One evening after the place was established as his, after a day spent moving things into it, Michel stood on the sand with his feet in the water, looking in the open door of the old place, then out at the wide horizon of the sea. The Martian sense of lightness began to seep back into him. Oh Provence, oh Earth this most beautiful world, each beach a gift of time and space, pendant on the sea and sparkling in the sun. . . . He kicked at the spent wave washing up the strand, and the water jetted out from his foot, glazed bronze by the horizontal sunlight. The sky under the sun was a bright bar of pewter, on a blazing sea. He said to himself, Here is my home, Maya. Come back and live with me.
Chapter 10
Green Mars
Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system. It is a broad shield volcano, six hundred kilometers in diameter and twenty-seven kilometers high. Its average slope angles only five degrees above the horizontal, but the circumference of the lava shield is a nearly continuous escarpment, a roughly circular cliff that drops six kilometers to the surrounding forests. The tallest and steepest sections of this encircling escarpment stand near South Buttress, a massive prominence which juts out and divides the south and southeast curves of the cliff (on the map, it’s at 15 degrees north, 132 degrees longitude). There, under the east flank of South Buttress, one can stand in the rocky upper edge of the Tharsis forest, and look up at a cliff that is twenty-two thousand feet tall.
Seven times taller than El Capitan, three times as tall as Everest’s southwest face, twice as tall as Dhaulagiri walclass="underline" four miles of cliff, blocking out the western sky. Can you imagine it? (It’s hard.)
“I can’t get a sense of the scale!” the Terran Arthur Sternbach shouts, hopping up and down.
Dougal Burke, looking up through binoculars, says, “There’s quite a bit of foreshortening from here.”
“No no. That’s not it.”
The climbing party has arrived in a caravan of seven field cars. Big green bodies, clear bubbles covering the passenger compartments, fat field tires with their exaggerated treads, chewing dust into the wind: The cars’ drivers have parked them in a rough circle, and they sit in the middle of a rocky meadow like a big necklace of paste emeralds.
This battered meadow, with its little stands of bristle-cone pine and noctis juniper, is the traditional base camp for South Buttress climbs. Around the cars are treadmarks, wind-walls made of stacked rock, half-filled latrine trenches, cairn-covered trash dumps, and discarded equipment. As the members of the expedition wander around the camp, stretching and talking, they inspect some of these artifacts. Marie Whillans picks up two ultralight oxygen cylinders stamped with letters that identify them as part of an expedition she climbed with more than a century ago. Grinning, she holds them overhead and shakes them at the cliff, beats them together. “Home again!” Ping! Ping! Ping!
One last field car trundles into the meadow, and the expedition members already in the camp gather around it as it rolls to a halt. Two men get out of the car. They are greeted enthusiastically: “Stephan’s here! Roger’s here!”
But Roger Clayborne is in a bad mood. It has been a long trip for him. It began in Burroughs six days ago, when he left his offices at Government House for the last time. Twenty-seven years of work as Minister of the Interior came to an end as he walked out the tall doors of Government House, down the broad chert steps and onto the trolley that would take him to his flat. Riding along with his face in the warm wind, Roger looked out at the tree-filled capital city he had rarely left during his stint in the government, and it struck him that it had been twenty-seven years of continuous defeat. Too many opponents, too many compromises, until the last unacceptable compromise arrived, and he found himself riding out of the city with Stephan, into the countryside he had avoided for twenty-seven years, over rolling hills covered by grasses and studded by stands of walnut, aspen, oak, maple, eucalyptus, pine: every leaf and every blade of grass a sign of his defeat. And Stephan wasn’t much help; though a conservationist like Roger, he has been a member of the Greens for years. “That’s where the real work can be done,” he insisted as he lectured Roger and neglected his driving. Roger, who liked Stephan well enough, pretended his agreement and stared out his window. He would have preferred Stephan’s company in smaller doses—say a lunch, or a game of batball. But on they drove along the wide gravel highway, over the windblown steppes of the Tharsis Bulge, past the farms and towns in Noctis Labyrinthus, up into the krummholz forests of east Tharsis, until Roger fell prey to that feeling one gets near the end of a long journey, that all his life had been part of this trip, that the traveling would never end this side of the grave, that he was doomed to wander over the scenes of all his defeats and failures endlessly, and never come to anyplace that did not include them all, right in the rearview mirror. It was a long drive.
For—and this was the worst of it—he remembered everything.
Now he steps from the car door to the rocky soil of base camp. A late addition to the climb (Stephan invited him along when he learned of the resignation), he is introduced to the other climbers, and he musters the cordial persona built over many years in office. “Hans!” he says as he sees the familiar smiling face of the areologist Hans Boethe. “Good to see you. I didn’t know you were a climber.”
“Not one like you, Roger, but I’ve done my share in Marineris.”
“So”—Roger gestures west—“are you going to find the explanation for the escarpment?”
“I already know it,” Hans declares, and the others laugh. “But if we find any contributing evidence . . .”
A tall rangy woman with leathery cheeks and light brown eyes appears at the edge of the group. Stephan quickly introduces her. “Roger, this is our expedition leader, Eileen Monday.”
“We’ve met before,” she says as she shakes his hand. She looks down and smiles an embarrassed smile. “A long time ago, when you were a canyon guide.”
The name, the voice; the past stirs, quick images appear in his mind’s eye, and Roger’s uncanny memory calls back a hike—(he once guided treks through the fossae to the north)—a romance, yes, with a leggy girclass="underline" Eileen Monday, standing now before him. They were lovers for quite some time, he recalls; she a student in Burroughs, a city girl, and he—off into the backcountry. It hadn’t lasted. But that was over two hundred years ago! A spark of hope strikes in him—“You remember?” he says.
“I’m afraid not.” Wrinkles fan away under her eyes as she squints, smiles the embarrassed smile. “But when Stephan told me you’d be joining us—well—you’re known to have a complete memory, and I felt I should check. Maybe that means I did remember something. Because I went through my old journals and found references to you. I only started writing the journals in my eighties, so the references aren’t very clear. But I know we met, even if I can’t say I remember it.” She looks up, shrugs.
It is a common enough situation for Roger. His “total recall” (it is nothing of the sort, of course) encompasses most of his three hundred years, and he is constantly meeting and remembering people who do not recall him. Most find it interesting, some unnerving; this Eileen’s sun-chapped cheeks are a bit flushed; she seems both embarrassed and perhaps a bit amused. “You’ll have to tell me about it,” she says with a laugh.