On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were springing up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other very rapidly growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older krummholz. These days it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big sun-reflecting bowl, protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing a great number of plant and animal species to flourish underneath them; Nirgal’s acquaintances said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars. They had to carry sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around, because of bears, snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of the galleries was becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and aspen.
All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate that had been lying in Candor and Ophir canyons — great white bench terraces made of extremely water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now melting over the canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new soils with lots of nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits were being buried under landslides — the water that was dissolving the sodium nitrate was also hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical acceleration of the mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near the foot of the canyon walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as they soared around in their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides everywhere. Several high talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods were one of the many topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the omegandorph got into the blood; in fact there was little they could do. If chunks of a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was going to stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on Shining Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in the pit of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to spot the slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of dust. Fliers in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble with tales of being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day Nirgal was about halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was like a sonic boom that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More loft than was needed, more power… the one he had rented (using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls — up up and up and up, to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an –individual in his own private life.
He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn’t one of them. In fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple pain as well — pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.
So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some image of himself. The fractured, layered, scarred canyon walls were so many stupendous mineral mirrors; and indeed he saw clearly that he was a tiny creature, smaller than a gnat in a cathedral. Flying around studying each great palimpsest of facets, he scried two very strong impulses in himself, distinct and mutually exclusive, yet infolded, like the green and the white. On the one hand he wanted to stay a wanderer, to fly and walk and sail over all the world, a nomad forever, wandering ceaselessly until he knew Mars better than anyone else. Ah yes; it was a familiar euphoria. On the other hand it was familiar, he had done that all his life. It would be the form of his previous life, without the content. And he knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness that made him feel so detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope vision. Coming from everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now he wanted that home, as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.
Both these desires existed, strongly and together — or, to be more exact, in a subtle rapid oscillation, which jangled his emotions, and left him insomniac and restless. He could see no way to reconcile the two. They were mutually exclusive. No one he talked to had any useful suggestions as to how to resolve the difficulty. Coyote was dubious about setting down roots — but then he was a nomad, and didn’t know. Art considered the wandering life impossible; but he was fond of his places now.
Nirgal’s nonpolitical training was in mesocosm engineering, but he found that little help to his thinking. At the higher elevations they were always going to be in tents, and mesocosm engineering would be needed; but it was becoming more of a science than an art, and with increasing experience solving the problems would be more and more routinized. Besides, did he want to pursue a tented profession, when so much of the lower planet was becoming land they could walk on?
No. He wanted to live in the open air. To learn a patch of land, its soil and plants and animals and weather and skies, and everything else … he wanted that. Part of him. Part of the time.
He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma was not the place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge vistas made it a hard place to see as home — it was too vast, too inhuman. The canyon floors were designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the streams surging with snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be buried under enormous landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The locals were going to stay up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors during the day. The mesa would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the mesa — it was an island in the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for flying vacations, for partying through the nights, for expensive hotels, for the young and the in-love … all that was fine, wonderful. But crowded, perhaps even overrun — or else always battling the influx of visitors, and newly settled residents enchanted by the sublime views, people who would arrive like Nirgal himself, dropping in at some dusk in their life and never going away, while the old residents looked on helplessly and grumbled about the good old days when the world had been new, and unoccupied.