Nirgal didn’t know-if those justifications were true or not. Had they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?
He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at Jackie’s daughter’s face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the Free Mars delegates from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by the northern sea, they were more determined than ever to take control of their fate, including immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing much past its current state. “All very well,” Jackie was saying, “but it’s a very large island now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will be especially humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine harbor sites, fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep a hand on development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a particular interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed to say to them? That the Elysian locals don’t like Chinese? That we’ll take their help in a crisis, but we don’t want them moving into the neighborhood?”
“It’s not that they’re Chinese!” the delegate said.
“I understand. Really I do. Tell you what — you go back to South Fossa and explain the difficulties we face here, and I’ll do everything I can here to help you. I can’t guarantee results, but I’ll do what I can.”
“Thanks,” the delegate said, and left.
Jackie turned to her assistant. “Idiot. Who’s next. Ah, naturally; the Chinese ambassador. Well, let him in.”
The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and her AI translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of pleasantries, the woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements, preferably somewhere in the equatorial provinces.
Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been started from the very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and built a tent town or a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater… Now, however, Jackie looked polite and said, “It’s possible. Everything of course will have to be referred to the environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a great deal of empty land on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be arranged there, especially if China was willing to contribute to infrastructure and mitigation and the like.”
They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.
Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. “Nirgal, could you get Rachel in here? And try to decide what you’re going to do soon, please?”
Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He packed his little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out to the launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person blimp-gliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in Marineris, on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad; they were willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it returned by another flier later.
It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would only get stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the pilot’s seat. The little blimp-glider slid up the launching mast, held by the nose; and was let free.**
He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over the maze of interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below. Flight out of the labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun, gotten burned, survived the fall — and now flew again, this time down, down, down, ever down. Taking advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting down over the shattered dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the great channel outbreak had begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down lus Chasma; but Nirgal angled north, away from the glacier’s flow, and then flew east again, down into the head of Ti-thonium Chasma, which paralleled lus Chasma just to the north.
Tithonium was one of the deepest and narrowest of the Marineris canyons — four kilometers deep, ten wide. He could fly well below the level of the plateau rims and still be thousands of meters over the canyon floor. Tithonium was higher than lus, wilder, untouched by human hands, seldom traveled in, because it was a dead end to the east, where it narrowed and became rough-floored as it got shallower, then abruptly stopped. Nirgal spotted the road that switchbacked up the eastern head wall, a road he had traveled a few times in his youth, when all the planet had been his home.
The afternoon sun dipped behind him. The shadows on the land lengthened. The wind continued to blow strong, thrumming over the blimpglider, whining and whooshing and keening. It blew him over the caprock of the rim plateau again, as Tithonium became a string of oval depressions, pocking the plateau one after the next: the Tithonia Catena, each dip a giant bowl-shaped depression in the land.
And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out over the immense open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of its eastern wall in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the sunset’s light. To the noilh was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the south the spectacular buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central giant of the Marineris system. It was Mars’s version of Concordiaplatz, he saw, but much bigger than Earth’s, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic beyond all human scale, as if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or two eons, to a time before the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!
And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond mesa, a caprock island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor. And in the sunset’s hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent town, at the southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the common band on his intercom, then guided him in to the town’s landing pad. The sun was winking out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimp-glider around and descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure of Kokopelli painted as a target on the^landing pad.
Shining mesa had a large top. more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty kilometers long and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a Monument Valley mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the southern point of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached fragment of the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a tremendous vantage point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views through the deep, steep gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to the south.
Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over the years, and the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five kilometers above the datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of removing it. The floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum, was patched with growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on Shining Mesa flew down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize, floating back up to the mesa’s top in the late afternoons. A few of these flying foresters were old underground acquaintances of Nirgal’s, and they were pleased to take him along and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.
The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In Candor, they curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously south into Melas. Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under the western walls where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow ran down in a faint tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided streambeds that ran together into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which collected at a confluence just above the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild foaming rapids to the floor of Melas Chasma, where it pooled against the remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly against its northern flank.