Then there they are just off the port bow, two angels floating through whiteness toward the still boat—or so for one illusory moment it appears. They leap over the rail onto the foredeck, and Roger uses the last momentum of the iceboat to wear away again, and in a matter of seconds they are flying east with the wind again, the howl greatly reduced.
By that sunset they are merely in a light mist. Next morning it is gone entirely, and the world has returned. The iceboat lies moored in the long shadow of Olympus Mons, hulking over the horizon to the east. A continent of a mountain, stretching as far as they can see to north and south; another world, another life.
They sail in toward the eastern shore of the Amazonian Sea, famous before the crash for its wild coastline. Now it shoots up from the ice white and bare, like a winter fairy tale: Gordii Waterfall, which fell a vertical kilometer off the coastal plateau directly into the sea, is now a great pillared icefall, with a great pile of ice shatter at its foot.
Past this landmark they skate into Lycus Sulci Bay, south of Acheron, where the land rises less precipitously, gentle hills above low sea bluffs, looking down on the ice bay. In the bay they slowly tack against the morning offshore breeze, until they come to rest against a floating dock, now somewhat askew in the press of ice, just off a beach. Roger ties off on this, and they gear up for a hike on the land. Freya and Jean-Claude carry their backpacks with them.
Out of the boat and onto the ice. Scritch-scritch over the ice to shore, everything strangely still; then across the frosty beach, and up a trail that leads to the top of the bluff. After that a gentler trail up the vast tilt of the coastal plateau. Here the trailmakers have laid flagstones that run sometimes ten in a row before the next low step up. In steeper sections it becomes more like a staircase, a great endless staircase, each flag fitted perfectly under the next one. Even rime-crusted as it is, Eileen finds the lapidary work extraordinarily beautiful. The quartzite flags are placed as tightly as Orkney drywall, and their surfaces are a mix of pale yellow and red, silver and gold, all in differing proportions for each flag, and alternating by dominant color as they rise. In short, a work of art.
Eileen follows the trail looking down at these flagstones, up and up, and up, up some more. Above them the rising slope is white to the distant high horizon, beyond which black Olympus bulks like a massive world of its own.
The sun emerges over the volcano. Light blazes on the snow. As they hike farther up the quartzite trail it enters a forest. Or rather, the skeleton of a forest. Eileen hurries to catch up with Roger, feeling oppressed, even frightened. Freya and Jean-Claude are up ahead, their other companions far behind.
Roger leads her off the trail, through the trees. They are all dead. It was a forest of foxtail pine and bristlecone pine; but the tree line has fallen to sea level at this latitude, and all the big old gnarled trees have perished. After that a sandstorm, or a series of sandstorms, have sandblasted away all the trees’ needles, the small branches, and the bark itself, leaving behind only the bleached tree trunks and the biggest lower branches, twisting up like broken arms from writhing bodies. Wind has polished the spiraling grain of the trunks until it gleams in the morning light. Ice packs the cracks into the heartwood.
The trees are well spaced, and they stroll between them, regarding some more closely, then moving on. Scattered here and there are little frozen ponds and tarns. It seems to Eileen like a great sculpture garden or workshop, in which some mighty Rodin has left scattered a thousand trials at a single idea, all beautiful, altogether forming a park of surreal majesty. And yet awful too; she feels it as a kind of stabbing pain in the chest; this is a cemetery. Dead trees flayed by the sandy wind; dead Mars, their hopes flensed by the cold. Red Mars, Mars the god of war, taking back its land with a frigid boreal blast. The sun glares off the icy ground, smeary light glazing the world. The bare wood glows orange.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Roger says.
Eileen shakes her head, looking down. She is bitterly cold, and the wind whistles through the broken branches and the grain of the wood. “It’s dead, Roger.”
“What’s that?”
“ ‘The darkness grew apace,’ ” she mutters, looking away from him. “ ‘A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east.’ ”
“What’s that you say?”
“The Time Machine,” she explains. “The end of the world. ‘It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.’ ”
“Ah,” Roger says, and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Still the English major.” He smiles. “All these years pass and we’re still just what we always were. You’re an English major from the University of Mars.”
“Yes.” A gust seems to blow through her chest, as if the wind had suddenly struck her from an unexpected quarter. “But it’s all over now, don’t you see? It’s all dead”—she gestures—“everything we tried to do!” A desolate plateau over an ice sea, a forest of dead trees; all their efforts gone to waste.
“Not so,” Roger says, and points up the hill. Freya and Jean-Claude are wandering down through the dead forest, stopping to inspect certain trees, running their hands over the icy spiral grain of the wood, moving on to the next magnificent corpse.
Roger calls to them, and they approach together. Roger says under his breath to Eileen, “Now listen, Eileen, listen to what they say. Just watch them and listen.”
The youngsters join them, shaking their heads and babbling at the sight of the broken-limbed forest. “It’s so beautiful!” Freya says. “So pure!”
“Look,” Roger interrupts, “don’t you worry everything will all go away, just like this forest here? Mars become unlivable? Don’t you believe in the crash?”
Startled, the two stare at him. Freya shakes her head like a dog shedding water. Jean-Claude points west, to the vast sheet of ice sea spread below them. “It never goes backward,” he says, halting for words. “You see all that water out there, and the sun in the sky. And Mars, the most beautiful planet in the world.”
“But the crash, Jean-Claude. The crash.”
“We don’t call it that. It is a long winter only. Things are living under the snow, waiting for the next spring.”
“There hasn’t been a spring in thirty years! You’ve never seen a spring in your life!”
“Spring is Ls zero, yes? Every year spring comes.”
“Colder and colder.”
“We will warm things up again.”
“But it could take thousands of years!” Roger exclaims, enjoying the act of provocation. He sounds like all the people in Burroughs, Eileen thinks, like Eileen herself when she is feeling the despair of the crash.
“I don’t care,” Freya says.
“But that means you’ll never see any change at all. Even with really long lives you’ll never see it.”
Jean-Claude shrugs. “It’s the work that matters, not the end of work. Why be so focused on the end? All it means is you are over. Better to be in the middle of things, or at the beginning, when all the work remains to be done, and it could turn out any way.”
“It could fail,” Roger insists. “It could get colder, the atmosphere could freeze out, everything in the world could die like these trees here. Nothing left alive at all.”
Freya turns her head away, put off by this. Jean-Claude sees her and for the first time he seems annoyed. They don’t quite understand what Roger has been doing, and now they are tired of it. Jean-Claude gestures at the stark landscape: “Say what you like,” he says. “Say it will all go crash, say everything alive now will die, say the planet will stay frozen for thousands of years—say the stars will fall from the sky! But there will be life on Mars.”