Harbor towns at dusk were all alike. A corniche, a curving narrow park, lines of trees, an arc of ramshackle hotels and restaurants backing the wharves … they checked into one of these hotels, and then strolled the dock, ate under an awning just as Maya had supposed they would. She relaxed in the grounded stability of her chair, watching liquid light oxbow over the viscous black water of the harbor, listening to Michel talk to the people sitting at the next table, tasting the olive oil and bread, the cheeses and ouzo. It was strange how much beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness. And yet she wished the lazy postprandial sprawl in their hard chairs could go on forever.
Of course it didn’t. They went up to bed, hand in hand, and she held on to Michel as hard as ever she could. And the next day they hauled their bags across town to the inner harbor, just north of the first canal lock, and up into a big canal boat, long and luxurious, like a barge become cruise ship. They were two of about a hundred passengers coming on board; and among the others was Vendana and some of her friends. And further on, on a private canal boat a few locks ahead, were Jackie and her consort of followers, about to travel south as well. On some nights they would be docked in the same canalside towns. “Interesting,” Maya drawled, and at the word Michel looked both pleased and worried.
The Grand Canal’s bed had been cut by an aerial lens, concentrating sunlight beamed down from the soletta. The lens had flown very high in the atmosphere, surfing on the thermal cloud of gases thrown up by the melted and vaporized rock; it had flown in straight lines, and burned its way across the land without the slightest regard for details of topography. Maya vaguely remembered seeing vids of the process at the time, but the photos had necessarily been taken from a distance, and they had not prepared her at all for the sheer size of the canal. Their long low canal boat motored into the first lock; was lifted up a short distance on infilling water; motored out of an opening gate — and there they were, in a wind-rippled lake two kilometers wide, extending in a straight line directly southwest toward the Hellas Sea, two thousand kilometers away. A great number of boats large and small were proceeding in both directions, keeping to the right with the slower ones closer to the banks, in the standard rules of the road. Almost all the craft were motorized, although many also sported lines of masts in schooner rig, and some of the smallest boats had big triangular sails and no engines — “dhows,” Michel said, pointing. An Arab design, apparently.
Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that and concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The canal water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.
The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize space in the locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the canals and rivers of classical antiquity. The first towns they passed were quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a canal bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the canal was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.
For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and nod.
The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town called Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area for ships and goods.
After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: “How do you like the canal?” they asked.
“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps — such dark skin, such white regular teeth — strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants — human scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. Sexy.