“Let’s go visit it,” Ann said. “Can we?”
“I don’t see why not,” Sax said, surprised at the request. “We can certainly catch it.”
He brought the catamaran about and tacked south and west toward the township, pushing the cat as much as he could, to impress the seafarers. In less than an hour they had reached its broad side, a rounded scarp about two kilometers long and fifty meters tall. A dock just above the waterline had a section against the township that would rise, as an open elevator, and when they had stepped across from the cat to the dock and tied their boat on, they got into this railed-off section and were lifted up to the deck of the township.
The deck was almost as broad as it was long, its central area a farm with many small trees scattered on it, so it was hard to see the other side. But it was clear from what they could see that the circumference of the deck was a kind of rectangular street or arcade, with buildings on both sides that were two to four stories high, the outer buildings topped by masts and windmills, the inner ones opening into broad breaks where parks and plazas led inward to the crops and groves of the farm, and a big freshwater pond. A floating town, somewhat like a walled city in Renaissance Tuscany in appearance, except that everything was extraordinarily neat and orderly, shipshape as one might say. A small group of the ship’s citizens greeted them on the plaza overlooking the dock, and when they found out who their visitors were they were thrilled— they insisted the travelers stay for a meal, and a few of them guided them on a walk around the perimeter of the ship, “or for as far as you care to go, it’s a good fair walk.”
This was a small township, they were told. Population, five thousand. Since its launch it had been almost entirely self-sufficient. “We grow most of our food, and fish for the rest. There are arguments now with other townships about overfishing certain species. We’re doing perennial polyculture, growing new strains of corn, sunflower, soybean, sand plum and so on, all intermixed and harvested by robot, because harvesting is backbreaking work. We’ve finally got the technology to go home to gathering, that’s what it comes down to. There are a lot of onboard cottage industries. We’ve got wineries, see the vineyards out there, and there are vintners and brandy distillers. That we do by hand. Also special-function semiconductors, and a famous bike shop.”
“Most of the time we sail around the North Sea. There are some really violent storms sometimes, but we’re so big that we ride them out pretty easily. Most of us have lived here for all ten years the ship has existed. It’s a great life. The ship is all you need. Although it’s great fun to make landfall from time to time. We come down to Nilokeras every Ls zero for the spring festival. We sell what we’ve made and resupply, and party all night long. Then back out to sea.”
“We don’t use anything but wind and sunlight, and some fish. The environmental courts like us, they agree we’re minimum impact. The population of the North Sea’s area might be even higher now than if it had stayed land. There are hundreds of townships now.”
“Thousands. And the harbor towns with the shipyards, and the seaports we visit to do business, they’re doing very well indeed.”
Ann said, “And you think this is one way we can take on some of Earth’s surplus population.”
“Yes, we do. One of the best ways. It’s a big ocean, it could take a lot more ships like this.”
“As long as they didn’t rely too much on fishing.”
As they walked on, Sax said to Ann, “That’s another reason that it just isn’t worth it to force a crisis over the immigration issue.”
Ann didn’t reply. She was staring down at the sun-burnished water, then up at one of the couple dozen masts, each with its single schooner sail. The town looked like a tabular iceberg with its surface entirely claimed by earth. A floating island.
“So many different kinds of nomads,” Sax commented. “It seems that very few of the natives feel impelled to settle in a single place.”
“Unlike us.”
“Point taken. But I wonder if this tendency means they are inclined to a certain redness. If you know what I mean.”
“I do not.”
Sax tried to explain. “It seems to me that nomads in general tend to make use of the land as they find it. They move around with the seasons, and live off what they find growing at that time. And seafaring nomads of course even more so, given that the sea is impervious to most human attempts to change it.”
“Except for the people trying to regulate sea level, or salt content. Have you heard about them?”
“Yes. But they’re not going to have much luck with that, I would guess. The mechanics of saltification are still very poorly understood.”
“If they succeed it will kill a lot of freshwater species.”
“True. But the saltwater species will be happy.”
They walked across the middle of the township toward the plaza over the dock, passing between long rows of grapevines pruned to the shape of waist-high T’s, the intermingled horizontal vines heavy with grape clusters of dusty indigo, and bracken, and clear viridine. Beyond the vineyards the ground was covered with a mix of plants, like a kind of prairie, with narrow foot trails cutting through it.
At a restaurant fronting the plaza they were treated to a meal of pasta and shrimp. The conversation ranged everywhere. But then someone came rushing out of the kitchen, pointing at his wrist: news had just come in of trouble on the space elevator. The UN troops who had been sharing the customs duties on New Clarke had taken over the whole station, and sent all the Martian police down, charging them with corruption and declaring that the UN would administer the upper end of the elevator by itself from now on. The UN’s Security Council was now saying that their local officers had overstepped their instructions, but this backpedaling did not include an invitation to the Martians to come back up the cable again, so it looked like a smoke screen to Sax. “Oh my,” he said. “Maya will be very angry, I fear.”
Ann rolled her eyes. “That isn’t really the most important ramification, if you ask me.” She looked shocked, and for the first time since Sax had found her in Olympus caldera, fully engaged in the current situation. Drawn out of her distance. It was fairly shocking, now that he thought of it. Even these seafarers were visibly shaken, though before they like Ann had seem distanced from whatever circumstances obtained on land. He could see the news tearing through the restaurant’s conversations, and throwing them all into the same space: upheaval, crisis, the threat of war. Voices were incredulous, faces were angry.
The people at their table were also watching Sax and Ann, curious as to their reaction. “You’ll have to do something about this,” one of their guides noted.
“Why us?” Ann replied tartly. “It’s you who will have to do something about it, if you ask me. You’re the ones responsible now. We’re just a couple of old issei.”
Their dinner companions looked startled, uncertain how to take her. One laughed. The host who had spoken shook his head. “That’s not true. But you’re right, we will be watching, and talking with the other townships about how to respond. We’ll do our part. I was just saying that people will be looking to you, to both of you, to see what you do. That isn’t so true for us.”
Ann was silenced by this. Sax returned to his meal, thinking furiously. He found he wanted to talk to Maya.
The evening continued, the sun fell; the dinner limped on, as they all tried to return to some sense of normality. Sax repressed a little smile; there might be an interplanetary crisis and there might not, but meanwhile dinner had to be gotten through in style. And these seafarers were not the kind of people who looked inclined to worry about the solar system at large. So the mood rallied, and they partied over their dessert, still very pleased to have Clayborne and Russell visiting them. And then in the last light the two of them made their excuses, and were escorted down to sea level and their boat. The waves on Chryse Gulf were a lot larger than they had seemed from up above.
• • •
Sax a
nd Ann sailed off in silence, wrapped in their own thoughts. Sax looked back up at the township, thinking about what they had seen that day. It looked like a good life. But something about . . . he chased the thought, and then at the end of the rapid steeplechase he caught it, and still held it all: no blank-outs these days. Which was a great satisfaction, although the content of this particular train of thought was quite melancholy. Should he even try to share it with Ann? Was it possible to say it?
He said, “Sometimes I regret— when I see those seafarers, and the lives they lead— it seems ironic that we— that we stand on the brink of a— of a kind of golden age—” There, he had said it; and felt foolish; “— which will only come to pass when our generation has died. We’ve worked for it all our lives, and then we have to die before it will come.”
“Like Moses outside Israel.”
“Yes? Did he not get to go in?” Sax shook his head. “These old stories—” Such a throwing together, like science at its heart, like the flashes of insight one got into an experiment when everything about it clarified, and one understood something. “Well, I can imagine how he felt. It’s— it’s frustrating. I would rather see what happens then. Sometimes I get so curious. About the history we’ll never know. The future after our death. And all the rest of it. Do you know what I mean?”
Ann was looking at him closely. Finally she said, “Everything dies someday. Better to die thinking that you’re going to miss a golden age, than to go out thinking that you had taken down your children’s chances with you. That you’d left your descendants with all kinds of toxic long-term debts. Now that would be depressing. As it is, we only have to feel bad for ourselves.”
“True.”
And this was Ann Clayborne talking. Sax felt that his face was glowing. That capillary action could be quite a pleasant sensation.
• • •
They returned to the Oxia archipelago and sailed through the islands, talking about them. It was possible to talk. They ate in the cockpit, and slept each in their own hull cabin, port and starboard. One fresh morning, with the wind wafting offshore cool and fragrant, Sax said, “I still wonder about the possibility of some kind of browns.”
Ann glanced at him. “And where’s the red in it?”
“Well, in the desire to hold things steady. To keep a lot of the land untouched. The areophany.”
“That’s always been green. It sounds like green with just a little touch of red, if you ask me. The khakis.”
“Yes, I suppose. That would be Irishka and the Free Mars coalition, right? But also burnt umbers, siennas, madder alizarins, Indian reds.”
“I don’t think there are any Indian reds.” And she laughed darkly.
Indeed she laughed frequently, though the humor expressed seemed often quite mordant. One evening he was in his cabin, and she up near the bow of her hull (she took the port, he the starboard) and he heard her laugh out loud, and coming up and looking around, he thought it must have been caused by the sight of Pseudophobos (most people just called it Phobos), rising again swiftly out of the west, in its old manner. The moons of Mars, sailing through the night again, little gray potatoes of no great distinction, but there they were. As was that dark laugh at the sight of them.
• • •
“Do you think this takeover of Clarke is serious?” Ann asked one night as they were retiring to their hulls.
“It’s hard to say. Sometimes I think it must be a threatening gesture only, because if it’s serious it would be so— unintelligent. They must know that Clarke is very vulnerable to— removal from the scene.”
“Kasei and Dao didn’t find it that easy to remove.”
“No, but—” Sax did not want to say that their attempt had been botched, but he was afraid that she would read the comment out of his silence. “We in Da Vinci set up an X-ray laser complex in Arsia Mons caldera, buried behind a rock curtain in the north wall, and if we set it off the cable will be melted right at about the areosynchronous point. There isn’t a defensive system that could stop it.”
Ann stared at him; he shrugged. He wasn’t personally responsible for Da Vinci actions, no matter what people thought.
“But bringing down the cable,” she said, and shook her head. “It would kill a lot of people.”
Sax remembered how Peter had survived the fall of the first cable, by jumping out into space. Rescued by chance. Perhaps Ann was less likely to write off the lives that would inevitably be lost. “It’s true,” he said. “It isn’t a good solution. But it could be done, and I would think the Terrans know that.”
“So it may just be a threat.”
“Yes. Unless they’re prepared to go further.”
• • •
North of the Oxia archipelago they passed McLaughlin Bay, the eastern side of a drowned crater. North again was Mawrth Point, and behind it the inlet to Mawrth Fjord, one of the narrowest and longest fjords of all. It was a matter of constant tacking to sail up it, pushed this way and that by tricky winds, swirling between steep convolute walls; but Sax did it anyway, because it was a pretty fjord, at the bottom of a very deep and narrow outbreak channel, widening as one sailed farther into it; and beyond and above the end of the water, the rock-floored canyon continued inland for as far as one could see, and many kilometers beyond that. He hoped to show Ann that the existence of the fjords did not necessarily mean the drowning of all the outbreak channels; Ares and Kasei also retained very long canyons above sea level, and Al-Qahira and Ma’adim as well. But he said nothing of this, and Ann made no comment.
After the maneuvering in Mawrth, he sailed them almost directly west. To get out of the Chryse Gulf into the Acidalia region of the North Sea, it was necessary to work around a long arm of land called the Sinai Peninsula, sticking out into the ocean from the west side of Arabia Terra. The strait beyond it connecting Chryse Gulf with the North Sea was 500 kilometers wide; but it would have been 1,500 kilometers wide if it were not for the Sinai Peninsula.
So they sailed west into the wind, day after day, talking or not talking. Many times they came back to what it might mean to be brown. “Perhaps the combination should be called blue,” Ann said one evening, looking over the side at the water. “Brown isn’t very attractive, and it reeks of compromise. Maybe we should be thinking of something entirely new.”
“Maybe we should.”
At night after dinner, and some time looking at the stars swimming over the sloppy sea surface, they said good night, and Sax retired to the starboard hull cabin, Ann to the port; and the AI sailed them slowly through the night, dodging the occasional icebergs that began to appear at this latitude, pushed into the gulf from the North Sea. It was quite pleasant.
One morning Sax woke early, stirred by a strong swell under the hull, which pitched his narrow bed up and down in a way that his dreaming mind had interpreted as a giant pendulum, swinging them this way and that. He dressed with some difficulty and went abovedeck, and Ann, standing at the shrouds, called out, “It seems the groundswell and the windchop are in a positive interference pattern.”
“Are they!” He tried to join her, and was slammed down into a cockpit seat by a sudden rise of the boat. “Ah!”
She laughed. He grabbed the cockpit handrail, pulled himself up to her side. He saw immediately what she meant; the wind was strong, perhaps sixty-five kilometers per hour, and the whine in the boat’s minimal rigging was loud and sustained. There were whitecaps everywhere on the blue sea, and the sound of the wind coursing through all that broken water was very unlike what it would be pouring over rock— there it would be a high keening shriek— here, among the trillions of bursting bubbles, it was a deep solid roar. Every wave was whitecapped, and the great hills of the ground swells were obscured by foam flying off the crests and rolling in the troughs. The sky was a dirty opaque raw umber, very ominous looking, the sun a dim old coin, everything else dark, as if in shadow, though there were no clouds. Fines in the air: a dust storm. And now the waves were picking up, so th
at they spent many long seconds shooting up the side of one, then almost as many schussing down into the trough of the next one. Up and down in a long rhythm. The positive interference Ann had spoken of made some waves doubly big. The water not foaming was turning the color of the sky, brownish and dull, dark, though there was still not a cloud to be seen— only this ominous color of the sky; not the old pink, but more like the dust-choked air of the Great Storm. The whitecaps ceased in their area and the sound of water against the boat grew louder, a slushy rumble; the sea here was coated with frazil ice, or the thicker elastic layer of ice crystals called nilas. Then the whitecaps returned, twice as thick as before.
Sax climbed down into the cockpit and checked the weather report on the AI. A katabatic wind was pouring down Kasei Vallis and onto Chryse Gulf. A howler, as the Kasei fliers would say. The AI should have warned them. But like many katabatic storms it had come up in an hour, and was still a fairly local phenomenon. Yet strong for all that; the boat was on a roller-coaster ride, shimmying under hammer blows of air as it shot up and down on the huge groundswell. To the side the waves looked like they were being knocked over by the wind, but the boat’s skittering flights up and down showed that they underlay the flying foam as big as ever. Overhead the mast sail had contracted almost to a pole, in the shape of an aerodynamic foil. Sax leaned over to check the AI more closely; the volume knob on the beeper was turned all the way down. So perhaps it had tried to warn them after all.