She hissed and drove on, up Echus, toward the steep volcanic cone of Tharsis Tholis. There was a town there, tucked on the side of the volcano where the slope leveled off. The bear had told her Peter was headed there, and so she avoided it. Peter, the land drowned; Sax, the land burned. Once he had been hers. On this rock I will build. Peter Tempe Terra, the Rock of the Land of Time. The new man, Homo martial. Who had betrayed them. Remember.
On she drove south, up the slope of the Tharsis Bulge, until the cone of Ascraeus hove into view. A mountain continent, puncturing the horizon. Pavonis had been infested and overgrown because of its equatorial position, and the little advantage that that gave the elevator cable. But Ascraeus, just five hundred kilometers northeast of Pavonis, had been left alone. No one lived there; very few people had ever even ascended it. Just a few areologists now and then, to study its lava and occasional pyroclastic ash flows, which were both colored the red nearest black.
She drove onto its lower slopes, gentle and wavy. Ascraeus had been one of the classic albedo feature names, as it was a mountain so big it was easily visible from Earth. Ascraeus Lacus. This was during the canal mania, and so they had decided it was a lake. Pavonis in that era had been called Phoenicus Lacus, Phoenix Lake. Ascra, she read, was the birthplace of Hesiod, “situated on the right of Mount Helicon, on a high and rugged place.” So though they had thought it a lake, they had named it after a mountain place. Perhaps their subconscious minds had understood the telescope images after all. Ascraeus was in general a poetic name for the pastoral, Helicon being the Boetian mountain sacred to Apollo and the Muses. Hesiod had looked up from his plow one day and seen the mountain, and found he had a story to tell. Strange the birth of myths, strange the old names that they lived among and ignored, while they continued to tell the old stories over and over again with their lives.
It was the steepest of the big four volcanoes, but there was no encircling escarpment, as around Olympus Mons; so she could put the rover in low gear and grind on up, as if taking off into space, in slow motion. Lean back in her seat and take a nap. Head on the headrest; relax. Wake up on arrival, up at twenty-seven kilometers above sea level, the same height as all the other three big ones; that was as high as a mountain could get on Mars, basically, it was the isostatic limit, at which point the lithosphere began to sag under the weight of all that rock; all of the big four had maxed out, they could grow no higher. A sign of their size and their great age.
Very old, yes, but at the same time the surface lava of Ascraeus was among the youngest igneous rock on Mars, weathered only slightly by wind and sun. As the lava sheets had cooled they had stiffened in their descent, leaving low curved bulges to ascend or bypass. A distinct trail of rover tracks zigzagged up the slope, avoiding steep sections at the bottoms of these flows, taking advantage of a big loose network of ramps and flowbacks. In any permanent shade, spindrift had settled into banks of dirty hard-packed snow; shadows were now a filmy blackened white, as if she drove through a photographic negative, her spirits plummeting inexplicably as she drove ever higher. Behind her she could see more and more of the conical northern flank of the volcano, and north Tharsis beyond that, all the way to the Echus wall, a low line over a hundred kilometers away. Much of what she could see was patchy with snowdrifts, windslab, firn. Freckled white. The shady sides of volcanic cones often became heavily glaciated.
There on a rockface, bright emerald moss. Everything was turning green.
But as she continued to ascend, day after day, up and up beyond all imagining, the snow patches became thinner, less frequent. Eventually she was twenty kilometers above the datum — twenty-one above sea level — nearly seventy thousand feet above the ice! — more than twice as high as Everest was above Earth’s oceans; and still the cone of the volcano rose above her, a full seven thousand meters more! Right up into the darkening sky, right up into space.
Far below scrolled a smooth flat layer of cloud, obscuring Tharsis. As if the white sea were chasing her up the slope. Up at this level there were no clouds, at least on this day; sometimes thunderheads would tower up beside the mountain, other days cirrus clouds could be seen overhead, slashing the sky with a dozen thin sickles. Today the sky above was a clear purple indigo suffused with black, pricked with a few daytime stars at the zenith, Orion standing faint and alone. Out to the east of the volcano’s summit streamed a thin cloud, a peak banner, so faint she could see the dark sky through it. There wasn’t much moisture up here, nor much atmosphere either. There would always be a tenfold difference between the air pressure at sea level and up here on the big volcanoes; pressure up here must therefore be about thirty-five millibars, very little more than what had existed when they had arrived.
Nevertheless she spotted tiny flecks of lichen in hollows on the tops of rocks, in pits that caught some snow and then a lot of sun. They were almost too small to see. Lichen: a symbiotic team of algae and fungus, working together to survive, even in thirty millibars. It was hard to believe what life would endure. So strange.
So strange, in fact, that she suited up and went out to look at them. Up here one had to employ all the old careful habits: secure walker, lock doors; out into the bright glare of low space.
The rocks that harbored the lichen were the kind of flat sunporches on which marmots would have sunbathed, if they could have lived so high. Instead, only little pinheads of yellow green, or battleship gray. Flake lichen, the wrist-pad guide said. Bits of it torn away in storms, blown up here, falling on rocks, sticking like little vegetable limpets. The kind of thing only Hiroko could explain.
Living things. Michel had said that she loved stones and not men because she had been mistreated, her mind damaged. Hippocampus significantly smaller, strong startle reaction, a tendency toward dissociation. And so she had found a man as much like a stone as she could. Michel too had loved that quality in Simon, he told her — such a relief in the Underbill years to have even one such charge, a man you could trust, quiet and solid, that you could heft in your hand and feel the weight of.
But Simon wasn’t the only one in the world like that, j Michel had pointed out. That quality rested in the others as well, intermixed and less pure, but still there. Why could she not love that quality of obdurate endurance in other people, in every living thing? They were only trying to exist, like any rock or planet. There was a mineral stubbornness in all of them.
Wind keened past her helmet and over the shards of lava, humming in her air hose, drowning out the sound of her breath. The sky more black than indigo here, except low on the horizon, where it was a hazy purple violet, topped by a band of clear dark blue … oh who could believe it would ever change, up here on the slope of Ascraeus Mons, why hadn’t they settled up here to remind themselves of what they had come to, of what they had been given by Mars and then so profligately thrown away.
Back to the rover. She continued on up.
She was above silver cirrus clouds, just west of the volcano’s diaphanous summit banner. In the lee of the jet stream. To ascend was to travel into the past, above all lichen and bacteria. Though she had no doubt they were still there, hiding inside the first layers of the rock. Chasmoendolithic life, like the mythic little red people, the microscopic gods who had spoken to John Boone, their own local Hesiod. So people said.
Life everywhere. The world was turning green. But if you couldn’t see the greenness — if it made no difference to the land — surely it was welcome to the task? Living creatures. Michel had said to her, you love stones because of the stony quality that life has! It all comes back to life. Simon, Peter; on this rock I will build my church. Why could she not love that stony quality in every thing?