rover’s AI, the vague spectacled eyes seemed to be looking out at her, about to
call any second. A kind bear of a man, though he would eat her if he could
catch her. If he could catch her—but then none of them could catch her, she
could hide in these high rock fastnesses forever—free she was and free she
would be, to be or not to be if she chose that, for as long as this rock held.
But there again, right at the lock door, that white flash in the corner of her
eye. Ah so hard.