Roger isn’t in the mood to amuse people. “We were about twenty-five.”
Her mouth forms a whistle. “You really do remember everything.”
Roger shakes his head; the chill in the shadowed air fills him, the momentary thrill of recognition and recall dissipates. It’s been a very long trip.
“And we were . . . ?” she prods.
“We were friends,” Roger says, with just the twist on friends to leave her wondering. It is disheartening, this tendency of people to forget; his unusual facility makes him a bit of a freak, a voice from another time. Perhaps his conservation efforts grow out of this retention of the past; he still knows what the planet was like, back there in the beginning. When he’s feeling low he tends to blame his generation’s forgetfulness on their lack of vigilance, and he is often, as he is now, a bit lonely.
Eileen has her head crooked, wondering what he means.
“Come on, Mr. Memory,” Stephan cries to him. “Let’s eat! I’m starving, and it’s freezing out here.”
“It’ll get colder up there,” Roger says. He shrugs at Eileen, follows Stephan.
In the bright lamplight of the largest base-camp tent the chattering faces gleam. Roger sips at a bowl of hot stew. Quickly the remaining introductions are made. Stephan, Hans, and Eileen are familiar to him, as is Dr. Frances Fitzhugh. The lead climbers are Dougal Burke and Marie Whillans, current stars of New Scotland’s climbing school; he’s heard of both of them. They are surrounded in their corner by four younger colleagues of Eileen’s, climbing guides hired by Stephan to be their porters: “We’re the Sherpas,” Ivan Vivanov says to Roger cheerfully, and introduces Ginger, Sheila, and Hannah. The young guides appear not to mind their supporting role in the expedition; in a party of this size there will be plenty of climbing for all. The group is rounded off by Arthur Sternbach, an American climber visiting Hans Boethe. When the introductions are done they all circle the room like people at any cocktail party anywhere. Roger works on his stew and regrets his decision to join the climb. He forgot (sort of) how intensely social big climbs must be. Too many years of solo bouldering, in the rock valleys north of Burroughs. That was what he had been looking for, he realizes: an endless solo rock climb, up and out of the world.
Stephan asks Eileen about the climb and she carefully includes Roger in her audience. “We’re going to start up the Great Gully, which is the standard route for the first thousand meters of the face. Then, where the first ascent followed the Nansen Ridge up to the left of the Gully, we’re planning to go right. Dougal and Marie have seen a line in the aerial photos that they think will go, and that will give us something new to try. So we’ll have a new route most of the way. And we’ll be the smallest party ever to climb the scarp in the South Buttress area.”
“You’re kidding!” Arthur Sternbach cries.
Eileen smiles briefly. “Because of the party size, we’ll be carrying as little oxygen as possible, for use in the last few thousand meters.”
“And if we climb it?” Roger asks.
“There’s a cache for us when we top out—we’ll change equipment there and stroll on up to the caldera rim. That part will be easy.”
“I don’t see why we even bother with that part,” Marie interjects.
“It’s the easiest way down. Besides, some of us want to see the top of Olympus Mons,” Eileen replies mildly.
“It’s just a big hill,” says Marie.
Later Roger leaves the tent with Arthur and Hans, Dougal and Marie. Everyone will spend one last night of comfort in the cars. Roger trails the others, staring up at the escarpment. The sky above it is still a rich twilight purple. The huge bulk of the wall is scarred by the black line of the Great Gully, a deep vertical crack just visible in the gloomy air. Above it, a blank face. Trees rustle in the wind; the dark meadow looks wild.
“I can’t believe how tall it is!” Arthur is exclaiming for the third time. He laughs out loud. “It’s just unbelievable!”
“From this vantage,” Hans says, “the top is over seventy degrees above our real horizon.”
“You’re kidding! I can’t believe it!” And Arthur falls into a fit of helpless giggling. The Martians following Hans and his friend watch with amused reserve. Arthur is quite a bit shorter than the rest of them, and suddenly to Roger he seems like a child caught after breaking into the liquor cabinet. Roger pauses to allow the others to walk on.
The big tent glows like a dim lamp, luminous yellow in the dark. The cliff face is black and still. From the forest comes a weird yipping yodel. Some sort of mutant wolves, no doubt. Roger shakes his head. Long ago any landscape exhilarated him; he was in love with the planet. Now the immense cliff seems to hang over him like his life, his past, obliterating the sky, blocking off any progress westward. The depression he feels is so crushing that he almost sits on the meadow grass, to plunge his face in his hands; but others will be leaving the tent. Again, that mournful yowling: the planet, crying out Mars is gone! Mars is gone! Ow-ooooooooooo! Homeless, the old man goes to sleep in a car.
But as always, insomnia takes its share of the night. Roger lies in the narrow bed, his body relaxed, his consciousness bouncing helplessly through scenes from his life. Insomnia, memory: Some of his doctors have told him there is a correlation between the two. Certainly for him the hours of insomniac awareness and half sleep are memory’s playground, and no matter what he does to fill the time between lying down and falling asleep (like reading to exhaustion, or scratching notes), tyrannical memory will have its hour.
This night he remembers all the nights in Burroughs. All the opponents, all the compromises. The Chairman handing him the order to dam and flood Coprates Chasma, with his little smile and flourish, the touch of hidden sadism. The open dislike from Noyova, that evening years before, after the Chairman’s appointments: “The reds are finished, Clayborne. You shouldn’t be holding office—you are the leader of a dead party.” Looking at the Chairman’s dam-construction bill and thinking of Coprates the way it had been in the previous century, when he had explored it, it occurred to him that ninety percent of what he had done in office, he did to stay in a position to be able to do anything. That was what it meant to work in government. Or was it a higher percentage? What had he really done to preserve the planet? Certain bills balked before they began, certain development projects delayed; all he had done was resist the doings of others. Without much success. And it could even be said that walking out on the Chairman and his “coalition” cabinet was only another gesture, another defeat.
He recalls his first day in office. A morning on the polar plains. A day in Burroughs, in the park. In the Cabinet office, arguing with Noyova. And on it will go, for another hour or more, scene after scene until the memories become fragmented and dreamlike, spliced together surrealistically, stepping outside the realm of memory into sleep.
There are topographies of the spirit, and this is one of them.
Dawn on Mars. First the plum sky, punctuated by a diamond pattern of four dawn mirrors that orbit overhead and direct a little more of Sol’s light to the planet. Flocks of black choughs caw sleepily as they flap and glide out over the talus slope to begin the day’s hunt for food. Snow pigeons coo in the branches of a grove of tawny birch. Up in the talus, a clatter of rocks; three Dall sheep are looking surprised to see the base-camp meadow occupied. Sparrows flit overhead.
Roger, up early with a headache, observes all the stirring wildlife indifferently. He hikes up into the broken rock of the talus to get clear of it. The upper rim of the escarpment is struck by the light of the rising sun, and now there is a strip of ruddy gold overhead, bathing all the shadowed slope below in reflected sunlight. The dawn mirrors look dim in the clear violet sky. Colors appear in the tufts of flowers scattered through the rock, and the green juniper needles glow. The band of lit cliff quickly grows; even in full light the upper slopes look sheer and blank. But that is the effect of distance and foreshortening. Lower on the face, crack systems look like brown rain stains, and the wall is rough-looking, a good sign. The upper slopes, when they get high enough, will reveal their own irregularities.