Roger grins crookedly. “That’s why I like it.”
“Oh of course. Far from the madding crowd.”
“Still the English major I see.”
“And you’re still the canyon hermit,” she says, laughing and pulling him toward the crowd; it is good to see him again, it has been three months. For many years now they have been a steady couple, Roger returning to their rooms in the co-op in Burroughs after every trip away; but his work is still in the backcountry, so they still spend quite a lot of time apart.
Just as they join Hans and Arthur, who are wrapping up their history of the world, Stephan and Frances come in the door, and they hold a cheery reunion over a late dinner. There’s a lot of catching up to do; this many members of their Olympus Mons climb haven’t been together in a long time. Hours after the other diners have gone upstairs to bed, or off to their homes, the little group of old ones sits at the end of one table talking. A bunch of antique insomniacs, Eileen thinks, none anxious to go to bed and toss and turn through the night. She finds herself the first to stand up and stretch and declare herself off. The others rise on cue, except for Roger and Arthur; they’ve done a lot of climbing together through the years, and Roger was a notorious insomniac even when young; now he sleeps very poorly indeed. And Arthur will talk for as long as anyone else is willing, or longer. “See you tomorrow,” Arthur says to her. “Bright and early for the crossing of the Amazonian Sea!”
The next morning the iceboat runs over ice that is mostly white, but in some patches clear and transparent right down to the shallow sea floor. Other patches are the color of brick, with the texture of brick, and the boat’s runners clatter over little dunes of gravel and dust. If they hit meltponds the boat slows abruptly and shoots great wings of water to the sides. At the other side of these ponds the runners scritch again like ice skates as they accelerate back up to speed. Roger’s iceboat is a scooter, he explains to them; not like the spidery skeletal thing that Eileen was expecting, having seen some of that kind down in Chryse—those Roger calls DNs. This is more like an ordinary boat, long, broad, and low, with several parallel runners nailed fore and aft to its hull. “Better over rough ice,” Roger explains, “and it floats if you happen to hit water.” The sail is like a big bird’s wing extended over them, sail and mast all melded together into one object, shifting shape with every gust to catch as much wind as it can.
“What keeps us from tipping over?” Arthur asks, looking over the lee rail at the flashing ice just feet below him.
“Nothing.” The deck is at a good cant, and Roger is grinning.
“Nothing?”
“The laws of physics.”
“Come on.”
“When the boat tips the sail catches less wind, both because it’s tilted and because it reads the tilt, and reefs in. Also we have a lot of ballast. And there are weights in the deck that are held magnetically on the windward side. It’s like having a heavy crew sitting on the windward rail.”
“That’s not nothing,” Eileen protests. “That’s three things.”
“True. And we may still tip over. But if we do we can always get out and pull it back upright.”
They sit in the cockpit and look up at the sail, or ahead at the ice. The iceboat’s navigation steers them away from the rottenest patches, spotted from satellites, and so the automatic pilot changes their course frequently, and they shift around the cockpit when necessary. Floury patches slow them the most, and over those the boat sometimes decelerates pretty quickly, throwing the unprepared forward into the shoulder of the person sitting next to them. Eileen is banged into by Hans and Frances more than once; like her they have never been on iceboats before, and their eyes are round at the speeds it achieves during strong gusts over smooth ice. Hans speculates that the sandy patches mark old pressure ridges, which stood like long stegosaur backs until the winds ablated them entirely away, leaving their load of sand and silt behind on the flattened ice. Roger nods. In truth the whole ocean surface is blowing away on the wind, with whatever sticks up going the fastest; and the ocean is now frozen to the bottom, so that no new pressure ridges are being raised. Soon the whole ocean will be as flat as a tabletop.
This first day out is clear, the royal blue sky crinkling in a gusty west wind. Under the clear dome of the cockpit it’s warm, their air at a slightly higher pressure than outside. Sea level is now around three hundred millibars, and lowering year by year, as for a great storm that never quite comes. They skate at speed around the majestic promontory of the Phlegra Peninsula, its great prow topped by a white-pillared Doric temple. Staring up at it Eileen listens to Hans and Frances discuss the odd phenomenon of the Phlegra Montes, seaming the north coast of Elysium like a long ship capsized on the land; unusually straight for a Martian mountain range, as are the Erebus Montes to the west. As if they were not, like all the rest of the mountain ranges on Mars, the remnants of crater rims. Hans argues for their being two concentric rings of a really big impact basin, almost the size of the Big Hit itself but older than the Big Hit, and so mostly obliterated by the later impact, with only Isidis Bay and much of the Utopian and Elysian Seas left to indicate where the basin had been. “Then the ranges could have been somewhat straightened out in the deformation of the Elysium bulge.”
Frances shakes her head, as always. Never once has Eileen seen the two of them agree. In this case Frances thinks the ranges may be even older than Hans does, remnants of early-tectonic or prototectonic plate movement. There’s a wide body of evidence for this early-tectonic era, she claims, but Hans is shaking his head: “The andesite indicating tectonic action is younger than that. The Phlegras are early Noachian. A pre—Big Hit big hit.”
Whatever the explanation, there the fine prow of rock stands, the end of a steep peninsula extending straight north into the ice for four hundred kilometers out of Firewater. A long sea cliff falling into the sea, and the same on the other side. The pilgrimage out the spine to the temple is one of the most famous walks on Mars; Eileen has made it a number of times since Roger first took her on it about forty years ago, sometimes with him, sometimes without. When they first came they looked out on a blue sea purled with whitecaps. Seldom since has it been free of ice.
He too is looking at the point, with an expression that makes Eileen think he might be remembering that time as well. Certainly he would remember if asked; his incredible memory has still not yet begun to weaken, and with the suite of memory drugs now available, drugs which have helped Eileen to remember quite a bit, it might well be that he will never forget anything his whole life long. Eileen envies that, though she knows he is ambivalent about it. But by now it is one of the things about him that she loves. He remembers everything and yet he has remained stalwart, even chipper, through all the years of the crash. A rock for her to lean on, in her own cycles of despair and mourning. Of course as a red it could be argued he has no reason to mourn. But that wouldn’t be true. His attitude was more complex than that, Eileen has seen it; so complex that she does not fully understand it. Some aspect of his strong memory, taking the long view; a determination to make it well; rueful joy in the enduring land; some mix of all these things. She watches him as he stares absorbed at the promontory where he and she once stood together over a living world.
How much he has meant to her through the years has become beyond her ability to express. Sometimes it fills her to overflowing. That they have known each other all their lives; that they have helped each other through hard times; that he got her out into the land in the first place, starting her on the trajectory of her whole life; all these would have made him a crucial figure to her. But everyone has many such figures. And over the years their divergent interests kept splitting them up; they could have lost touch entirely. But at one point Roger came to visit her in Burroughs, and she and her partner of that time had been growing distant for many years, and Roger said, I love you, Eileen. I love you. Remember what it was like on Olympus Mons, when we climbed it? Well now I think the whole world is like that. The escarpment goes on forever. We just keep climbing it until eventually we fall off. And I want to climb it with you. We keep getting together and then going our ways, and it’s too chancy, we might not cross paths again. Something might happen. I want more than that. I love you.