Icehenge
We drove up a narrow ramp and got out of the cars to investigate. Another ruin of the Unrest. The brick buildings still looked ordinary enough to make broken windows a surprise. All the doors were open. The interiors were thick with dust and sand. I decided one building could be disturbed, and we entered it. In its kitchen were cupboards full of pots and pans, drawers full of dishware and utensils. No food. It was odd. Back outside I crossed the little yard created by the circle of buildings, and found Xhosa already testing the old pump. The generator still worked. Soon we would see whether the thawing, filtering, and pumping mechanisms underground also remained functional.
We set tents in the yard, and in the next couple of days while the others investigated the site, I hiked into the maze of valleys and blocks to the north. At first I found nothing. With the growing atmosphere tire tracks that before the transformation would have lasted a million years now would be buried. I explored in a fan pattern, checking avenues to the west and north, returning to the station to re-orient myself, trying again farther east. I left green marker balls to show where I had been, and came back upon them more than once.
But I found no sign of a road until the fourth day, when I tried a long sloping canyon that started two valleys east of the one leading to the station, and split the terrain to the northeast. I had stopped to inspect some Tibetan figwort growing between two rocks. I had seen a lot of lichen and alpine moss, but the figwort drew my attention. These sinks held a lot of air and water, to support such life. When I looked up from the cushion-shaped plant I saw that the little canyon floor was lined by two parallel depressions, like ruts almost filled in. I took out my little whisk broom and dusted away a few centimeters of fine sand, revealing a clear tire track. Our cars left tracks very like it. I followed the two ruts down the canyon and over a pass into a V-shaped valley that wound between ridges for as far as I could see; then, running short of light, I returned to the station.
That night I failed completely to hide my agitation. I forked my food as if stabbing ants. When the meal was finished I said, “I’m going to take one of the field cars for a few days and explore to the north.”
Xhosa and Bill looked at each other. Hana frowned.
“It’s possible some of the occupants of this place went north when it was abandoned. It’s a bit of a long shot, and I don’t want to disturb the main work here, but I’d like to follow some tracks I’ve found. I won’t be long.”
“It would be safer to go in a group,” Xhosa suggested. “We can spare the people.”
“I’m going to do it alone.” And I began to feel how power could corrupt. It made things so easy. On the other hand, even though I had the authority, they had the force to be able to disobey, and stop me. Authority must be backed by force to be true authority. So I added, “Don’t worry. I drove field cars for the Survey for more years than you all have lived.”
Bill said, “We only have so much air.”
“Get the Johnson still going again, then,” I said roughly, with a wave of dismissal. “I won’t take much.”
“Easy to get lost out there,” Xhosa said. “Safer if I came along.”
“I’ll be all right.”
Speechlessly Hana was asking me a question. I said again, to her, “I’ll be all right. I want to take a look up there, just for myself.”
She nodded reluctantly. Xhosa looked worried; Bill frowned as if weighing his permission. Annoyed, I said, “Help me get a car ready.”
* * *
Xhosa helped me fill a compartment of the car with green marker balls. “Set a lot of these,” he said. “We’ll listen for you on the radio.”
It was the mirror dawn, and in the dimness I could not read his face. Plumes of frost fell from our breath. Hana and Bill emerged from a tent, and Hana approached me. “You shouldn’t do this,” she said. “It isn’t safe. We should stop him from going—” This to Xhosa.
“You’ll do what I say,” I cried; and then, embarrassed at my outburst, I had to make the rest of my preparations mumbling and avoiding Hana’s gaze. I climbed into the little field car without acknowledging their farewells, feeling foolish, and drove down the ramp.
Maneuvering the car over the two low ridges to my canyon was easy enough, and then I followed the faint road. My car’s wheels almost fit the tracks. Turning off my radio I felt my spirit blossom inside me, inspiring an exultant shout. I was off in search of Emma and the rebels! I swore that if I found them I would join them and never go back.
The tracks were easy to follow, and it took less than an hour to retrace all my previous day’s hike. Beyond the point where I had turned back the V-shaped valley stretched for four or five kilometers, and the faint parallel ruts continued right down its middle. A little creekbed, born since the tracks were made, ran between them and sometimes over them; sometimes the bed was filled with jade ice, mostly it was dry. But the ruts were visible until I came on a box canyon ending the valley. There the ruts disappeared. I put the car in reverse and retreated, and at the first pass over the side ridge of the valley, I saw the two ruts again, cutting deeply over the pass. I cursed my inattention, but mildly, since it had caused no harm, and left a green marker at the turn before driving on.
Over the pass were scalloped ridges like dunes, offering no obvious way north; slowly I followed the tracks over this broken land, and then they dropped into an area of massive blocks divided by narrow canyons or defiles that offered a path through the blocks, sometimes. Apparently the first long canyon and the valley after it had been features of border terrain, and now I was in the chaos proper. I could seldom see more than a kilometer in any direction, and often less than that. It was as if I drove through the rubble-filled streets of a city of jasper or chert, which had been struck to shambles by a cataclysmic earthquake. At less than my walking pace I drove over faint traces of tire track, and it seemed that the only reason I kept finding it was that it was the only route through the maze. But in every kilometer’s progress there were three or four choices to be made, and at each fork I stopped, looked at the two or three possibilities, and concluded I had lost the trail; then a line of rocks, or a smooth depression, or two parallel lines in the distance made by shifts in the soil that could not be perceived when near to them, would become evident, and with a hum of the car’s electric motor I was off again. At each fork or crossroads I guided the robot arm out and stabbed a green marker ball into the hard sand. Looking back I could almost always see one.
As I proceeded north the height of the giant blocks diminished—or the defiles between them rose—and a few kilometers farther on the canyons ascended to the height of the blocks. I drove over a fractured plain, a sort of crazed plateau surrounded by jagged hills not much higher than it. It was the inversion of the maze: low ridges crossed each other everywhere on this plateau, dividing it into frozen ponds and drifts of sand. Passage over this ground was difficult, and the tracks skirted it to the west, leading me to another plateau, one split by fissures or crevasses so that to continue north the track had to wind in big S’s. Here I ran into difficulty. The land was exposed to the wind, and in the fissures and etch pits were frozen ponds, surrounded by icy Syrtis grass, cushions of sandwort and rock jasmine, stiff leaf sedge, and boulders dotted with lichen of several colors. In this weird Arctic meadow the tracks were impossible to trace. I drove back to the last point I had been sure of seeing them—on one of the eskerlike ridges dividing the depressed plain—but once there, my own car’s tracks marred the landscape ahead, and I saw no others. No other direction seemed feasible; to veer right was to return to the ridged plain, to turn left was to drop back into the maze that the old tracks had worked out of. It seemed most likely that the road had crossed the crevassed plateau I had driven onto, and that in the last century the tracks had been destroyed by erosion and deposition.
So I was on my own. But I was loath to believe that. I got out of the car and ranged forward on foot, inspecting each route between fissures for sign of the road. Nothing. The rough ju
mble of peaks to the north might protect a canyon section of the road enough for it to reappear—or so I hoped—and in the last hour of daylight I drove north across the plateau, zigging and zagging to avoid fissures. When blocks began to dot the plateau like immense erratics on a dusky morraine, I slowed the car and kept close watch. I saw only a pebbly broken plain, which became canyon mouths as the blocks became more frequent and continuous. I drove up one anxiously; then for no reason I looked up at the left wall of the new canyon, and there, dug into the rock like three cracks, was an arrow, like so: . I laughed aloud. “Thank you very much,” I said. “I was wondering about that.” I drove on, but immediately I saw that the shadows of late afternoon would obscure any sign of the trail. I backed out of the canyon onto the plain to have a view for the evening, and stopped for camp beside one of the frozen ponds. The evening mirrors were pinpricks in a burgundy sky. I heated some beef soup, dipped crackers in it. After eating I sipped a cup of brandy, and located my position on the map. The fissured plain was clearly marked, an island in rougher terrain. The red dot was still a good distance to the north. The sky darkened to blackberry, the mirrors winked out over a horizon like a row of black teeth. The stars glowed yellow, making the clear dome of the car a planisphere. Sleep was difficult. Late in the night I jerked awake and knew I had been speaking with Emma, in a long conversation, a crucial one. What can you offer, she said. I tried to remember it; the starlit chaos, a vast jumble of black and gray, disoriented me, and even Emma’s last words fled. The whole dream forgotten. And so much of our waking lives are lost in the same way. I felt a pang of grief for the way we live, for all that we go through, and can never return to.
When the mirror dawn came I ate some cereal, and at true dawn I started the car and hummed up the arrow canyon, determined to find the road again. The canyon led to another stone maze, with forks at every turn that might have been paths through to the north; but there were no signs of passage to show me the way. I drove back to the arrow and considered what to do. Studying the map, it seemed to me that I could navigate my own way to the red dot. It was about sixty or seventy kilometers away, and the terrain in between did not appear markedly different from that I had already crossed. It was midmorning already, and I didn’t have an endless supply of air; in fact, my choice was to press on without the road, or turn back.
So I resolved to press on without the tracks. The rest of that morning I made good time north. The tumbled-down stone city I entered seemed to have split into hexagonal “city blocks”: a dogleg of thirty degrees right, followed by the same to the left, brought me time after time to Y-shaped canyon intersections where I could make the same choice again. Then a long broad fault allowed me to drive directly north for several kilometers, pausing only to maneuver over slides. My spirits rose, and with them my hopes (and a bit of fear): perhaps I would reach the region of the red dot that very day.
But I had forgotten that maps do not contain very much of reality. In the Aureum Chaos it would have been more accurate to leave a blank, with the legend “This is chaos—terra incognita—no map can show it and be faithful to its nature.” For I drove into a narrow valley where the map indicated I could continue northward and downward to the center of the chaos, the bottom of that huge bowl—
And the valley ended in an escarpment. Not a very tall one, but tall enough—ten or twelve meters—and it extended east and west for as far as the eye could see. The whole land took a step down, in a sheer drop. A cliff!
Angrily I pulled out the map. In the appropriate area was a contour line—in fact two of them, drawn together, in a dark line that I had taken for an index contour. Disgusted, I tossed the map to the floor. Contour line or no, the escarpment was there; I could drive no farther.
For nearly an hour I sat there and thought. Then I packed some food into the survival cart, filled its water tank, filled my field suit with its maximum load of oxygen: a hundred hours, on minimum flow. In the drawers of the cart I put map, bivouac tent, lamp, etc., and then I shoved the cart out of the car’s lock. The rush of cold air filled my lungs, but it was warmer than I had expected; there was more air down in this sink than I was used to.
The car’s trunk contained a rope ladder and a big square flag of lime-green nylon. I used the ladder to lower the cart down the cliff. Rocks served to hold down the corners of the green flag, and I dropped the unsecured end over the side. Then I climbed down the rope ladder’s metal rungs. The flag stood out against the cliff-side clearly enough, and I tied its two bottom corners down with line so it couldn’t be blown back over the top by a north wind. Satisfied, I took another look at the map, put it in my thigh pocket, and set off hiking, pulling the little cart behind me.
Now there was no chute too narrow, no pass too steep. I hiked almost directly north. According to the map the red dot was about fifteen kilometers away, so I would have to hurry. But I had started late in the day, and soon the sun fell, and I had to use the mirror dusk to pull the bivouac tent from the cart and inflate it. That done, I climbed through the little lock and pulled the cart in after me. I fixed and ate a meal rapidly, as if I were going to be able to hike again when I was finished.
It was a cloudy night. Through scudding breaks the stars twinkled, and Deimos flew eastward like an omen. I could not sleep; hours passed; I was surprised to wake and find that I had been drowsing in the mirror dawn. I slipped out of the tent and the shock of frigid air burst my senses awake. Soon after the tent was back in the cart the sun rose, and I started hiking again.
Hours passed, and there was nothing for me in the world but that maze of canyons and the map. It is a form of grace to become nothing but a task; one can believe in meanings because they are all that exist. At each fork in the system of giant fissures I got out the map and made a choice. The sun overhead warmed the air, and ice on the clumps of Syrtis grass turned to drops of water, sparking like prisms in the light. Icicles hanging off rocks dripped, and the surfaces of the ice ponds got slick and smooth. Junipers and needle grass filled cracks, and sprays of saxifrage and gentian surprised me with their color. Sometimes it was hard to match the terrain to the map, which was too small-scaled for my purpose. Estimating heights and distances in the dense amber air was difficult; at times I had a prospect of fifty meters, other times I could see all the way across the chaos; what appeared to be mountains in the distance often proved to be blocks just over the next ridge, and vice versa. Each correspondence I made between my location and a point on the map was more of a guess than the last—but once, in the afternoon, I climbed a tall rock and had a look around, and the view corresponded perfectly to a point on the map five or six kilometers southwest of the dot. Full of confidence I hiked on.
The general slope of the terrain tilted up against me, and hauling the cart up stone terraces got to be hard work. The dawn mirrors had set and the sun was about to, when I sat in a narrow pass to rest. I had just caught my breath when I saw a trail duck, right there before me in the sand. Four flat rocks laid on top of each other. “Yes!” I exclaimed. I knelt to inspect it. A human construct. I hooted loudly, and leaving the cart I ranged down both sides of the pass looking for another duck. I found nothing. “Which way?” I said, suddenly free to speak. “No one makes only one duck—where’s the next?” In both directions I saw nothing but a rumpled carpet of rock, a shambles of brown and black and red. “Odd. Order leaps to the eye, I should be able to see two ducks, one before, one behind.” But perhaps the others had fallen, or been buried. Or maybe I was supposed to continue in the same direction, and when the route changed direction another duck would appear. “Yes. Carry on, a sign will appear.”
I was tired. By the time I returned to the cart the sun was down, and it was the most I could do to get the tent up and wiggle inside before dark. Once again I made soup, sipped brandy, pored over the map and charted a course for the next day, lay back in my bag, looked up at low dark clouds. Failed to sleep, except in fits and starts near dawn. Dreamed, and forgot the dreams on waking.
Next morning I was stiff, and it took a while to break camp. Before leaving I made a reconnaissance of the area, and over a steep ridge to the east of my pass I found another duck. Sand had drifted around it until it looked like a mound of dust filled with pebbles, but there it was. Lichen growing on the sides of it. I crunched back over the ridge to the cart. The new duck indicated a different course than the one I had charted the night before, but at one-to-one-million scale, the map wasn’t going to give me much help once I got into the immediate area of the red dot, and the duck might be part of a trail leading straight to it. So I hauled the cart over the ridge, and very nearly twisted an ankle. “That will never do.” The tendinitis in my knee was flaring up, but I ignored it. At the second duck I left the cart and searched for a third. I found it over another ridge; it was a fairly big duck, though it had fallen on its side and looked like a talus spill if you didn’t look closely. It was unfortunate the terrain was so rough. But it made sense. The rebels would have put their refuge in the most inaccessible location they could find. Still, it took me nearly an hour to recover from the crossing of that ridge. I turned up my oxygen supply a bit, and searched again.
The next duck led me up a narrow, shallow chute, one that gave me a way to climb a broad tilted face that was like the side of a mountain. Thankful that I was done with ridge crossings, I hauled the cart up the chute twenty steps at a time, pausing after each twenty to catch my breath and strength. Out on the slope it was very hot, at least on the side of me facing the sun. I was surprised to find it was after noon. The sweat on my brow tasted good. When I moved my hand I saw it blur through space a bit. Wondering vaguely when the next duck would appear, I started climbing again.
I was near the top of that pitch, and feeling that the chaos must have turned on its side, when I saw the figure climbing ahead of me. My heart pulsed violently, its thump banged in my ears. “Hey!” I called weakly, and gathered myself for a shout. “Hello! Hellooo!”