Blue Mars

  “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 of Hyperion? 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 elec
tric 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 Clayborne, 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 affect
ion 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.

  Part Twelve

  It Goes So Fast

  They walked down to the low bluffs overlooking the Florentine. It was night, the air still and cool, the stars bunched overhead in their thousands. They strode side by side on the bluff trail, looking down at the beaches below. The black water was smooth, pricked everywhere by reflected starlight, and the long smeared line reflecting Pseudophobos setting in the east, leading the eye to the dim black mass of land across the bay.

  I’m worried, yes, very worried. In fact I’m scared.

  Why?

  It’s Maya. Her mind. Her mental problems. Her emotional problems. They’re getting worse.

  What are the symptoms?

  The same, only worse. She can’t sleep at night. She hates the way she looks, sometimes. She’s still in her manic-depressive cycle, but it’s changing somehow, I don’t know how to characterize it. As if she can’t always remember where in the cycle she is. Bouncing around in it. She forgets things, a lot of things.