“Sure,” Peter said. “If he doesn’t mind.”
The waiter went and asked the man, then waved Peter over.
“Thanks,” Peter said as he approached, and the man nodded as he sat across from him.
“No problem.” He appeared to be nursing a beer. Then his meal came, and he gestured at it.
“Please go ahead,” Peter said, looking at the day’s menu. Stew, bread, salad; he nodded at the passing waiter, pointing at the menu, and ordered also a glass of wine, the local zinfandel.
The man had not been reading anything, and now Peter wasn’t either. They looked at clouds tumbling by, the canyon below, and the great shattered wall opposite them, shadows stretching long to the east, emphasizing the depth of every little embayment, the sharpness of every spur.
“What textures,” Peter ventured. He had not made conversation for a long time.
“You can see how deep the Brighton Gully really is from here,” the man agreed. “That’s rare from any other angle.”
“Have you climbed it?”
The man nodded. “It’s mostly a hike, though. All of it, now, if you take the ladder trail, which most people do.”
“I’ll bet that’s fun.”
A squint. “It is if you’re with a fun group.”
“You’ve done it often then?”
Swallow. “Guide.” Another swallow. “I guide groups in the canyonlands. Treks, climbs, boating.”
“Oh I see. How nice.”
“It is. And you?”
“Noachian Aquatic Redistribution. A co-op in Argyre. On leave now, but going back.”
The man nodded and stuck out a hand, mouth full. Peter took it and shook. “Peter Clayborne.”
The man’s eyes rounded, and he swallowed. “Roger Clayborne.”
“Hey. Nice name. Nice to meet you.”
“You too. I don’t often meet other Claybornes.”
“Me neither.”
“Are you related to Ann Clayborne?”
“She’s my mom.”
“Oh! I didn’t know she had kids.”
“Just me. Do you know her?”
“No no. Just stories, you know. Not related, I don’t think. My folks came on the second wave, from England.”
“Oh I see. Well—cousins, no doubt, somewhere back there.”
“Sure. From the first Clayborne.”
“Some kind of potter.”
“Maybe so. Do you spell yours with an i or a y?”
“Y.”
“Oh yeah. Me too. I have a friend spells his with an i.”
“Not a cousin then.”
“Or a French cousin.”
“Yeah sure.”
“E on the end?”
“Yeah sure.”
“Me too.”
The waiter dropped off Peter’s meal. Peter ate, and as Roger had finished, and was nursing a grappa, Peter asked him about himself.
“I’m a guide,” he said with a shrug.
He had gotten into it in his youth, he said, when the planet was raw, and had stayed with it ever since. “I liked showing people my favorite places. Showing them how beautiful it was.” That had gotten him into various red groups, though he did not seem to mind the terraforming in the way Peter’s mom did. He shrugged when Peter asked. “It makes it safer, having an atmosphere. And water around. Safer in some ways, anyway. Cliffs fall on people. I’ve tried to keep the canyons free of reservoirs, because they saturate the sidewalls and cause collapses. We had some successes early on. The dam down there at Ganges, keeping the north sea out of the canyons, that was our doing. And the removal of the Noctis Dam.”
“I didn’t know it was gone.”
“Yeah. Anyway that’s about all I’ve done for the red cause. I thought about getting more into it, but . . . I never did. You?”
Peter pushed his stew bowl away, drank some water. “I guess I’m what you’d call a green.”
Roger’s eyebrows went up, but he made no comment.
“Ann doesn’t approve, of course. It’s caused problems between us. But I spent my whole childhood indoors. I’ll never be outdoors enough.”
“The suits didn’t suit you.”
“No they didn’t. Could you stand them?”
Roger shrugged. “I was willing to put up with them. I felt like I was still out there. Although now that I can get my face in the wind, I like that quite a bit. But the primal landscape—it had a quality. . . .” He shook his head to show he was unable to express it. “That’s gone now.”
“Really? I find it just as wild as ever.” Gesturing over the side of the railing, where they could now see sheets of sunlit snow falling from the bottom of one dark cloud.
“Well, wild. It’s a tricky word. When I was first guiding, that’s when I would have said things were wild. But ever since the air came, and the great lakes, it doesn’t seem so wild to me. It’s a park. That’s what the Burroughs Protocol means, as far as I’m concerned.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“You know—the big land-use thing.”
Peter shook his head. “Must have been a while ago.”
Roger shook his. “Not so long.”
“But Burroughs was flooded, back when . . .”
“Sure. Every spring, like clockwork. But I worry how it’s been starting later, and running harder. I think there’s something we’re not catching that’s causing these long cold winters.”
“I thought this winter was pretty warm, myself.”
Then the members of a band crowded by their table, carrying their instruments and equipment. While they set up their amps and music stands on a little platform at the terrace’s railing right by the two Claybornes, a great number of masked people poured onto the terrace, as if the band had led in some kind of parade. Roger stopped their waiter as he rushed by. “What’s this?”
“Oh it’s Fassnacht, didn’t you know? It’ll start getting crowded now that the train is in. Everyone will be here tonight, you’re lucky you got here early.” From one of his vest pockets he pulled two small white domino masks out of a nestled stack and tossed them onto their table. “Enjoy.”
Peter pulled the masks apart, gave one to Roger. They put them on and grinned at the odd look that resulted. As the waiter had predicted, the terrace and the whole complex—hotel, restaurant, outbuildings, co-op quarters—were all quickly filling with people. Most of the masks people had on were much more elaborate than Roger’s and Peter’s. Apparently their wearers were locals of the region, mostly Swiss in the mountaineering and tourist trade; also a lot of Arabs from Nectaris Fossae, and from roving caravans rolling in for the night. The equinoctial sunset poured light directly up the great gorge of the canyon, illuminating everything horizontally; indeed it appeared that the sun was well below them, the light shining upward. Their terrace the edge of the world; the sky dark, and filled now with twirling flakes of snow, like bits of mica.
The band started to play. Trumpet, clarinet, trombone, piano, bass, drums. They were loud. From Munchen, down to the south in Protva Vallis. Clearly favorites of the local Swiss—a privilege to have them there, you could tell by the enthusiastic response. Hot jazz blaring in the cold dusk.
Peter and Roger ordered a pitcher of dark beer and cheered them on with the rest of the crowd. Some maskers danced, many sat, some stood and wandered from table to table, chatting with seated people or each other. Some groups had their waiters take rounds of grappa up to the band between songs, and happily the band members downed them, until they were saturated, at which point they passed the drinks out to people in the front row; two or three times these medicinal toasts came to Roger and Peter, who drained them in tandem. Without intending to they got a bit drunk. In the frequent “kleines pauses” they continued talking, but the noise of the crowd obscured their hearing, and they often found themselves misunderstanding each other.