Blue Mars (42 page)

Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of
the stories, however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have
been made up. Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to
think she was dead. Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.

“They just wish she were here,” Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned
it the next day.

“Don’t you wish it?”

“Of course”—(though she didn’t)—”but not enough to make up stories
about it.”

“You really think they’re all made up? I mean, who would do that?
What would they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn’t make sense.”

“People don’t make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People
see an elderly Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko.
That night they tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down
in the marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site,
says my roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!”

Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the
stories. For the rest, though, the few that didn’t fit that pattern....

“Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court
position,” Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court.
“We can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually
be more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I
suppose. But we have to know.”

“Yeah yeah.”

People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal
withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in
what they were doing, not any of it—it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous
manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work
had. That’s politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But
Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation,
ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.

Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have
to overcome the hostility of the people who didn’t want him back in the party,
he would have to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people
who would help him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their
favor; play them off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in
order to establish preeminence over the others. ... He could see all these
processes at work right there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser
after the next, discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then
working them to establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she
would say if he pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in
control of Mars now, and this work had to be done if they were to create the
new world they had hoped for. One couldn’t be overfastidious, one had to be
realistic, you held your nose and did it. It had a certain nobility to it,
really. It was the necessary work.

Nirgal didn’t know-if those justifications were true or not. Had
they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only
in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could
politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?

He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at
Jackie’s daughter’s face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the
Free Mars delegates from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by
the northern sea, they were more determined than ever to take control of their
fate, including immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing
much past its current state. “All very well,” Jackie was saying, “but it’s a
very large island now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will
be especially humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine
harbor sites, fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep
a hand on development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a
particular interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed
to say to them? That the Elysian locals don’t like Chinese? That we’ll take
their help in a crisis, but we don’t want them moving into the neighborhood?”

“It’s not that they’re Chinese!” the delegate said.

“I understand. Really I do. Tell you what—you go back to South
Fossa and explain the difficulties we face here, and I’ll do everything I can
here to help you. I can’t guarantee results, but I’ll do what I can.”

“Thanks,” the delegate said, and left.

Jackie turned to her assistant. “Idiot. Who’s next. Ah, naturally;
the Chinese ambassador. Well, let him in.”

The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and
her AI translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of
pleasantries, the woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements,
preferably somewhere in the equatorial provinces.

Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been
started from the very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and
built a tent town or a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater. . . . Now, however,
Jackie looked polite and said, “It’s possible. Everything of course will have
to be referred to the environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a
great deal of empty land on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be
arranged there, especially if China was willing to contribute to infrastructure
and mitigation and the like.”

They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.

Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. “Nirgal, could you get Rachel in
here? And try to decide what you’re going to do soon, please?”

Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He
packed his little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out
to the launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person
blimp-gliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in
simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in
Marineris, on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad;
they were willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it
returned by another flier later.

It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would
only get stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the
pilot’s seat. The little blimp-glider slid up the launching mast, held by the
nose; and was let free.
**

He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over
the maze of interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below.
Flight out of the labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun,
gotten burned, survived the fall—and now flew again, this time down, down,
down, ever down. Taking advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting
down over the shattered dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the
great channel outbreak had begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down lus
Chasma; but Nirgal angled north, away from the glacier’s flow, and then flew
east again, down into the head of Ti-thonium Chasma, which paralleled lus
Chasma just to the north.

Tithonium was one of the deepest and narrowest of the Marineris
canyons—four kilometers deep, ten wide. He could fly well below the level of
the plateau rims and still be thousands of meters over the canyon floor.
Tithonium was higher than lus, wilder, untouched by human hands, seldom
traveled in, because it was a dead end to the east, where it narrowed and
became rough-floored as it got shallower, then abruptly stopped. Nirgal spotted
the road that switchbacked up the eastern head wall, a road he had traveled a
few times in his youth, when all the planet had been his home.

The afternoon sun dipped behind him. The shadows on the land
lengthened. The wind continued to blow strong, thrumming over the blimpglider,
whining and whooshing and keening. It blew him over the caprock of the rim
plateau again, as Tithonium became a string of oval depressions, pocking the
plateau one after the next: the Tithonia Catena, each dip a giant bowl-shaped
depression in the land.

And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out
over the immense open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of
its eastern wall in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the
sunset’s light. To the noilh was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the
south the spectacular buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central
giant of the Marineris system. It was Mars’s version of Concordiaplatz, he saw,
but much bigger than Earth’s, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic
beyond all human scale, as if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or
two eons, to a time before the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!

And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond
mesa, a caprock island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor.
And in the sunset’s hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent
town, at the southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the
common band on his intercom, then guided him in to the town’s landing pad. The
sun was winking out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimp-glider
around and descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure
of Kokopelli painted as a target on the^landing pad.

Shining mesa had a large top
. more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty kilometers long
and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a Monument Valley
mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the southern point
of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached fragment of
the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a tremendous vantage
point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views through the deep, steep
gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to the south.

Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over
the years, and the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five
kilometers above the datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of
removing it. The floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum,
was patched with growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on
Shining Mesa flew down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize,
floating back up to the mesa’s top in the late afternoons. A few of these
flying foresters were old underground acquaintances of Nirgal’s, and they were
pleased to take him along and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.

The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In
Candor, they curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously
south into Melas. Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under
the western walls where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow
ran down in a faint tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided
streambeds that ran together into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which
collected at a confluence just above the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild
foaming rapids to the floor of Melas Chasma, where it pooled against the
remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly against its northern flank.

On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were
springing up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other
very rapidly growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older
krummholz. These days it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big
sun-reflecting bowl, protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing
a great number of plant and animal species to flourish underneath them;
Nirgal’s acquaintances said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars.
They had to carry sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around,
because of bears, snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of
the galleries was becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and
aspen.

All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate
that had been lying in Candor and Ophir canyons—great white bench terraces made
of extremely water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now
melting over the canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new
soils with lots of nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits
were being buried under landslides—the water that was dissolving the sodium
nitrate was also hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical
acceleration of the mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near
the foot of the canyon walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as
they soared around in their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides
everywhere. Several high talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods
were one of the many topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the
omegandorph got into the blood; in fact there was little they could do. If
chunks of a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was
going to stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on
Shining Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in
the pit of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to
spot the slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of
dust. Fliers in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble
with tales of being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day
Nirgal was about halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was
like a sonic boom that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel.
Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.

Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old
acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy
to steer. More loft than was needed, more power . . . the one he had rented
(using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help
botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the
afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just
how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls—up up and up and up,
to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed
this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the
exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong
end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I
want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning
to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night
in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The
success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had
wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather
than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was
ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation
he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how
to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an
-individual in his own private life.

He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective;
it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In
fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of
simple pain as well—pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of
life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow
from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That
life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he
suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was
twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to
Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.

So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some
image of himself. The fractured, layered, scarred canyon walls were so many
stupendous mineral mirrors; and indeed he saw clearly that he was a tiny
creature, smaller than a gnat in a cathedral. Flying around studying each great
palimpsest of facets, he scried two very strong impulses in himself, distinct
and mutually exclusive, yet infolded, like the green and the white. On the one
hand he wanted to stay a wanderer, to fly and walk and sail over all the world,
a nomad forever, wandering ceaselessly until he knew Mars better than anyone
else. Ah yes; it was a familiar euphoria. On the other hand it was familiar, he
had done that all his life. It would be the form of his previous life, without
the content. And he knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness
that made him feel so detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope
vision. Coming from everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now
he wanted that home, as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to
settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it
completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools,
become part of a community of friends.

Both these desires existed, strongly and together—or, to be more
exact, in a subtle rapid oscillation, which jangled his emotions, and left him
insomniac and restless. He could see no way to reconcile the two. They were
mutually exclusive. No one he talked to had any useful suggestions as to how to
resolve the difficulty. Coyote was dubious about setting down roots—but then he
was a nomad, and didn’t know. Art considered the wandering life impossible; but
he was fond of his places now.

Nirgal’s nonpolitical training was in mesocosm engineering, but he
found that little help to his thinking. At the higher elevations they were
always going to be in tents, and mesocosm engineering would be needed; but it
was becoming more of a science than an art, and with increasing experience
solving the problems would be more and more routinized. Besides, did he want to
pursue a tented profession, when so much of the lower planet was becoming land
they could walk on?

No. He wanted to live in the open air. To learn a patch of land,
its soil and plants and animals and weather and skies, and everything else ...
he wanted that. Part of him. Part of the time.

He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma
was not the place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge
vistas made it a hard place to see as home—it was too vast, too inhuman. The
canyon floors were designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the
streams surging with snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be
buried under enormous landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The
locals were going to stay up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors
during the day. The mesa would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the
mesa—it was an island in the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for
flying vacations, for partying through the nights, for expensive hotels, for
the young and the in-love ... all that was fine, wonderful. But crowded,
perhaps even overrun—or else always battling the influx of visitors, and newly
settled residents enchanted by the sublime views, people who would arrive like
Nirgal himself, dropping in at some dusk in their life and never going away,
while the old residents looked on helplessly and grumbled about the good old
days when the world had been new, and unoccupied.

No—that was not the kind of home he had in mind. Although he loved
the way dawn flushed the fluted west walls of Candor, flaring all across the
Martian spectrum, the sky turning indigo or mauve, or a startling earthly
cerulean . . . a beautiful place, so beautiful that on some days as he flew about
he felt it would be worth it to stand on Shining Mesa and hold his ground, to
try to preserve it, to swoop down and learn the gnarly wilderness floor, float
back up every afternoon to dinner. Would that work, make him feel at home? And
if wilderness was what he wanted, weren’t there other places less spectacular
but more remote, thus more wild?

Back and forth he went, back and forth. One day, flying over the
foaming opaque series of waterfalls and rapids in the Candor Gap, he remembered
that John Boone had been through this area, in a solo rover just after the
Transmari-neris Highway had been built. What would that master equivocator have
said about this amazing region?

Nirgal called up Boone’s AI, Pauline, and asked for Candor, and
found a voice diary made during a drive through the canyon in 2046. Nirgal let
the tape run as he looked down on the land from above, listening to the hoarse
voice with the friendly American accent, a voice unselfconscious about talking
to an AI. Listening to the voice made Nirgal wish he could really talk to the
man. Some people said Nirgal had filled John Boone’s empty shoes, that Nirgal
had done the work John would have done had he lived. If that were so, what
would John have done afterward? How would he have lived?

“This is the most unbelievable country I’ve ever seen. Really,
it’s what you think of when you think of Valles Mari-neris. Back in Melas the
canyon was so wide that out in the middle you couldn’t see the walls at all,
they were under the horizon! This small-planet curvature is producing effects
no one ever imagined. All the old simulations lied so bad, the verticals
exaggerated by factors of five or ten, as I recall, which made it look like you
were down in a slot. It’s not a slot. Wow, there’s a rock column just like a
woman in a toga, Lot’s wife I guess that would be. I wonder if it is salt, it’s
white, but I guess that doesn’t mean much. Have to ask Ann. I wonder what those
Swiss road builders made of all this when they built this road, it’s not very
alpine. Kind of like an anti-Alps, down instead of up, red instead of green,
basalt instead of granite. Well, but they seemed to like it anyway. Of course
they’re anti-Swiss Swiss, so it makes a kind of sense. Whoa, pothole country
here, the rover is bouncing around. Might try that bench there, it looks
smoother than here. Yep, there we go, just like a road. Oh—it is the road. I
guess I got off it a bit, I’m driving manually for the fun of it, but it’s hard
to keep an eye out for the transponders when there’s so much else to look at.
The transponders are made more for automatic pilot than the human eye. Hey,
there’s the break into Ophir Chasma, what a gap! That wall must be, I don’t
know—twenty thousand feet tall. My Lord. Since the last one was called Candor
Gap, this one should be called Ophir Gap, right? Ophir Gate would be nicer.
Let’s check the map. Hmm, the promontory on the west side of the gap is called
Candor Labes, that’s lips, isn’t it? Candor Throat. Or, hmm. I don’t think so.
It’s one hell of an opening though. Steep cliffs on both sides, and twenty
thousand feet tall. That’s about six or seven times as tall as the cliffs in
Yosemite. Sheeee-it. They don’t look that much taller, to tell the truth.
Foreshortening no doubt. They look about twice as tall, or—who knows. I can’t
remember what Yosemite really looked like, in terms of size anyway. This is the
most amazing canyon you could ever even imagine. Ah, there’s Candor Mensa, on
my left. This is the first time I could see that it isn’t part of the Candor Labes
wall. I’ll bet that mesa top has one hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up
there, sure. I wish I could get up there and see it! This would be a fun place
to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see dust devils every now and then,
vicious little things, real tight and dark. There’s a shaft of sunlight there
hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar of butter hanging in the air. Ah,
God, what a beautiful world!”