More, I was facing an aspect of Humankind that my species had forgotten.
“Pickin’ up a real bit of speed now,” Paul’s voice said. “Lot of vibration here. I’m well into the Ius Chasma’s eastern mouth, and the tide surge’s squirtin’ me along at a pretty good clip.”
He was fading. I could feel that, feel the tremors of exhaustion dragging at his arms, his back. I felt something else, too, which alarmed me more. We were having trouble breathing, each breath a hard drag against an increasing pressure over our chest. Paul checked his airflow and PLSS readouts then, but everything showed normal. He bumped up the O2 valve a notch and went back to steering. The Ius Chasma here was neatly divided by a long, knife-backed ridge called the Geryon Montes, narrowing the canyon to five kilometers in places, maybe less. Zet. He should have tried for the main passage to the north. Maybe he’d gotten confused … maybe he’d simply not been able to correct the awkward ship’s course enough to clear the montes and put it on our left.
Judging from the cliffs flashing past to either side now, the water beneath was perhaps half a kil deep; the air around us had a peculiar, hazy softness to it, the effect of dust and water droplets hurled up by the water’s explosive passage. The cliffs, what I could see of them, showed evidence of the sheer violence of the water’s arrival. Martian regolith is laden with peroxides that can react explosively with water, releasing vast quantities of oxygen.
Not enough to breathe, of course. Not even enough to ignite with the hydrogen and methane that must be outgassing from the rocks and melting ices as well. But enough to give the air a strange and beautiful glow as the cloud cover began to grow ragged and the first shafts of sunlight angled down out of the sky, sparkling against the water. The rain continued, but lightly … a thin mist gleaming in the golden light.
“My God,” Paul said. “Ann … it’s beautiful …”
The jolt as we collided with the rock wall to our right was sharp and savage enough to leave my head spinning. I felt the compartment tip alarmingly; another balyut, again on the right side, had blown, cushioning the impact but leaving us with a dangerous list to starboard.
Paul’s heart was thudding in his chest now, and he was struggling with each breath. I willed him to up the O2 again, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“Should be okay,” he said. “Should be okay. We should stay afloat even if we lose three of the things.” Then we struck the wall again, rebounding with a dizzying spin that left me breathing as hard as Paul. Geryon Montes was behind us now; ahead, just visible through flashing spray, a purple shadow loomed high and rounded.
The waveride was coming to an end.
“Paul!” Andr’s voice was calling. “Paul, respond, please!”
I could hear the voice plainly, but Paul was not reacting.
“Feel like we’re comin’ home at last, eh, Ann? Not just Pittsburgh, Mars. But Earth. Been a long time since we’ve seen rain like that. Or water, come t’that.”
“Paul! Please respond!”
“Eh. Don’t tell them Amortals I said so. This might be a pretty nice place t’live, some year. Our grandkids might live here, if’n the girls decide to come back, someday. Christ, I miss ’em. But life’s gotta reach out. Fill new niches. Expand. Adapt. Fossils …”
It felt as though we were enduring high acceleration, a smothering, crushing sensation over our chest. A sharp pain was drilling its way down my left arm.
A side channel fed me new data on Paul’s condition. Heart attack! Life, didn’t he even have preventative nano for … ?
No. Of course he didn’t. Nothing to keep the arthritis in check, nothing to keep the coronary artery clear. Years of self-neglect, of refusal to try the new ways, and he was dying now, as I watched.
What could I do? The nano I’d slipped into his system only functioned within certain narrow parameters. It let me communicate with him but could not be reprogrammed for a medical application.
Swiftly, though, I uploaded new instructions, directing the radio transmitter to extrude parts of itself, forming new connections, following facial blood vessels to plate out bits of itself against the angle of his jawbone.
“Paul!” I shouted, and the bone-conductor speaker must have jolted him.
“Eh? Whozat?”
“Paul, this is Cessair! Increase your oxyflow! Now!”
“What the hell are you doin’ in my head, woman?”
“I’m sorry. I’ll explain later. Right now … we’ve got to get you to a doctor, do you understand?”
He chuckled. “Don’tcha think I oughta land, first?” But he keyed his air mix to pure O2 at hyperbaric pressure. The crushing feeling abated, slightly, but I felt him panting with the strain.
He was staring into the screen, where the purple mountain rose from the water. The slope didn’t look too bad—it wasn’t a sheer cliff, at any rate—but if he dashed into it nose first …
“Paul! Use your thrusters! You’ve lost two balyuts on your starboard side, and you’re dragging some there. If you can turn right, turn broadside with your port side to the mountain, your left-side balyuts ought to cushion your impact a bit!”
“Do you see it?” he asked. “Ann … do you see it?”
He was staring into the big screen. With the craft’s stern dragging low in the water, the camera was angled high now, focused on the misty grays and silvers and golds of the cloud cover above the Noctis Labyrinthus. And there, just visible in the uncertain light, I could see a faint smear of Life-pure colors … red, green, yellow … and blue.
I’d never seen anything like that.
“A rainbow …” Paul said. His voice was blurred with the effort. “Ann, it’s a rainbow, the first on Mars in a billion years …”
And then I was lying on the linkpod’s cushions, cut off from the tiny bit of flotsam below and feeling very much alone.
5
The wave was gentle by the time it crested the end of Ius Chasma and crawled up the lower slopes of the Tharsis Bulge. He came to rest less than a hundred kils from Pittsburgh, the Martian city where he’d started off, with his beloved Ann, so many years ago. Five billion humans experienced the Marineris Ride, either directly or through sensory replays later on—a quarter of the old human race. I wonder, sometimes, if that was when the renaissance began.
Homo amortalis was supposed to be Man’s successor, an elegant and seamless melding of machine and reworked human genes. By losing any allegiance to a set shape or somatype, it was we who would inherit a galaxy far too vast and hostile for Homo sapiens, with his genetic structure cast and honed in the forge of Earth’s limited environment. Until he entered space, man’s greatest claim to survival had always been his adaptability, and we amortals had taken adaptability—even in the forms our bodies take—to unprecedented levels. It was we who would inherit the stars, not Homo sapiens.
Was that, I wonder now, entirely true? Since Paul’s Marineris ride, our evacuation efforts on Mars have met with almost universal failure … and thousands of OS humans who’d already emigrated to the microworld refuges have returned. Injection events. Marsquakes. Storms. Mudslides. They face them. They die in unprecedented numbers.
And the survivors keep going.
Paul was buried next to Ann in the shadow of the monument they raised to him and his epic ride, close by the sparkling, ocher shores of the new Marineris Sea. They found a handwritten will sealed in one of the containers, Paul’s insurance in case he didn’t survive the trip. From its tone, it sounded as though he half expected to end up entombed within the Mars hut beneath a few hundred meters of mud at the bottom of the Valles Marineris. Ann’s body, perfectly preserved by the cold, dry Martian environment, was sealed in a cryocase strapped in next to the seat where we found Paul’s body.
This is my home, the letter explained. I’m not leaving it for anything, not for a new world, not for a better world. I’ll build my own life here with Ann. Forever.
More than anything else, he wanted to be buried with Ann.
/> I did some checking in the Records Center in Pittsburgh. Paul Norris and Ann Whittaker both contributed genetic material shortly after their arrival on Mars, material purchased by the Amortal Program. Some of my more recent somatypes include DNA sequences contributed by those two, a reminder that we amortals are Mankind’s children.
I find myself proud to have such parents. Even if their stubbornness borders on the incomprehensible at times.
The amortals were designed to be supremely adaptable. Perhaps, though, survival requires a bit of stubbornness as well.
Perhaps Paul’s species will outlive us after all.
A Martian Romance
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Kim Stanley Robinson sold his first story in 1976, and quickly established himself as one of the most respected and critically-acclaimed writers of his generation. His story “Black Air” won the World Fantasy Award in 1984, and his novella “The Blind Geometer” won the Nebula Award in 1987. His novel The Wild Shore was published in 1984 as the first title in the resurrected Ace Special line, along with first novels by other new writers such as William Gibson, Michael Swanwick, and Lucius Shepard, and was quickly followed up by other novels such as Icehenge, The Memory of Whiteness, A Short, Sharp Shock, The Gold Coast, and The Pacific Shore, and by collections such as The Planet on the Table, Escape from Kathmandu, and Remaking History.
Robinson’s already distinguished literary reputation would take a quantum jump in the 1990s, though, with the publication of his acclaimed Mars trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. Red Mars would win a Nebula Award; both Green Mars and Blue Mars would win Hugo Awards; and the trilogy would be widely recognized as the genre’s most accomplished, detailed, sustained, and substantial look at the colonization and terraforming of another world, rivaled only by Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars. Robinson’s latest books are the novel Antarctica, and a collection of stories and poems set of his fictional Mars, The Martians. He lives with his family in California.
The Mars trilogy will probably associate Robinson’s name forever with the Red Planet, but it was not the first time he would explore a fictional Mars. Robinson would visit Mars in several stories from the 1980s, including a memorable novella, “Green Mars,” which detailed the first attempt to climb Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system. The bittersweet and evocative story that follows is a direct sequel to “Green Mars”—and at a tangent to the history of Martian settlement as it ultimately developed in the Mars trilogy. In it, he takes us to a bleak and wintry Mars where the terraforming effort has gone disastrously wrong, and a group of old friends set sail in an iceboat across the frozen seas of the once Red Planet, many years after their first epic journey, hoping to touch the sky one last time … .
Eileen Monday hauls her backpack off the train’s steps and watches the train glide down the piste and around the headland. Out the empty station and she’s into the streets of Firewater, north Elysium. It’s deserted and dark, a ghost town, everything shut down and boarded up, the residents moved out and moved on. The only signs of life come from the westernmost dock: a small globular cluster of yellow streetlights and lit windows, streaking the ice of the bay between her and it. She walks around the bay on the empty corniche, the sky all purple in the early dusk. Four days until the start of spring, but there will be no spring this year.
She steps into the steamy clangor of the hotel restaurant. Workers in the kitchen are passing full dishes through the broad open window to diners milling around the long tables in the dining room. They’re mostly young, either iceboat sailors or the few people left in town. No doubt a few still coming out of the hills, out of habit. A wild-looking bunch. Eileen spots Hans and Arnold; they look like a pair of big puppets, discoursing to the crowd at the end of one table—elderly Pinocchios, eyes lost in wrinkles as they tell their lies and laugh at each other, and at the young behemoths passing around plates and devouring their pasta while still listening to the two. The old as entertainment. Not such a bad way to end up.
It isn’t Roger’s kind of thing, however, and indeed when Eileen looks around she sees him standing in the corner next to the jukebox, pretending to make selections but actually eating his meal right there. That’s Roger for you. Eileen grins as she makes her way through the crowd to him.
“Hey,” he says as he sees her, and gives her a quick hug with one arm.
She leans over and kisses his cheek. “You were right, it’s not very hard to find this place.”
“No.” He glances at her. “I’m glad you decided to come.”
“Oh, the work will always be there, I’m happy to get out. Bless you for thinking of it. Is everyone else already here?”
“Yeah, all but Frances and Stephan, who just called and said they’d be here soon. We can leave tomorrow.”
“Great. Come sit down with the others, I want some food, and I want to say hi to everyone.”
Roger wrinkles his nose, gestures at the dense loud crowd. This solitary quality in him has been the cause of some long separations in their relationship, and so now Eileen shoves his arm and says, “Yeah yeah, all these people. Such a crowded place, Elysium.”
Roger grins crookedly. “That’s why I like it.”
“Oh, of course. Far from the madding crowd.”
“Still the English major, I see.”
“And you’re still the canyon hermit,” she says, laughing and pulling him toward the crowd; it is good to see him again, it has been three months. For many years now they have been a steady couple, Roger returning to their rooms in the co-op in Burroughs after every trip away; but his work is still in the back country, so they still spend quite a lot of time apart.
Just as they join Hans and Arnold, who are wrapping up their history of the world, Stephan and Frances come in the door, and they hold a cheery reunion over a late dinner. There’s a lot of catching up to do; this many members of their Olympus Mons climb haven’t been together in a long time. Hours after the other diners have gone upstairs to bed, or off to their homes, the little group of old ones sits at the end of one table talking. A bunch of antique insomniacs, Eileen thinks, none anxious to go to bed and toss and turn through the night. She finds herself the first to stand up and stretch and declare herself off. The other rise on cue, except for Roger and Arnold; they’ve done a lot of climbing together through the years, and Roger was a notorious insomniac even when young; now he sleeps very poorly indeed. And Arnold will talk for as long as anyone else is willing, or longer. “See you tomorrow,” Arnold says to her. “Bright and early for the crossing of the Amazonian Sea!”
The next morning the iceboat runs over ice that is mostly white, but in some patches clear and transparent right down to the shallow seafloor. Other patches are the color of brick, with the texture of brick, and the boat’s runners clatter over little dunes of gravel and dust. If they hit melt ponds the boat slows abruptly and shoots great wings of water to the sides. At the other side of these ponds the runners scritch again like ice skates as they accelerate back up to speed. Roger’s iceboat is a scooter, he explains to them; not like the spidery skeletal thing that Eileen was expecting, having seen some of that kind down in Chryse—those Roger calls DNs. This is more like an ordinary boat, long, broad, and low, with several parallel runners nailed fore and aft to its hull. “Better over rough ice,” Roger explains, “and it floats if you happen to hit water.” The sail is like a big bird’s wing extended over them, sail and mast all melded together into one object, shifting shape with every gust to catch as much wind as it can.
“What keeps us from tipping over?” Arnold asks, looking over the lee rail at the flashing ice just feet below him.
“Nothing.” The deck is at a good cant, and Roger is grinning.
“Nothing?”
“The laws of physics.”
“Come on.”
“When the boat tips the sail catches less wind, both because it’s tilted and because it reads the tilt, and reefs in. Also we have a lot of ballas
t. And there are weights in the deck that are held magnetically on the windward side. It’s like having a heavy crew sitting on the windward rail.”
“That’s not nothing,” Eileen protests. “That’s three things.”
“True. And we may still tip over. But if we do we can always get out and pull it back upright.”
They sit in the cockpit and look up at the sail, or ahead at the ice. The iceboat’s navigation steers them away from the rottenest patches, spotted from satellites, and so the automatic pilot changes their course frequently, and they shift around the cockpit when necessary. Floury patches slow them the most, and over these the boat sometimes decelerates pretty quickly, throwing the unprepared forward into the shoulder of the person sitting next to them. Eileen is banged into by Hans and Frances more than once; like her, they have never been on iceboats before, and their eyes are round at the speeds it achieves during strong gusts over smooth ice. Hans speculates that the sandy patches mark old pressure ridges, which stood like long stegosaur backs until the winds ablated them entirely away, leaving their load of sand and silt behind on the flattened ice. Roger nods. In truth the whole ocean surface is blowing away on the wind, with whatever sticks up going the fastest; and the ocean is now frozen to the bottom, so that no new pressure ridges are being raised. Soon the whole ocean will be as flat as a tabletop.
This first day out is clear, the royal blue sky crinkling in a gusty west wind. Under the clear dome of the cockpit it’s warm, their air at a slightly higher pressure than outside. Sea level is now around 300 millibars, and lowering year by year, as if for a great storm that never quite comes. They skate at speed around the majestic promontory of the Phlegra Peninsula, its great prow topped by a white-pillared Doric temple. Staring up at it Eileen listens to Hans and Frances discuss the odd phenomenon of the Phlegra Montes, seaming the north coast of Elysium like a long ship capsized on the land; unusually straight for a Martian mountain range, as are the Erebus Montes to the west. As if they were not, like all the rest of the mountain ranges on Mars, the remnants of crater rims. Hans argues for them being two concentric rings of a really big impact basin, almost the size of the Big Hit itself but older than the Big Hit, and so mostly obliterated by the later impact, with only Isidis Bay and much of the Utopian and Elysian Seas left to indicate where the basin had been. “Then the ranges could have been somewhat straightened out in the deformation of the Elysium bulge.”
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