Blue Mars (62 page)

Ann hiked along much more comfortably than she had in Hippolyta,
with the unconscious grace of someone who has spent a lot of time walking on
rock. Boulder ballet; she carried a long angular hammer in her thick glove, and
her thigh pockets bulged with specimens. She didn’t respond to the exclamations
of Zo or the guardian group, she was oblivious to them. Like an actor playing
the part of Ann Clayborne. Zo laughed: that one could become such a cliche!

“If they domed this dark backward and abysm of time, it would make
a beautiful place to live,” she said. “Lots of land for the amount of tent
needed, eh? And such a view. It would be a wonder.”

No response to such a blunt provocation, of course. But it would
set them thinking. Zo followed the guardian group like an albatross. They had
started descending a broken staircase of rock that lined the edge of a slim buttress,
extending far out from the chasm wall, like a fold of drapery in a marble
statue. This feature ended in a flat swirl several kilometers out from the
wall, and a kilometer or more lower than the rim. After the flat spot the
buttress fell away abruptly, in a sheer drop to the chasm floor, some twenty
kilometers straight down. Twenty kilometers! Twenty thousand meters, some
seventy thousand feet. . . . Even great Mars itself could boast no such wall.

There were a number of buttresses and other deformations on the
wall similar to the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in
a limestone cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten
rock had dripped into the abyss until the chill of space had frozen it forever.
Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been
bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by
lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of
the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out
into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft that had dropped
them off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the
staircase, from the flat spot at the end of the buttress promontory. So they
could descend without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute
after minute, in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin;
you could almost hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was
palpable. Except for Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the
cracks between their rough stairs.

“This obsession with rock is so pathetic,” Zo said to her on a
private band. “To be so old and still so small. To limit yourself to the world
of inert matter, a world that will never surprise you, never do a single thing.
So that you won’t be hurt. Areology as a kind of cowardice. Sad, really.”

A noise on the intercom: air shot between front teeth. Disgust.

Zo laughed.

“You’re an impertinent girl,” Ann said.

“Yes I am.”

“And stupid as well.”

“That I am not!” Zo was surprised at her own vehemence. And then
she saw Ann’s face was twisted with anger behind her faceplate, and her voice
hissed in the intercom over sharp heavy breaths.
‘

“Don’t ruin the walk,” Ann snapped.

“I was tired of being ignored.”

“So who’s afraid now?”

“Afraid of the boredom.”

Another disgusted hiss. “You’ve been very poorly brought up.”

“Whose fault is that?”

“Oh yours. Yours. But we have to suffer the results.”

“Suffer on. I’m the one that got you here, remember.”

“Sax is the one who got me here, bless his little heart.”

“Everyone’s little to you.”

“Compared to this....” The movement of her helmet showed she had
glanced down into the rift.

“This speechless immobility that you’re so safe in.”

“This is the wreckage of a collision very similar to other
planetessimal collisions in the early solar system. Mars had some, Earth too.
That’s the matrix life emerged out of. This is a window into that time,
understand?”

“I understand, but I don’t care.”

“You don’t think it matters.”

“Nothing matters, in the sense you mean. There is no meaning to
all this. It’s just an accident of the Big Bang.”

“Oh please,” Ann said. “Nihilism is so ridiculous.”

“Look who’s talking! You’re a nihilist yourself! No meaning or
value to life or to your senses—it’s weak nihilism, nihilism for cowards, if
you can imagine such a thing.”

“My brave little nihilist.”

“Yes—I face it. And then enjoy what can be enjoyed.”

“Which is?”

“Pleasure. The senses and their input. I’m a sensualist, really.
It takes some courage, I think. To face pain, to risk death to get the senses
really roaring....”

“You think you’ve faced pain?”

Zo remembered a stalled landing at Overlook, the pain-beyond-pain
of broken legs and ribs. “Yes. I have.”

Radio silence. The static of the Uranian magnetic field. Perhaps
Ann was allowing her the experience of pain, which given its omnipresence was
no great generosity. In fact it made Zo furious. “Do you really think it takes
centuries to become human, that no one was human until you geriatrics came
along? Keats died at twenty-five, have you read Hyperion? Do you think this
hole in a rock is as sublime as even a phrase ofHyperionl Really, you issei are
so horrible. And you especially. For you to judge me, when you haven’t changed
from the moment you touched Mars. ...”

“Quite an accomplishment, eh?”

“An accomplishment in playing dead. Ann Clayborne, the greatest
dead person who ever lived.”

“And an impertinent girl. But look at the grain of this rock,
twisted like a pretzel.”

“Fuck the rocks.”

“I’ll leave that to the sensualist. No, look. This rock hasn’t
changed in three-point-five billion years. And when it did change, my Lord what
a change.”

Zo looked at the jade rock under their boots. Somewhat glasslike,
but otherwise utterly nondescript. “You’re obsessed,” she said.

“Yes. But I like my obsessions.”

After that they hiked down the spine of the buttress in silence.
Over the course of the day they descended to Bottom’s Landing. Now they were a
kilometer below the rims of the chasm, and the sky was a starry band overhead,
Uranus fat in the middle of it, the sun a blazing jewel just to one side. Under
this gorgeous array the depth of the rift was sublime, astonishing; again Zo
felt herself to be flying. “You’ve located intrinsic worth in the wrong place,”
she said to all of them, over the common band. “It’s like a rainbow. Without an
observer at a twenty-three-degree angle to the light reflecting off a cloud of
spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our
spirits stand at a twenty-three-degree angle to the universe. There is some new
thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between
rock and mind. Without mind there is no intrinsic worth.”

“That’s just saying there is no intrinsic worth,” one of the
guardians replied. “It collapses back to utilitarianism. But there’s no need to
include human participation. These places exist without us and before us, and
that is their intrinsic worth. When we arrive we should honor that precedence,
if we want to be in a right attitude to the universe, if we want to actually
see it.”

“But I see it,” Zo said happily. “Or almost see it. You people
will have to sensitize your eyes with some addition to your genetic treatments.
Meanwhile it’s glorious, it truly is. But that glory is in our minds.”

They did not answer. After a while Zo went on:

“All these issues have been raised before, on Mars. The whole
matter of environmental ethics was raised to a new level by the experience on
Mars, raised right into the heart of our actions. Now you want to protect this
place as wilderness, and I can see why. But I’m a Martian, and so I understand.
A lot of you are Martian, or your parents were. You start from that ethical
position, and in the end wilderness is an ethical position. Terrans won’t
understand you as well as I do. They’ll come out here and build a big casino
right on this promontory. They’ll cover this rift from rim to rim, and try
terraforming it like they have everywhere else. The Chinese are still jammed
into their country like sardines, and they don’t give a damn about the
intrinsic worth of China itself, much less a barren moonlet on the edge of the
solar system. They need room and they see it’s out here, and they’ll come and
build and look at you funny when you object, and what are you going to do? You
can try sabotage like the Reds did on Mars, but they can blow you off the moons
here just as easy as you can them, and they’ve got a million replacements for
every colonist they lose. That’s what we’re talking about when we talk about
Earth. We’re like the Lilliputians with Gulliver. We’ve got to work together,
and tie him down with as many little lines as we can devise.”

No response from the others.

Zo sighed. “Well,” she said, “maybe it’s for the best. Spread
people around out here, they won’t be pressuring Mars so hard. It might be
possible to work out deals whereby the Chinese are free to settle out here all
they want, and we on Mars are free to cut down immigration to nearly nothing.
It might work rather well.”

Again no response from the others.

Finally Ann said, “Shut up. Let us concentrate on the land here.”

“Oh of course.”

Then, as they were approaching the very end of the buttress, the
promontory standing out in a gap of air beyond all telling, under the bejeweled
jade disk and the brilliant diamond chip beyond it, the whole solar system
suddenly triangulated by these celestial objects, the true size of things
revealed—they saw moving stars overhead. The rocket jets of their spacecraft.

“See?” Zo said. “It’s the Chinese, coming to have a look.”

Suddenly one of the guardians was on her in a fury, striking her
directly on the faceplate. Zo laughed. But she had forgotten Miranda’s
ultralight gravity, and was surprised when a ridiculous uppercut lifted her
right off her feet. Then she hit the railing with the back of her knees, spun
head over heels, twisting to catch herself, bang—a hard blow to the head, but
the helmet protected her, she was still conscious, tumbling down the incline at
the edge of the promontory—beyond it the void—fear shot through her like an
electric shock, she fought for balance but was tumbling, out of control—she
felt a jolt—ah yes, the end of her harness! Then the sickening sensation of a
farther slide down—the harness clip must have given way. Second surge of
adrenal fear—she turned inward and grabbed at the passing rock. Human power in
.005 g; the same gravity that had sent her flying now allowed her to catch
herself by a single fingertip, and bring the whole weight of her falling body
to a halt, as in a miracle.

She was on the edge of a long drop. Sparking lights in her eyes,
nausea, darkness beyond; she couldn’t see the floor of the chasm, it was like a
bottomless pit, a dream image, black falling. . . . “Don’t move,” said Ann’s
voice in her ear. “Hold on. Don’t move.” Above her, a foot, then legs. Very
slowly Zo turned her head up to look. A hand clutched her right wrist, hard.
“Okay. There’s a hold for your left hand, above it by half a meter. Higher.
There. Okay, climb. You above, pull us up.”

They were hauled up like fish on a line.

Zo sat on the ground. The little space ferry was landing
soundlessly, over on a pad on the far side of the flat spot. Brief flare of
light from its rockets. The concerned looks of the guardians, standing over
her.

“Not such a funny joke,” Ann suggested.

“No,” Zo said, thinking hard about how she could use the incident.
“Thanks for helping me.” It was impressive how quickly Ann had jumped to her
help—not impressive that she had decided to, for this was the code of nobility,
one had obligations to one’s peers, and enemies were just as important as
friends; enemies were equals, they were necessary, they were what made it
possible to be a good friend. But just as a physical maneuver it had been
impressive. “Very quick of you.”

On the flight back to Oberon they were all silent, until one of
the ferry’s crew turned to Ann and mentioned that Hiroko and some of her
followers had been seen here in the Uranian system recently, on Puck.

“Oh what crap,” Ann said.

“How do you know?” Zo asked. “Maybe she decided to get as far away
from Earth and Mars as possible. I wouldn’t blame her.”

“This isn’t her kind of place.”

“Maybe she doesn’t know that. Maybe she hasn’t heard this is your
private rock garden.”

But Ann simply waved her away.

Back to Mars, the red planet
, the most beautiful world in the solar system. The only real
world.

Their shuttle accelerated, made its turn, floated a few days,
decelerated; and in two weeks they were in the lineup for Clarke, and then on
the elevator, going down, down, down. So slow, this final descent! Zo looked
out at Echus, there to the northeast, between red Tharsis and the blue North
Sea. So good to see it; Zo ate several tabs of pandorph as the elevator car made
its approach into Sheffield, and when she walked out into the Socket, and then
through the streets between the glossy stone buildings to the giant train
station on the rim, she was in the rapture of the areophany, loving every face
she saw, loving all her tall brothers and sisters with their striking beauty
and their phenomenal grace, loving even the Terrans running around underfoot.
The train to Echus didn’t leave for a couple of hours, and so she walked the
rim park restlessly for a time, looking down into the great Pavonis Mons
caldera, as spectacular as anything on Miranda, even if it wasn’t as deep as
Prospero’s Rift: infinity of horizontal banding, all the shades of red, tan,
crimson, rust, umber, maroon, copper, brick, sienna, paprika, oxblood, cinnabar,
vermilion, all under the dark star-studded afternoon sky. Her world. Though
Sheffield was under its tent, and would ever be; and she wanted back in the
wind again.

So she went back to the station and got on the train for Echus,
and felt the train fly down the piste, off the great cone of Pavonis, down the
pure xeriscape of east Tharsis, to Cairo and a Swiss-precision exchange onto
the train north to Echus Overlook. The train came in near midnight, and she
checked in at the co-op’s hostel and walked over to the Adler, feeling the last
of the pandorph buzz through her like the feather in the cap of her happiness,
and the whole gang was there as if no time had passed, and they cheered to see
her, they all hugged her, singly and severally, they all kissed her, they gave
her drinks and asked questions about her trip, and told her about the recent
wind conditions, and caressed her in her chair, until quickly it was the hour
before dawn and they all trooped down to the ledge and suited up and took off,
out into the darkness of the sky and the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of
it coming back instantly like breathing or sex, the black mass of the Echus
escarpment bulking to the east like the edge of a continent, the dim floor of
Echus Chasma so far below—the landscape of her heart, with its dim lowland and
high plateau, and the vertiginous cliff between them, and over it all the
intense purples of the sky, lavender and mauve in the east, black indigo out to
the west, the whole arch lightening and taking on color each second, the stars
popping out of existence—high clouds to the west flaring pink—and as several
stoops had taken her well below the level of Overlook, she was able to close on
the cliff and catch a hard westerly updraft and sail on it, inches over Underlook
and then up in a tight gyre, motionless herself and yet cast violently up by
the wind, until she burst out of the shadow of the cliff into the raw yellows
of the new day, an incredibly joyful combination of the kinetic and the visual,
of sense and world, and as she soared up into the clouds she thought, To hell
with you, Ann Clayborne—you and the rest of your kind can go on forever about
your moral imperatives, your issei ethics, values, goals, strictures,
responsibilities, virtues, grand purposes of life, you can pour out those words
to the end of time in all their hypocrisy and fear, and still you will never
have a feeling like this one, when the grace of mind and body and world are all
in perfect consort—you can rant your Calvinist rant until you are blue in the
face, what humans should do with their brief lives, as if there were any way to
tell for sure, as if you didn’t turn out to be a bunch of cruel bastards in the
end—but until you get out here and fly, surf, climb, jump, exert yourself somehow
in the risk of space, in the pure grace of the body, you just don’t know, you
have no right to speak, you are slaves to your ideas and your hierarchies and
so can’t see that there is no higher goal than this, the ultimate purpose of
existence, of the cosmos itself: the free play of flight.

In the northern spring the trade winds blew, pushing against the
westerlies and damping the Echus updrafts. Jackie was on the Grand Canal,
distracted from her interplanetary maneuverings by the tedium of local politics;
indeed she seemed irritated and tense at having to deal with it, and clearly
she did not want Zo around. So Zo went to work in the mines at Moreux for a
while, and then joined a group of flying friends on the coast of the North Sea,
south of Boone’s Neck, near Blochs Hoffnung, where the sea cliffs reared a
kilometer out of the crashing surf. Late-afternoon onshore breezes hit these
cliffs and sent up a small flock of fliers, wheeling through seastacks that
poked out of tapestries of foam surging up and down, up and down, pure white on
the wine-dark sea.

This flying group was led by a young woman Zo hadn’t met before, a
girl of only nine m-years, named Melka. She was the best flier Zo had ever
seen. When she was in the air leading them it was as if an angel had come into
their midst, darting through them like a raptor through doves, at other times
leading them through the tight maneuvers that made flocking such fun. And so Zo
worked through the days at her co-op’s local partner, and flew every day after
her work stint was over. And her heart was always soaring, pleased by one thing
after another. Once she even called Ann Clay-borne, to try to tell her about
flying, about what it really meant; but the old one had nearly forgotten who
she was, and did not appear interested even when Zo managed to make it clear
when and how they had met.

That afternoon she flew with an ache inside. The past was a dead
letter, sure; but that people could become such ghosts…’

Nothing for such a feeling but sun and salt air, the everchanging
spill of sea foam, rising and falling against the cliffs. There was Melka,
diving; Zo chased her, feeling a sudden rush of affection for such a beautiful
spirit. But then Melka saw her and tipped away, and clipped the highest rock of
a seastack with the end of one wing, and tumbled down like a shot bird. Shocked
at the sight of the accident, Zo pulled her wings in and began dolphin-kicking
downward next to the seastack, until she was plummeting in a powerful stoop;
she caught up the tumbling girl in her arms, she flapped one wing just over the
blue waves, while Melka struggled under her; then she saw that they were going
to have to swim.