Blue Mars (57 page)

Then it was down the space elevator
from Clarke, a trip that took longer than
the flight from Earth; and she was back in the world, the only real world, Mars
the magnificent. “There’s no place like home,” Zo said to the train-station
crowd in Sheffield, and then she sat happily in the trains as they flowed over
the pistes down Tharsis, then north to Echus Overlook.

The little town had grown since its early days as the
ter-raforming headquarters, but not much; it was out of the way, and built into
the steep east wall of Echus Chasma, so that there wasn’t much of it to be
seen—a bit on the plateau at the top of the cliff, a bit at the bottom, but
with three vertical kilometers between the two, so that they were not visible
one from the other—more like two separate villages, connected by a vertical
subway. Indeed if it weren’t for the fliers, Echus Overlook might have subsided
into sleepy historic-monument status, like Underbill or Senzeni Na, or the icy
hideouts in the south. But the eastern wall of Echus Chasma stood right in the
path of the prevailing westerlies that came pouring down the Tharsis Bulge,
causing them to shoot up in the most astonishingly powerful updrafts. Which
made it a birding paradise.

Zo was supposed to check in with Jackie and the Free Mars
apparatchiks working for her, but before getting embroiled in all that she
wanted to fly. So she checked her old San-torini hawksuit out of storage at the
gliderport, and went to the changing room and slipped into it, feeling the
smooth muscly texture of the suit’s flexible exoskeleton. Then it was out the
smooth path, trailing her tail feathers, and onto the Diving Board, a natural
overhang that had been artificially extended with a concrete slab. She walked
to the edge of this slab and looked down, down, down, three thousand meters
down, to the umber floor of Echus Chasma. With the usual burst of adrenaline
she tipped forward and fell off the cliff. Headfirst down, down, down, the wind
picking up in a swift whoosh over her helmet as she reached terminal velocity,
which she recognized by the pitch of the whooshing; and then she spread her
arms, and felt the suit stiffen and help her muscles to hold the beautiful
wings wide, and with a loud crumping smoosh of wind she curved up into the sun,
turned her head, arched her back, pointed her toes and set the tail feathers,
left right left; and the wind was pulling her up, up, up. Shift her feet and
arms together, turn then in a tight gyre, see the cliff then the chasm floor,
around and around: flying. Zo the hawk, wild and free. She was laughing
happily, and tears streamed this way and that in her goggles, dashed away by the
force of the g.

The air above Echus was nearly empty this morning. After riding
the updraft most fliers were peeling off to the north, soaring, or shooting
down one of the clefts in the cliff wall, where the updraft was diminished and
it was possible to tip and dive in stoops of great velocity. Zo too, when she
had gotten about five thousand meters above Overlook, and was breathing the
pure oxygen of her helmet’s enclosed air system, turned her head right and
dipped her right wing, and curved through the exhilaration of a run across the
wind, feeling it keen over her body in a rapid continuous fingering. No sound
but the hard whoosh of wind in her wings. The somatic pressure of the wind all
over her body was a subtly sensuous massage, and she felt it through the
tightened suit as if the suit were not there, as if she were naked and feeling
the wind directly on her skin, as she wished she could be. A good suit
reinforced this impression, of course, and she had used this one for three
m-years before leaving for Mercury; it fit like a glove, it was great to be
back in it.

She pulled up into a kite, then stunted forward in the maneuver
called Jesus Falling. A thousand meters down and she pulled her wings in and
began to dolphin-kick to speed her stoop, until the wind was keening loudly
over her, and she passed the edge of the great wall going well over terminal
velocity. Passing the rim was the sign to start pulling out, because as tall as
the cliff was, at full stoop the chasm floor came rushing up like a final slap
in the face, and it took a while to pull out of it, even given her strength and
skill and nerve, and the reinforcement of the suit. So she arched her back and
popped her wings, and felt the strain in her pecs and biceps, a tremendous
pressure even though the suit aided her with a logarithmically increasing
precen-tage of the load. Tail feathers down; pike; four hard flaps; and then
she was jinking across the chasm’s sandy floor, she could have picked a mouse
off it.

She turned and got back in the updraft, gyred back up into
developing high clouds. The wind was erratic today, and it was an all-absorbing
pleasure to tumble and play in it. This was the meaning of life, the purpose of
the universe: pure joy, the sense of self gone, the mind become no more than a
mirror of the wind. Exuberance; she flew like an angel, as they said. Sometimes
one flew like a drone, sometimes one flew like a bird; and then on rare
occasions one flew like an angel. It had been a long time.

She came to herself, and lofted back down the wall toward
Overlook, feeling tired in her arms. Then she spotted a hawk. Like a lot of
fliers, if there was a bird in sight she tracked it, watching it more closely
than birders had ever before watched a bird, imitating its every twitch and
flutter to try to learn the genius of its flight. Sometimes hawks over this
cliff would be innocently wheeling in a search for food and a whole squadron of
fliers would be above it following its moves, or trying to. It was fun.

Now she shadowed the hawk, turning when it did, imitating the
placement of the wings and tail. Its mastery of the air was like a talent that
she craved but could never have. But she could try: bright sun in the racing
clouds, indigo sky, the wind against her body, the little weightless gut orgasms
when she peeled over into a stoop ... eternal moments of no-mind. The best,
cleanest use of human time.

But the sun fell westward and she got thirsty, and so she left the
hawk to its day and turned and coursed down in giant lazy S’s to Overlook, to nail
her landing with a flap and a step, right on the green Kokopelli, just as if
she had never left.

The neighborhood behind the launching complex was called Topside,
and it was a mass of cheap dorms and restaurants inhabited almost entirely by
fliers, and tourists come to watch the flying, all eating and drinking and
roving and talking and dancing and looking for someone with whom to tandem the
night. And there, no surprise, were her flier friends, Rose and Imhotep and
Ella and Estavan, all in a group at the Adler Hofbrauhaus, high already and
delighted to see Zo back again among them. They had a drink at the Adler to
celebrate the reunion, and then went to Overlook Overlook, and sat on the rail
catching up on gossip, passing around a big spliff laced with pandorph, making
ribald commentary on the passing parade below the railing, shouting at friends
spotted in the crowd.

Eventually they left Overlook Overlook and went down into the
crowds of Topside, and slowly made their way through the bars to one of the
bathhouses. They piled into the changing room and took off their clothes, and
wandered naked through the dark warm watery rooms, the water waist-deep,
ankle-deep, chest-deep—hot, cold, lukewarm—splitting up, finding each other
later, having sex with scarcely visible strangers, Zo working slowly through
several partners to her own orgasm, purring happily as her body clamped down on
itself and her mind went away. Sex, sex, there was nothing like sex, except for
flying, which it much resembled: the rapture of the body, yet another echo of
the Big Bang, that first orgasm. Joy at the sight of the stars in the skylight
overhead, at the feel of warm water and of some boy who came in her and stayed
in her, nearly hard, and three minutes later stiffened and started humping
again, laughing at the approach of another bright orgasm. After that she
sloshed into the comparative brightness of the bar and found the others there,
Estavan declaring that the night’s third orgasm was usually the best, with an
exquisitely long approach to climax and yet still a good bit of semen left to
ejaculate. “After that it’s still fine, but more of an effort, you have to be
wild to get off, and then it isn’t like the third anyway.” Zo and Rose and the
rest of the women agreed that in this as in so many other ways, being female
was superior; in a night at the baths they routinely had several wonderful
orgasms, and even these were as nothing compared to the status orgasmus, a kind
of running continuous orgasm that could last half an hour if one were lucky and
one’s partners skillful. There was a craft to this that they studied
assiduously, but it was still more art than science, as they all agreed: one
had to be high but not too high, with a group but not a crowd ... lately they
had gotten pretty reliably good at it, they told Zo, and happily Zo demanded
proof. “Come on, I want to be tabled.” Estavan hooted and led her and the rest
down to a room with a big table sticking out of the water. Imhotep lay on his
back on the table, Zo’s mattress man for the session; she was lifted up by the
others, lying on her back as well, and slid down onto him, and then the whole
group was on her, hands and mouths and genitals, a tongue in each ear, in her
mouth, contact everywhere; after a while it was all an un-differentiated mass
of erotic sensation, total sexsurround, Zo purring loudly. Then when she
started to come, arching up off Imhotep with the violence of the cramping, they
all kept going, more subtly now, teasing her, not letting her land, and then
she was off and flying, the touch of a little finger would keep her going,
until she cried out “No, I can’t,” and they laughed and said “You can,” and
kept her going until her stomach muscles truly cramped, and she rolled
violently off Imhotep and was caught by Rose and Estavan. She couldn’t even
stand. Someone said they had had her off for twenty minutes; it had felt like
two, or eternity. All her abdominal muscles ached, as did her thighs and butt.
“Cold bath,” she said, and crawled off to the cool water in a nearby room.

But after being tabled there was little else at the baths that
could appeal. Any more orgasms would hurt. She helped to table Estavan and
Xerxes, and then a thin woman she didn’t know, all fun, but then she got bored.
Flesh flesh flesh. Sometimes after being tabled one got further and further
into it; other times it became just skin and hair and flesh, insides and
outsides, who cared.

She went to the changing room and dressed, went outside. It was
morning, the sun bright over the bare plains of Lunae. She flowed through the
empty streets to her hostel, feeling relaxed and clean and sleepy. A big
breakfast, fall into bed, delicious sleep.

But there in the hostel restaurant was Jackie. “If it isn’t our
Zoya.” She had always hated the name, which Zo had chosen for herself.

Zo, surprised, said, “Did you follow me here?”

Jackie looked disgusted. “It’s my co-op too, you might recall. Why
didn’t you check in when you got back?”

“I wanted to fly.”

“That’s no excuse.”

“I didn’t mean it as one.”

Zo went to the buffet table, piled a plate with scrambled eggs and
muffins. She returned to Jackie’s table, kissed her mother on the top of the
head. “You’re looking good.”

Actually she looked younger than Zo, who was often sunburned and
therefore wrinkled—younger but somehow preserved, as if she were a twin sister
of Zo’s who had been bottled for a time and only recently decanted. She
wouldn’t tell Zo how often she had had the gerontological treatments, but
Rachel had said that she was always trying new variants, which were coming out
at the rate of two or three a year, and that she got the basic package every
three years at the most. So although she was somewhere in her fifth m-decade,
she looked almost like Zo’s contemporary, except for that preserved quality, which
was not so much body as spirit—a look in the eye, a certain hardening, a
tightness, a wariness or weariness. It was hard work being the alpha female
year after year, a heroic struggle, it had worn visible tracks in her no matter
how baby smooth her skin, no matter how much a beauty she remained—and she was
still quite a beauty, no doubt about it. But she was getting old. Soon her
young men would unwrap themselves from around her little fingers and drop away.

Meanwhile she still had a great deal of presence, and at the
moment she appeared considerably put out. People averted their eyes as if her
look might strike them dead, which made Zo laugh. Not the politest way to greet
one’s beloved mother, but what else could one do? Zo was too relaxed to be
irritated.

Probably a mistake to laugh at her, however. She stared coldly
until Zo straightened up.

“Tell me what happened on Mercury.”

Zo shrugged. “I told you. They still think they have the sun to
give to the outer solar system, and it’s gone to their heads.”

“I suppose their sunlight would still be useful out there.”

“Energy’s always useful, but the outer satellites should be able
to generate what they need, now.”

“So the Mercurians are left with metals.”

“That’s right.”

“But what do they want for them?”

“Everyone wants to be free. None of these new little worlds are
big enough to be self-sufficient, so they have to have something to trade if
they want to stay free. Mercury has sunlight and metals, the asteroids have
metals, the outer satellites have volatiles, if anything. So they package and
trade what they have, and try to make alliances to avoid domination by Earth or
Mars.”