There were a number of buttresses and other deformations on the wall similar to the one they were hiking out on: flutings and draperies, as in a limestone cavern, but formed all at once; the wall had been melted, molten rock had dripped into the abyss until the chill of space had frozen it forever. Everything was visible from every point of their descent. A railing had been bolted to the buttress’s edge, and they were all clipped to this railing by lines, connected to harnesses in their spacesuits; a good thing, as the edge of the buttress was narrow, and the slightest slip sideways could launch one out into the space of the chasm. The spidery little spacecraft that had dropped them off was going to fly down and take them off at the bottom of the staircase, from the flat spot at the end of the buttress promontory. So they could descend without a worry for the return; and descend they did, for minute after minute, in a silence that was not at all companionable. Zo had to grin; you could almost hear them thinking black thoughts at her, the grinding was palpable. Except for Ann, who was stopping every few meters to inspect the cracks between their rough stairs.
“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 ofHyperionl 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.”