'You'll do nicely, Commander.'
'Manuel, please.' He spoke almost flawless American English, but with the tiniest trace of a Latin accent. 'Tell me - how did you get on with Jim?'
'Oh, fine. I liked him. Apart from the fact that he kept going on about some dead person called Elvis, of course.'
'Yes. You have to humour him in that respect. But he's not too bad, all things considered. We could have had a worse captain, I think. He glued us together. Now then. It seems to be our turn. Are you ready for this, Miss . . . ?'
'Carrie Clay.' It was strange introducing myself again, but it seemed rude not to. 'Yes, I'm ready.'
We shuffled forwards and jumped, falling through the middle of the ring-shaped platform. I looked up - although I was attached to D'Oliveira, I could still move my head - and saw the ring-shaped platform dwindling into the vertical distance. After only a couple of heartbeats we flashed past the level of Sloths, and then we were falling still faster. The feeling of weightlessness was not totally new to me, of course, but the sensation of mounting speed and proximity to the rushing wall of the city more than compensated.
'There's a trick to this, of course,' D'Oliveira said. He had positioned us into a belly-down configuration, with his arms and legs spread out. 'A lot of people haven't got the nerve to keep this close to the side of the city.'
'No shit.'
'But it's a big mistake not to,' D'Oliveira said. 'If you know the city well, you can keep in nice and close like this. The fatal error is moving too far out.'
'Really.'
'Oh, yes. Major mistake.' He paused. 'Hmm. Notice anything? We're not accelerating. You've got your weight back.'
'Silly me. Didn't . . . notice.'
'Terminal velocity after forty-five seconds. Already dropped four kilometres - but you wouldn't guess it, would you?'
Now we were falling down a narrow, vertical canyon with buildings on either side of us and rock on the third face. D'Oliveira started giving me a lecture on terminal velocities that might well have been fascinating at any other time; how the refineries had ramped up the air pressure on Mars to around five per cent of Earth normal, which - while neither thick nor warm enough to breathe - was enough to stop a human in a squirrel-suit from dropping like a stone, even if terminal velocity was still a hair-raising one-sixth of a kilometre per second.
It was about as welcome as a lecture on human neck anatomy to someone on the guillotine.
I looked down again and saw that we were beginning to reach the city's lower-level outskirts. But the canyon wall itself seemed as high as ever; the lights at the bottom just as far away.
'You know how this city came about, don't you?' D'Oliveira said.
'No . . . but I'm . . . damn sure you're . . . going to . . . tell me.'
'It all began with geologists, not long after the turmoil.' He flipped us around and altered our angle of attack, so that we were slightly head-down. 'They were looking for traces of ancient fossil life, buried in rock layers. Eight vertical kilometres wasn't good enough for them, so they dug out the canyon's base for two or three more, then covered a whole vertical strip in scaffolding. They built labs and living modules on the scaffolding, to save going back up to the top all the time.' A chunk of building zipped past close enough to touch - it looked that close, anyway - and then we were falling past rough rock face with only the very occasional structure perched on a ledge. 'But then somewhere else on Mars they uncovered the first sloth relics. The geologists didn't want to miss the action, so they cleared out like shit on wheels, leaving all their things behind.' D'Oliveira steered us around a finger-like rock protrusion that would have speared us otherwise. 'By the time they got back, the scaffolding had been taken over by squatters. Kids, mostly - climbers and base jumpers looking for new thrills. Then someone opened a bar, and before you knew it the place had gone mainstream.' He spoke the last word with exquisite distaste. 'But I guess it's not so bad for the tourists.'
'Jim didn't mind, did he?'
'No, but he's not me. I don't mind the fact that we came here, either, and I don't mind the fact that people came after us. But did it have to be so many?'
'You can't ration a planet.'
'I don't want to. But it used to be hard to get here. Months of travel in cramped surroundings. How long did it take you, Miss Clay?'
'Five days on the Hiawatha.' It was easier to talk now; what had been terror not many seconds ago transmuting into something almost pleasant. 'And I wouldn't exactly call her cramped. You could argue about the de'cor in the promenade lounge, but beyond that--'
'I know. I've seen those tourist liners parked around Mars, lighting up the night sky.'
'But if you hadn't come to Mars, we might not have discovered the sloth relics, Manuel. And it was those relics that showed us how to get from Earth to Mars in five days. You can't have it both ways.'
'I know. No one's more fascinated by the sloths than me. It's just - did we have to learn so much, so soon?'
'Well, you'd better get used to it. They're talking about building a starship, you know - a lot sooner than any of us think.'
The rock face had become much smoother now - it was difficult to judge speed, in fact - and the lights at the bottom of the canyon no longer seemed infinitely distant.
'Yes, I've heard about that. Sometimes I almost think I'd like to . . .'
'What, Manuel?'
'Hang on. Time to start slowing down, I think.'
There were only two orthodox ways of slowing down from a big dive, the less skilled of which involved slamming into the ground. The other, trickier way, was to use the fact that the lower part of the canyon wall began to deviate slightly from true vertical. The idea was to drop until you began to scrape against the wall at a tiny grazing angle, and then use friction to kill your speed. Lower down, the wall curved out to merge with the canyon floor, so if you did it properly you could come to a perfect sliding halt with no major injuries. It sounded easy, but - as D'Oliveira told me - it wasn't. The main problem was that people were usually too scared to stay close to the rushing side of the wall when it was sheer. You couldn't blame them for that, since it was pretty nerve-racking and you did have to know exactly where it was safe to fall. But if they stayed too far out they were prolonging the point at which they came into contact with the canyon wall, and by then it wouldn't be a gentle kiss but a high-speed collision at an appreciable angle.
Still, as D'Oliveira assured me, they probably had the best view, while it lasted.
He brought us in for a delicate meeting against the wall, heads down, and then used the fifteen-centimetre-thick armour on his front as a friction break, as if we were tobogganing down a near-vertical slope. The lower part of the wall had already been smooth, but thousands of previous cliff-divers had polished it to glassy perfection.
When it was over - when we had come to an undignified but injury-free halt - attendants escorted us out of the danger zone. The first thing they did was release the fasteners so that we could stand independently. My legs felt like jelly.
'Well?' D'Oliveira said.
'All right, I'll admit it. That was reasonably entertaining. I might even consider doing--'
'Great. There's an elevator that'll take us straight back--'
'Or, on second thought, you could show me to the nearest stiff drink.'
I needn't have worried; D'Oliveira was happy to postpone his next cliff-dive and I was assured that there was a well-stocked bar at the base of the canyon. For a moment, however, we lingered, looking back up that impossible wall of rock, to where the lights of Strata City glimmered far above us. The city had seemed enormous when I'd been inside it; not much smaller when we'd been falling past it - but now it looked tiny, a thin skein of human presence against the monumental vastness of the canyon side.
D'Oliveira put a hand on my forearm. 'Something up?'
'Just thinking, that's all.'
'Bad habit.' He patted me on the back. 'We'll get you that drink now.'
/> An hour or so later, D'Oliveira and I were sharing a compartment in a train heading away from Strata City.
'We could go somewhere else,' I'd said. 'It's still early, after all, and my body clock still thinks it's mid-afternoon.'
'Bored with Strata City already?'
'Not exactly, no - but somewhere else would make a good contrast.' I was finishing off a vodka and could feel my cheeks flushing. 'I'm going to write this meeting up, you understand.'
'Why not?' He shrugged. 'Jim's told you what he thinks about Mars, so I might as well have my say.'
'Some of it you've already told me.'
He nodded. 'But I could talk all night if you let me. Listen - how about taking a train to Golombek?'
'It's not that far,' I said, after a moment's thought. 'But you know what's there, don't you?'
'It's not a problem for me, Miss Clay. And it isn't the reason I suggested Golombek, anyway. They've recently opened a sloth grotto for public viewing. Haven't had a chance to see it, to be honest, but I'd very much like to.'
I shrugged. 'Well, what are expense accounts for, if not to burn?'
So we'd taken an elevator back to the top of the canyon and picked up the first train heading out to Golombek. The express shot across gently undulating Martian desert, spanning canyons on elegant white bridges grown from structural bone. It was dark, most of the landscape black except for the distant lights of settlements or the vast, squatting shapes of refineries.
'I think I understand now,' I said, 'why you contacted me.'
The man sitting opposite me shrugged. 'It wasn't really me. Jim was the one.'
'Well, maybe. But the point remains. It was time to be heard, wasn't it? Time to set the record straight. That was the problem with vanishing - it let people put things into your mouths that you wouldn't necessarily have agreed with.'
He nodded. 'We've been used by every faction you can think of, whether it's to justify evacuating Mars completely or covering it with kilometre-deep oceans. And it's all bullshit; all lies.'
'But it's not as if you even agree with each other.'
'No, but . . .' He paused. 'We might not agree, but at least this is the truth - what we really think - not something invented to suit someone else's agenda. At least it's the real story.'
'And if the real story isn't exactly neat and tidy?'
'It's still true.'
He looked, of course, very much like Jim Grossart. I won't say they were precisely the same, since D'Oliveira seemed to inhabit the same face differently, pulling the facial muscles into a configuration all of his own. He deported himself differently, as well, sitting with slightly more military bearing.
Even by the time I'd done my article - more than eighty years after the landing - no one really understood quite what had happened to Captain Jim Grossart. All anyone agreed on was the basics: Grossart had been normal when he left Earth as the only inhabitant of a one-man Mars expedition.
Maybe it was the accident that had done it, the explosion in deep space that had damaged Hydra's aerobraking shields. The explosion also caused a communication blackout, which lasted several weeks, and it was only when the antenna began working again that anyone could be sure that Grossart had survived at all. Over the next few days, as he began sending messages back home, the truth slowly dawned. Jim Grossart had cracked, fracturing into three personalities. Grossart himself was only one-third of the whole, with two new and entirely fictitious selves sharing his head. Each took on some of the skills that had previously been part of Grossart's overall expertise; D'Oliveira inheriting Grossart's piloting abilities and Treichler becoming the specialist in Martian physics and geology. And - worried about inflicting more harm than necessary on a man who was almost over the edge - the mission controllers back on Earth played along with him. They must have hoped he'd reintegrate as soon as the crisis was over, perhaps when the Hydra had safely landed.
But it never happened.
'Do you ever think back to what it was like before?' I said, aware that I was on dangerous ground.
'Before what, exactly?'
'The crossing.'
He shook his head. 'I'm not really one to dwell on the past, I'm afraid.'
Golombek was a glittery, gaudy sprawl of domes, towers and connecting tubes; a pile of Christmas tree decorations strewn with tinsel. The train dived into a tunnel, then emerged into a dizzying underground mall. We got off, spending a lazy hour wandering the shopping galleries before stopping for a drink in a theme bar called Sojourners. The floor was covered with fake dust and the hideously overpriced drinks arrived on little flat-topped, six-wheeled rovers that kept breaking down. I ended up paying, just as I'd paid for the train tickets, but I didn't mind. D'Oliveira, or Grossart, or whoever it was best to think of him as, obviously didn't have much money to throw around. He must have been nearly invisible as far as the Martian economy was concerned.
'It was true what you said earlier on, wasn't it?' I said, while we rode a tram towards the sloth grotto. 'About no one being more fascinated by the aliens than you were.'
'Yes. Even if the others sometimes call me a mystical fool. To Jim they're just dead aliens, a useful source of new technologies but nothing more than that. Me, I think there's something deeper; that we were meant to find them, meant to come this far and then continue the search, even if that means some of us leaving Mars altogether . . .' He smiled. 'Maybe I've just listened to too much of their music while doing the big dive.'
'And what does Brad Treichler think about them?'
He was silent for a few moments. 'Brad doesn't feel the same way I do.'
'To what extent?'
'To the extent of wondering whether the relics are a poisoned chalice, the extent of wondering whether we should have come to Mars at all.'
'That's an extreme viewpoint for someone who risked his life coming here.'
'I know. And not one I share, I hasten to add.'
I made an effort to lighten the mood. 'I'm glad. If you hadn't come to Mars, there'd have been no big dive, and I'd have had to find another way of having the living shit scared out of me.'
'Yes, it does tend to do that the first time, doesn't it?'
'And the second?'
'It's generally worse. The third time, though--'
'I don't think there'll be a third time, Manuel.'
'Not even for a vodka?'
'Not even.'
By then we had arrived at the grotto, a real one that had been laboriously dismantled and relocated from elsewhere on Mars. Apparently the original site was right under one of the aqueducts and would have been flooded in a few years, as soon as they tapped the polar ice.
Inside, it all felt strangely over-familiar. I kept having to remind myself that these were real sloth rooms, real sloth artefacts and real wall frescos; that the sloths had actually inhabited this grotto. Part of my brain, nonetheless, still insisted that the place was just a better-than-average museum mock-up or an upmarket but still slightly kitsch theme-style restaurant: Sloths with better de'cor.
But they'd really been here. Unlike any mock-up I'd been in, for instance, there was really no floor. Floor was a concept the sloths had never got their furry heads around, the walls merging like an inverted cave roof. Supposedly they'd evolved on a densely forested planet where gruesome predators used to live on the ground. The sloths must have come down at some point - they hadn't evolved an advanced civilisation by wiping their bottoms on leaves all day - but that dislike of the ground must have remained with them. Just as we humans still liked to shut out the dark, the sloths liked to get off the ground and just hang around.
It was all very interesting; I would have been happy to spend hours there, but not all in one go. After two hours of showing scholarly fascination in every exhibit, I'd had enough six-limbed furry aliens to last me a fortnight.
We met up in the souvenir shop attached to the grotto. I bought a T-shirt with a tasteful sloth motif on it; very discreet, with the words Sloth Grotto, Golombek, Ma
rs in writing that had been made to look slightly like sloth script if you were not an expert in xenolinguistics.
'Well,' I said, beginning to feel just the tiniest bit tired. 'That was fun. What next?'
'The lander's not far from here,' he said. 'We could check it out, if you like.'
I should have talked him out of it.