The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  It is the strongest sort of duality: Facing the rock and climbing, his attention is tightly focused on the rock within a meter or two of his eyes, inspecting its every flaw and irregularity. It is not particularly good climbing rock, but the Gully slopes at about seventy degrees in this section, so the actual technical difficulty is not that great. The important thing is to understand the rock fully enough to find only good holds and good cracks—to recognize suspect holds and avoid them. A lot of weight will follow them up these fixed ropes, and although the ropes will probably be renailed, his piton placements will likely stand. One has to see the rock and the world beneath the rock.

  And then he finds a ledge to sit and rest on, and turns around, and there is the great expanse of the Tharsis Bulge. Tharsis is a continent-sized bulge in the Martian surface; at its center it is eleven kilometers above the Martian datum, and the three prince volcanoes lie in a line, northeast to southwest, on the bulge's highest plateau. Olympus Mons is at the far northwestern edge of the bulge, almost on the great plain of Amazonis Planitia. Now, not even halfway up the great volcano's escarpment, Roger can just see the three prince volcanoes poking over the horizon to the southeast, demonstrating perfectly the size of the planet itself. He looks around one-eighteenth of Mars.

  By midafternoon Roger and Stephan have run out their three hundred meters of rope, and they return to Camp Three pleased with themselves. The next morning they hurry up the fixed ropes in the mirror dawn, and begin again. At the end of Roger's third pitch in the lead he comes upon a good site for a camp: A sort of pillar bordering the Great Gully on its right side ends abruptly in a flat top that looks very promising. After negotiating a difficult short traverse to get onto the pillar top, they wait for the midday radio conference. Consultation with Eileen confirms that the pillar is about the right distance from Camp Three, and suddenly they are standing in Camp Four.

  “The Gully ends pretty near to you anyway,” Eileen says.

  So Roger and Stephan have the day free to set up a wall tent and then explore. The climb is going well, Roger thinks: no major technical difficulties, a group that gets along fairly well together . . . perhaps the great South Buttress will not prove to be that difficult after all.

  Stephan gets out a little sketchbook. Roger glances at the filled pages as Stephan flips through them. “What's that?”

  “Chir pine, they call it. I saw some growing out of the rocks above Camp One. It's amazing what you find living on the side of this cliff.”

  “Yes,” Roger says.

  “Oh I know, I know. You don't like it. But I'm sure I don't know why.” He has the blank sheet of the sketchbook up now. “Look in the cracks across the Gully. Lot of ice there, and then patches of moss. That's moss campion, with the lavender flowers on top of the moss cushion, see?”

  He begins sketching and Roger watches, fascinated.

  “That's a wonderful talent to have, drawing.”

  “Skill. Look, there's edelweiss and asters, growing almost together.” He jerks, puts finger to lips, points. “Pika,” he whispers.

  Roger looks at the broken niches in the moat of the Gully opposite them. There is a movement and suddenly he sees them—two little gray furballs with bright black eyes—three—the last scampering up the rock fearlessly. They have a hole at the back of one niche for a home. Stephan sketches rapidly, getting the outline of the three creatures, then filling them in. Bright Martian eyes.

  And once, in the northern autumn in Burroughs, when the leaves covered the ground and fell through the air, leaves the color of sand, or the tan of antelopes, or the green of green apples, or the white of cream, or the yellow of butter—he walked through the park. The wind blew stiffly from the southwest out of the big funnel of the delta, bringing clouds flying overhead swiftly, scattered and white and sunbroken to the west, massed and dark dusky blue to the east; and the evergreens waved their arms in every shade of dark green, before which the turning leaves of the hardwoods flared; and above the trees to the east a white-walled church, with reddish arched roof tiles and a white bell tower, glowed under the dark clouds. Kids playing on the swings across the park, yellow-red aspens waving over the brick city hall beyond them to the north—and Roger felt—wandering among widely spaced white-trunked trees that thrust their white limbs in every upward direction—he felt—feeling the wind loft the gliding leaves over him—he felt what all the others must have felt when they walked around, that Mars had become a place of exquisite beauty. In such lit air he could see every branch, leaf, and needle waving under the tide of wind, crows flying home, lower clouds lofting puffy and white under the taller black ones, and it all struck him all at once: freshly colored, fully lit, spacious and alive in the wind—what a world! What a world.

  And then, back in his offices, he hadn't been able to tell anyone about it. It wouldn't have been like him.

  Remembering that, and remembering his recent talk with Eileen, Roger feels uncomfortable. His past overwhelmed that day's walk through the park: What kind of assumption was that?

  Roger spends his afternoon free-climbing above Camp Four, looking around a bit and enjoying the exercise of his climbing skills. They're coming back at last. But the rock is nearly crack-free once out of the Gully, and he decides free-climbing is not a good idea. Besides, he notices a curious thing: About fifty meters above Camp Four, the Great Central Gully is gone. It ends in a set of overhangs like the ribs under the protruding wall of a building. Definitely not the way up. And yet the face to the right of the overhangs is not much better; it too tilts out and out, until it is almost sheer. The few cracks breaking this mass will not be easy to climb. In fact, Roger doubts he could climb them, and wonders if the leads are up to it. Well, sure, he thinks. They can climb anything. But it looks awful. Hans has talked about the volcano's “hard eon,” when the lava pouring from the caldera was denser and more consistent than in the volcano's earlier years. The escarpment, being a sort of giant boring of the volcano's flow history, naturally reflects the changes in lava consistency in its many horizontal bands. So far they have been climbing on softer rock—now they have reached the bottom of a harder band. Back in Camp Four Roger looks up at what he can see of the cliff above, and wonders where they will go.

  Another duality: the two halves of the day, forenoon and afternoon. Forenoon is sunny and therefore hot: a morning ice and rock shower in the Gully, and time to dry out sleeping bags and socks. Then noon passes and the sun disappears behind the cliff above. For an hour or so they have the weird half-light of the dusk mirrors; then they too disappear, and suddenly the air is biting, bare hands risk frostnip, and the lighting is indirect and eerie: a world in shadow. Water on the cliff face ices up, and rocks are pushed out—there is another period when rocks fall and go whizzing by. People bless their helmets and hunch their shoulders, and discuss again the possibility of shoulder pads. In the cold the cheery morning is forgotten, and it seems the whole climb takes place in shadow.

  When Camp Four is established they try several reconnaissance climbs through what Hans calls the Jasper Band. “It looks like orbicular jasper, see?” He shows them a dull rock and after cutting away at it with a laser saw, shows them a smooth brown surface, speckled with little circles of yellow, green, red, white. “Looks like lichen,” Roger says. “Fossilized lichen."

  “Yes. This is orbicular jasper. For it to be trapped in this basalt implies a metamorphic slush—lava partially melting rock in the throat above the magma chamber, and then throwing it all up.”

  So it was the Jasper Band, and it was trouble. Too sheer—close to vertical, really, and without an obvious way up. “At least it's good hard rock,” Dougal says cheerfully.

  Then one day Arthur and Marie return from a long traverse out to the right, and then up. They hurry into camp grinning ear to ear.

  “It's a ledge,” Arthur says. “A perfect ledge. I can't believe it. It's about half a meter wide, and extends around this rampart for a couple hundred meters, just like a damn sidewalk!
We just walked right around that corner! Completely vertical above and below—talk about a view!”

  For once Roger finds Arthur's enthusiasm fully appropriate. The Thank God Ledge, as Arthur has named it ("There's one like this on Half Dome in Yosemite"), is a horizontal break in the cliff face, and a flat slab just wide enough to walk on is the result. Roger stops in the middle of the ledge to look around. Straight up: rock and sky. Straight down: the tiny tumble of the talus, appearing directly below them, as Roger is not inclined to lean out too far to see the rock in between. The exposure is astonishing. “You and Marie walked along this ledge without ropes?” Roger says.

  “Oh, it's fairly wide,” Arthur replies. “Don't you think? I ended up crawling there where it narrows just a bit. But mostly it was fine. Marie walked the whole way.”

  “I'm sure she did.” Roger shakes his head, happy to be clipped on to the rope that has been fixed about chest high above the ledge. With its aid he can appreciate the strange ledge—perfect sidewalk in a completely vertical world: the wall hard, knobby, right next to his head—under him the smooth surface of the ledge, and then empty space.

  Verticality. Consider it. A balcony high on a tall building will give a meager analogy: Experience it. On the side of this cliff, unlike the side of any building, there is no ground below. The world below is the world of belowness, the rush of air under your feet. The forbidding smooth wall of the cliff, black and upright beside you, halves the sky. Earth, air; the solid here and now, the airy infinite; the wall of basalt, the sea of gases. Another duality: To climb is to live on the most symbolic plane of existence and the most physical plane of existence at the same time. This too the climber treasures.

  At the far end of the Thank God Ledge there is a crack system that breaks through the Jasper Band—it is like a narrow, miniature version of the Great Gully, filled with ice. Progress upward is renewed, and the cracks lead up to the base of an ice-filled half funnel that divides the Jasper Band even further. The bottom of the funnel is sloped just enough for Camp Five, which becomes by far the most cramped of the campsites. The Thank God Ledge traverse means that using the power reels is impossible between Camps Four and Five, however. Everyone makes ten or twelve carries between the two camps. Each time Roger walks the sidewalk through space, his amazement at it returns.

  While the carries across the ledge are being made, and Camps Two and Three are being dismantled, Arthur and Marie have begun finding the route above. Roger goes up with Stephan to supply them with rope and oxygen. The climbing is “mixed,” half on rock, half on black ice rimed with dirty hard snow. Awkward stuff. There are some pitches that make Roger and Hans gasp with effort, look at each other round-eyed. “Must have been Marie leading.” “I don't know, that Arthur is pretty damn good.” The rock is covered in many places by layers of black ice, hard and brittle: Years of summer rain followed by frost have caked the exposed surfaces at this height. Roger's boots slip over the slick ice repeatedly. “Need crampons up here."

  “Except the ice is so thin, you'd be kicking rock.”

  “Mixed climbing.”

  “Fun, eh?”

  Breath rasps over knocking heartbeats. Holes in the ice have been broken with ice axes; the rock below is good rock, lined with vertical fissures. A chunk of ice whizzes by, clatters on the face below.

  “I wonder if that's Arthur and Marie's work.”

  Only the fixed rope makes it possible for Roger to ascend this pitch, it is so hard. Another chunk of ice flies by, and both of them curse.

  Feet appear in the top of the open-book crack they are ascending.

  “Hey! Watch out up there! You're dropping ice chunks on us!”

  “Oh! Sorry, didn't know you were there.” Arthur and Marie jumar down the rope to them. “Sorry,” Marie says again. “Didn't know you'd come up so late. Have you got more rope?”

  “Yeah.”

  The sun disappears behind the cliff, leaving only the streetlamp light of the dusk mirrors. Arthur peers at them as Marie stuffs their packs with new rope. “Beautiful,” he exclaims. “They have parhelia on Earth too, you know—a natural effect of the light when there's ice crystals in the atmosphere. It's usually seen in Antarctica—big halos around the sun, and at two points of the halo these mock suns. But I don't think we ever had four mock suns per side. Beautiful!”

  “Let's go,” Marie says without looking up. “We'll see you two down at Camp Five tonight.” And off they go, using the rope and both sides of the open-book crack to quickly lever their way up.

  “Strange pair,” Stephan says as they descend to Camp Five.

  The next day they take more rope up. In the late afternoon, after a very long climb, they find Arthur and Marie sitting in a cave in the side of the cliff that is big enough to hold their entire base camp. “Can you believe this?” Arthur cries. “It's a damn hotel!"

  The cave's entrance is a horizontal break in the cliff face, about four meters high and over fifteen from side to side. The floor of the cave is relatively flat, covered near the entrance with a thin sheet of ice, and littered with chunks of the roof, which is bumpy but solid. Roger picks up one of the rocks from the floor and moves it to the side of the cave, where floor and roof come together to form a narrow crack. Marie is trying to get somebody below on the radio, to tell them about the find. Roger goes to the back of the cave, some twenty meters in from the face, and ducks down to inspect the jumble of rocks in the long crack where floor and roof meet. “It's going to be nice to lie out flat for once,” Stephan says. Looking out the cave's mouth, Roger sees a wide smile of lavender sky.

  When Hans arrives he gets very excited. He bangs about in the gloom hitting things with his ice axe, pointing his flashlight into various nooks and crannies. “It's tuff, do you see?” he says, holding up a chunk for their inspection. “This is a shield volcano, meaning it ejected very little ash over the years, which is what gave it its flattened shape. But there must have been a few ash eruptions, and when the ash is compressed it becomes tuff—this rock here. Tuff is much softer than basalt and andesite, and over the years this exposed layer has eroded away, leaving us with our wonderful hotel."

  “I love it,” says Arthur.

  The rest of the team joins them in the mirror dusk, but the cave is still uncrowded. Although they set up tents to sleep in, they place the lamps on the cave floor, and eat dinner in a large circle, around a collection of glowing little stoves. Eyes gleam with laughter as the climbers consume bowls of stew. There is something marvelous about this secure home, tucked in the face of the escarpment three thousand meters above the plain. It is an unexpected joy to loll about on flat ground, unharnessed. Hans has not stopped prowling the cave with his flashlight. Occasionally he whistles.

  “Hans!” Arthur calls when the meal is over and the bowls and pots have been scraped clean. “Get over here, Hans. Have a seat. There you go. Sit down.” Marie is passing around her flask of brandy. “All right, Hans, tell me something. Why is this cave here? And why, for that matter, is this escarpment here? Why is Olympus Mons the only volcano anywhere to have this encircling cliff?”

  Frances says, “It's not the only volcano to have such a feature.”

  “Now, Frances,” Hans says. “You know it's the only big shield volcano with a surrounding escarpment. The analogies from Iceland that you're referring to are just little vents of larger volcanoes.”

  Frances nods. “That's true. But the analogy may still hold.”

  “Perhaps.” Hans explains to Arthur, “You see, there is still not a perfect agreement as to the cause of the scarp. But I think I can say that my theory is generally accepted—wouldn't you agree, Frances?”

  “Yes. . . .”

  Hans smiles genially and looks around at the group. “You see, Frances is one of those who believe that the volcano originally grew up through a glacial cap, and that the glacier made in effect a retaining wall, holding in the lava and creating this drop-off after the glacial cap disappeared.”

  “Th
ere are good analogies in Iceland for this particular shape for a volcano,” Frances says. “And it's eruption under and through ice that explains it.”

  “Be that as it may,” Hans says, “I am among those who feel that the weight of Olympus Mons is the cause of the scarp.”

  “You said that once before,” Arthur says, “but I don't understand how that would work.”

  Stephan voices his agreement with this, and Hans sips from the flask with a happy look. He says, “The volcano is extremely old, you understand. Three billion years or so, on this same site, or close to it—very little tectonic drift, unlike on Earth. So magma upwells, lava spills out, over and over and over, and it is deposited over softer material—probably the gardened regolith that resulted from the intensive meteor bombardments of the planet's earliest years. A tremendous weight is deposited on the surface of the planet, you see, and this weight increases as the volcano grows. As we all know now, it is a very, very big volcano. And eventually the weight is so great that it squishes out the softer material beneath it. We find this material to the northeast, which is the downhill side of the Tharsis Bulge, and is naturally the side that the pressured rock would be pushed out to. Have any of you visited the Olympus Mons aureole?” Several of them nod. “Fascinating region.”