Flying over Noctis Labyrinthus! The wind keened over the blimp's taut transparent material, and they bounced unpredictably up and down on the wind, while also rotating horizontally in what seemed an uncontrolled spin; but then Monica laughed and began manipulating the controls before her, and quickly they were proceeding south across the labyrinth, over canyon after canyon making their irregular X intersections. Then over the Compton Chaos, and the torn land of the Illyrian Gate, where it dropped into the upper end of the Marineris Glacier.
"These things' jets are much more powerful than they need to be," Monica told him through their headphones. "You can make headway into the wind until it reaches something like two hundred and fifty kilometers an hour, although you wouldn't want to try that. You also use the jets to counteract the blimp's loft, to get us back down. Here, try it. That's left jet throttle, that's right, and here are the stabilizers. The jets are dead easy, it's using the stabilizer that needs some practicing."
In front of Nirgal was a complete second set of controls. He put his hands on the jet throttles, gave them pushes. The blimp veered right, then left. "Wow."
"It's fly by wire, so if you tell it to do something disastrous, it'll just cut out."
"How many hours flying time do you need to learn this?"
"You're doing it already, right?" She laughed. "No, it takes a hundred hours or so. Depends on what you mean by knowing how to do it. There's the death mesa between a hundred hours and a thousand hours, after people have relaxed and before they're really good, so that they get into trouble. But that's mostly hang gliders anyway. With these, the simulators are just like the real thing, so you can put in your hours on those, and then when you're actually up here you'll have it wired even though you haven't officially reached the flying time limit."
"Interesting!"
And it was. The intersecting sapped canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, lying under them like an enormous maze; the sudden lifts and drops as the winds tossed them; the loud keening of the wind over their partially enclosed gondola seats.... "It's like becoming a bird!"
"Exactly."
And some part of him saw it was going to be all right. The heart is pleased by one thing after another.
After that he spent time in a flight simulator in the city, and several times a week he made a date with Monica or one of her friends, and went out to the cliff's edge for another lesson. It was not a complicated business, and soon he felt that he could try a flight on his own. They cautioned him to be patient. He kept at it. The simulators felt very much like the real thing; if you tested them by doing something foolish, the seat would tilt and bounce very convincingly. More than once he was told the story of the person who had taken an ultralite into such a disastrous death spiral that the simulator had torn off its mountings and crashed through the glass wall next to it, cutting some bystanders and breaking the flier's arm.
Nirgal avoided that kind of error, and most others as well. He went to Free Mars meetings in the city offices almost every morning, and flew every afternoon. As the days passed he discovered that he was dreading the morning meetings; he only wanted to fly. He had not founded Free Mars, no matter what they said. Whatever he had been doing in those years, it was not politics, not like this. Maybe it had had a political element to it, but mostly he had been living his life, and talking to people in the demimonde and the surface cities about how to live theirs and still have some freedoms, some pleasures. Okay, it had been political, everything was; but it seemed he was not really interested in politics. Or perhaps it was government.
It was particularly uninteresting, of course, when dominated by Jackie and her crew. That was politics of a different kind. He had seen from his first moment back that for Jackie's inner circle, his return from Earth was no welcome thing. He had been gone for most of an m-year, and during that time a whole new group had risen to the fore, vaulted by the revolution. Nirgal to them was a threat to Jackie's control of the party, and to their influence on Jackie. They were firmly if subtly against him. No. For a time he had been the natives' leader, the charismatic of the tribe made up of the indigenous people of Mars- son of Hiroko and Coyote, a very potent mythic parentage- very hard to oppose. But that time had passed. Now Jackie was in control; and against him she had her own mythic parentage, her descent from John Boone, as well as their shared Zygote beginnings, and also the (partial) backing of the Minoan cult in Dorsa Brevia.
Not to mention her direct power over him, in their own intense dynamic. But her advisers could not understand that, or even fully be aware of it. To them he was a threatening power, by no means finished because of his Terran illness. A threat forever to their native queen.
So he sat through morning meetings in the city offices, trying to ignore their little maneuverings, trying to focus on the issues coming in from all over the planet, many of them having to do with land problems or wrangles. Many tent towns wanted to take down their tents when air pressures made it possible, and hardly any of them were willing to concede that this was an operation in which the environmental courts had a say. Some areas were arid enough that water was the critical issue, and their requests for a water allotment were pouring in, until it seemed that the northern sea could be drawn down a kilometer merely by pumping it out to thirsty cities in the south. These and a thousand more matters tested the constitution's many networks for connecting local autonomy to global considerations; the debates would go on forever.
Nirgal, while fundamentally uninterested in most of these wrangles, found them yet preferable to the party politics he saw going on in Cairo. He had come back from Earth without any official position in the new government or the old party, and one thing he saw going on these days was the struggle to place him- to give him a job with limited power, or, for his backers (or rather Jackie's opponents) to put him in a position with some real power to it. Some friends advised him to wait and run for the senate when the next elections came, others mentioned the executive council, others party positions, others a post on the GEC. All these jobs sounded awful to Nirgal in one way or another, and when he talked to Nadia on the screens, he could see that he would find them a burden; though she seemed to be hammering away stolidly enough, it was obvious the executive council was distasteful to her. But he kept a straight face and listened closely as people offered their advice.
Jackie herself kept her own council. In meetings where people suggested that Nirgal become a kind of minister-without-portfolio, she regarded him more blankly than usual, which led Nirgal to think that she liked that possibility least of all. She wanted him pinned into some position, which given her current post could not help but be inferior to hers. But if he stayed outside the system entirely....
There she sat, the infant in her arms. It could be his child. And Antar watched her with the same expression, the same thought. No doubt Dao would have as well, if he were still alive. Nirgal was suddenly shaken by a spasm of grief for his half brother, his tormentor, his friend- he and Dao had fought for as far back as he could remember, but they had been brothers for all that.
Jackie had apparently forgotten Dao already, and Kasei as well. As she would forget Nirgal, if he should happen to get killed. She had been among the greens who had ordered the crushing of the Red assault on Sheffield, she had advocated the strong response. Perhaps she had to forget the dead.
The infant cried. Face rounded by fat, it was impossible to see any resemblance to any adult. The mouth looked like Jackie's. Other than that... it was frightening, this power created by anonymous parenting. Of course a man could do the same, obtain an egg, grow it by ectogenesis, raise it himself. No doubt it would begin to happen, especially if many women took Jackie's route. A world without parents. Well, friends were the real family; but he shuddered nevertheless at what Hiroko had done, what Jackie was doing.
He went flying to clear his mind of all that. One night after a glorious flight in the clouds, sitting in the launchpad pub, the conversation turned and someone mentioned Hiroko's name. "I hear she's on Elysium," someone said, "working on a new commune of communes up there."
"How did you hear?" Nirgal demanded of the woman, somewhat sharply no doubt.
Surprised, she said, "You know those fliers who dropped in last week who are flying around the world? They were on Elysium last month, and they said they saw her there." She shrugged. "That's all I know. Not much by way of confirmation, I know."
Nirgal sat back in his seat. Always thirdhand information. Some of the stories, however, seemed so like Hiroko; and a few, too Hiroko-like to have been made up. Nirgal did not know what to think. Very few people seemed to think she was dead. Sightings of the rest of her group were reported as well.
"They just wish she were here," Jackie said when Nirgal mentioned it the next day.
"Don't you wish it?"
"Of course"-(though she didn't)-"but not enough to make up stories about it."
"You really think they're all made up? I mean, who would do that? What would they be telling themselves when they did it? It doesn't make sense."
"People don't make sense, Nirgal. You have to learn that. People see an elderly Japanese woman somewhere, they think, that looks like Hiroko. That night they tell their roommates, I think I saw Hiroko today. She was down in the marketplace buying plums. The roommate goes to his construction site, says my roommate saw Hiroko yesterday, buying plums!"
Nirgal nodded. It was no doubt true, at least for most of the stories. For the rest, though, the few that didn't fit that pattern....
"Meanwhile, you have to make a decision about this environmental-court position," Jackie said. It was a province court, one below the global court. "We can arrange it so that Mem gets a position in the party that will actually be more influential, or you could take that one if you wanted, or both, I suppose. But we have to know."
"Yeah yeah."
People came in wanting to talk about something else, and Nirgal withdrew to the window, near the nurse and the infant. He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it- it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That's politics, Jackie would say. And it was clear she enjoyed it. But Nirgal did not. It was strange; he had worked all his life for this situation, ostensibly, and now that it was here, he did not like it.
Very possibly he could learn enough to do the work. He would have to overcome the hostility of the people who didn't want him back in the party, he would have to build his own power base, meaning collecting a group of people who would help him in their official positions; do them favors; curry their favor; play them off against each other, so that each would do his bidding in order to establish preeminence over the others.... He could see all these processes at work right there in this very room, as Jackie met with one adviser after the next, discussing whatever issue happened to be their bailiwick, then working them to establish more firmly their allegiance to her. Of course, she would say if he pointed out this process. That was politics; they were in control of Mars now, and this work had to be done if they were to create the new world they had hoped for. One couldn't be overfastidious, one had to be realistic, you held your nose and did it. It had a certain nobility to it, really. It was the necessary work.
Nirgal didn't know if those justifications were true or not. Had they really worked all their lives to overthrow Terran domination of Mars, only in order to put in place their own local version of the same thing? Could politics ever be anything but politics, practical, cynical, compromised, ugly?
He did not know. He sat in the window seat, looking down at Jackie's daughter's face, sleeping. Across the room Jackie was intimidating the Free Mars delegates from Elysium. Now that Elysium was an island surrounded by the northern sea, they were more determined than ever to take control of their fate, including immigration limits that would keep the massif from developing much past its current state. "All very well," Jackie was saying, "but it's a very large island now, a continent really, surrounded by water so that it will be especially humid, with a coastline of thousands of kilometers, lots of fine harbor sites, fishing harbors no doubt. I can sympathize with your desire to keep a hand on development, we all feel that, but the Chinese have expressed a particular interest in developing some of these sites, and what am I supposed to say to them? That the Elysian locals don't like Chinese? That we'll take their help in a crisis, but we don't want them moving into the neighborhood?"
"It's not that they're Chinese!" the delegate said.
"I understand. Really I do. Tell you what- you go back to South Fossa and explain the difficulties we face here, and I'll do everything I can here to help you. I can't guarantee results, but I'll do what I can."
"Thanks," the delegate said, and left.
Jackie turned to her assistant. "Idiot. Who's next. Ah, naturally; the Chinese ambassador. Well, let him in."
The Chinese, a woman, was quite tall. She spoke in Mandarin, and her AI translated into a clear British English. After an exchange of pleasantries, the woman asked about establishing some Chinese settlements, preferably somewhere in the equatorial provinces.
Nirgal stared, fascinated. This was how settlements had been started from the very beginning; groups of Terran nationals had come up, and built a tent town or a cliff dwelling, or domed a crater.... Now, however, Jackie looked polite and said, "It's possible. Everything of course will have to be referred to the environmental courts for judgment. However, there is a great deal of empty land on the Elysium massif. Perhaps something could be arranged there, especially if China was willing to contribute to infrastructure and mitigation and the like."
They discussed details. After a while the ambassador left.
Jackie turned to look at Nirgal. "Nirgal, could you get Rachel in here? And try to decide what you're going to do soon, please?"
Nirgal walked out of the building, through the city to his room. He packed his little collection of clothes and toiletries, and took the subway out to the launching pad, and asked Monica for the use of one of the single-person blimpgliders. He was ready for soloing, he had put in enough hours in simulators and with teachers. There was another flight school down in Marineris, on Candor Mensa. He talked to the school officials on the launchpad; they were willing to let him take the blimpglider down there, and have it returned by another flier later.
It was midday. The Tharsis downslope winds had started, and would only get stronger as the afternoon progressed. Nirgal suited up, got into the pilot's seat. The little blimpglider slid up the launching mast, held by the nose; and was let free.
He rose over Noctis Labyrinthus, turned east. He flew east over the maze of interlocking canyons. A land split open by stress from below. Flight out of the labyrinth. An Icarus who had flown too close to the sun, gotten burned, survived the fall- and now flew again, this time down, down, down, ever down. Taking advantage of a hard tailwind. Riding a gale, shooting down over the shattered dirty ice field that marked Compton Chaos, where the great channel outbreak had begun in 2061. That immense flood had run down Ius Chasma; but Nirgal angled north, away from the glacier's flow, and then flew east again, down into the head of Tithonium Chasma, which paralleled Ius Chasma just to the north.
Tithonium was one of the deepest and narrowest of the Marineris canyons- four kilometers deep, ten wide. He could fly well below the level of the plateau rims and still be thousands of meters over the canyon floor. Tithonium was higher than Ius, wilder, untouched by human hands, seldom traveled in, because it was a dead end to the east, where it narrowed and became rough-floored as it got shallower, then abruptly stopped. Nirgal spotted the road that switchbacked up the eastern head wall, a road he had traveled a few times in his youth, when all the planet had been his home.
The afternoon sun dipped behind him. The shadows on the land lengthened. The wind continued to blow strong, thrumming over the blimpglider, whining and whooshing and keening. It blew him over the caprock of the rim plateau again, as Tithonium became a string of oval depressions, pocking the plateau one after the next: the Tithonia Catena, each dip a giant bowl-shaped depression in the land.
And then suddenly the world dropped away again, and he flew out over the immense open canyon of Candor Chasma, Shining Canyon, the ramparts of its eastern wall in fact shining at that very moment, amber and bronze in the sunset's light. To the north was the deep entrance to Ophir Chasma, to the south the spectacular buttress-walled opening down to Melas Chasma, the central giant of the Marineris system. It was Mars's version of Concordiaplatz, he saw, but much bigger than Earth's, wilder, looking untouched, primal, gigantic beyond all human scale, as if he had flown back two centuries into the past, or two eons, to a time before the anthropogenesis. Red Mars!
And there out in the middle of broad Candor was a tall diamond mesa, a caprock island standing nearly two kilometers above the canyon floor. And in the sunset's hazy gloom Nirgal could make out a nest of lights, a tent town, at the southernmost point of the diamond. Voices welcomed him over the common band on his intercom, then guided him in to the town's landing pad. The sun was winking out over the cliffs to the west as he brought the blimpglider around and descended slowly into the wind, putting it down right on the figure of Kokopelli painted as a target on the landing pad.
Shining Mesa had a large top, more a kite shape than a diamond proper, thirty kilometers long and ten wide, standing in the middle of Candor Chasma like a Monument Valley mesa writ large. The tent town occupied only a small rise on the southern point of the kite. The mesa was just what it appeared to be, a detached fragment of the plateau that the Marineris canyons had split. It was a tremendous vantage point for viewing the great walls of Candor, with views through the deep, steep gaps into Ophir Chasma to the north and Melas Chasma to the south.
Naturally such a spectacular prospect had attracted people over the years, and the main tent was surrounded by new smaller ones. At five kilometers above the datum, the town was still tented, though there was talk of removing it. The floor of Candor Chasma, only three kilometers above the datum, was patched with growing dark green forests. Many of the people who lived on Shining Mesa flew down into the canyons every morning to farm or botanize, floating back up to the mesa's top in the late afternoons. A few of these flying foresters were old underground acquaintances of Nirgal's, and they were pleased to take him along and show him the canyons, and what they did in them.
The Marineris canyon floors generally run down west to east. In Candor, they curved around the great central mesa, then fell precipitously south into Melas. Snow lay on the higher parts of the floor, especially under the western walls where shadows lay in the afternoon. Meltwater from this snow ran down in a faint tracery of new watersheds, made up of sandy braided streambeds that ran together into a few shallow muddy red rivers, which collected at a confluence just above the Candor Gap, and poured down in a wild foaming rapids to the floor of Melas Chasma, where it pooled against the remnant of the 61 glacier, running redly against its northern flank.
On the banks of all these opaque red streams, forest galleries were springing up. They consisted in most places of cold-hardened balsas and other very rapidly growing tropical trees, creating new canopies over older krummholz. These days it was warm on the canyon floor, which was like a big sun-reflecting bowl, protected from the wind. The balsa canopies were allowing a great number of plant and animal species to flourish underneath them; Nirgal's acquaintances said it was the most diverse biotic community on Mars. They had to carry sedative dart guns now when they landed and walked around, because of bears, snow leopards, and other predators. Walking through some of the galleries was becoming difficult because of thickets of snow bamboo and aspen.
All this growth had been aided by huge deposits of sodium nitrate that had been lying in Candor and Ophir canyons- great white bench terraces made of extremely water-soluble caliche blanco. These mineral deposits were now melting over the canyon floors and running down the streams, providing the new soils with lots of nitrogen. Unfortunately some of the biggest nitrate deposits were being buried under landslides- the water that was dissolving the sodium nitrate was also hydrating the canyon walls, destabilizing them in a radical acceleration of the mass wasting that went on all the time. No one went near the foot of the canyon walls anymore, the fliers said: too dangerous. And as they soared around in their blimpgliders, Nirgal saw the scars of landslides everywhere. Several high talus plant slopes had been buried, and wall-fixing methods were one of the many topics of conversation in the mesa evenings, after the omegandorph got into the blood; in fact there was little they could do. If chunks of a ten-thousand-foot-high wall of rock wanted to give way, nothing was going to stop them. So from time to time, about once a week or so, everyone on Shining Mesa would feel the ground quiver, watch the tent shimmer, and hear in the pit of the stomach the low rumble of a collapse. Often it was possible to spot the slide, rolling across the canyon floor ahead of a sienna billow of dust. Fliers in the air nearby would come back shaken and silent, or voluble with tales of being slapped across the sky by earsplitting roars. One day Nirgal was about halfway down to the floor when he felt one himself: it was like a sonic boom that went on for many seconds, the air quivering like a gel. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.
Mostly he explored on his own, sometimes he flew with his old acquaintances. Blimpgliders were perfect for the canyon, slow and steady, easy to steer. More loft than was needed, more power... the one he had rented (using money from Coyote) allowed him to drift down in the mornings to help botanize in the forests, or walk by the streams; then float back up through the afternoons, up and up and up and up. This was when one got a true sense of just how tall Candor Mesa was, and the even taller canyon walls- up up and up and up, to the tent and its long meals, its party nights. Day after day Nirgal followed this routine, exploring the various regions of the canyons below, watching the exuberant nightlife in the tent; but seeing everything as if through the wrong end of a telescope, a telescope consisting of the question Is this the life I want to lead? This distancing and somehow miniaturizing question kept returning to him, spurring him by day as he banked in the sunlight, haunting him at night in sleepless hours between the timeslip and dawn. What was he to do? The success of the revolution had left him without a task. All his life he had wandered Mars talking to people about a free Mars, about inhabitation rather than colonization, about becoming indigenous to the land. Now that task was ended, the land was theirs to live on as they chose. But in this new situation he found he did not know his part. He had to think very specifically about how to go on in this new world, no longer as the voice of the collective, but as an individual in his own private life.
He had discovered that he did not want to continue working on the collective; it was good that some people wanted to do it, but he wasn't one of them. In fact he could not think about Cairo without a stab of anger at Jackie, and of simple pain as well- pain at the loss of that public world, that whole way of life. It was hard to give up being a revolutionary. Nothing seemed to follow from it, either logically or emotionally. But something had to be done. That life was past. In the midst of a banking slow dive in his blimpglider, he suddenly understood Maya and her obsessive talk about incarnations. He was twenty-seven m-years old now, he had crisscrossed all Mars, he had been to Earth, he had returned to a free world. Time for the next metempsychosis.
So he flew around the immensities of Candor, looking for some image of himself. The fractured, layered, scarred canyon walls were so many stupendous mineral mirrors; and indeed he saw clearly that he was a tiny creature, smaller than a gnat in a cathedral. Flying around studying each great palimpsest of facets, he scried two very strong impulses in himself, distinct and mutually exclusive, yet infolded, like the green and the white. On the one hand he wanted to stay a wanderer, to fly and walk and sail over all the world, a nomad forever, wandering ceaselessly until he knew Mars better than anyone else. Ah yes; it was a familiar euphoria. On the other hand it was was familiar, he had done that all his life. It would be the form of his previous life, without the content. And he knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness that made him feel so detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope vision. Coming from everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now he wanted that home, as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends. familiar, he had done that all his life. It would be the form of his previous life, without the content. And he knew already the loneliness of that life, the rootlessness that made him feel so detached, that gave him this wrong-end-of-the-telescope vision. Coming from everywhere he came from nowhere. He had no home. And so now he wanted that home, as much as the freedom or more. A home. He wanted to settle into a full human life, to pick a place and stay there, to learn it completely, in all its seasons, to grow his food, make his house and his tools, become part of a community of friends.
Both these desires existed, strongly and together- or, to be more exact, in a subtle rapid oscillation, which jangled his emotions, and left him insomniac and restless. He could see no way to reconcile the two. They were mutually exclusive. No one he talked to had any useful suggestions as to how to resolve the difficulty. Coyote was dubious about setting down roots- but then he was a nomad, and didn't know. Art considered the wandering life impossible; but he was fond of his places now.
Nirgal's nonpolitical training was in mesocosm engineering, but he found that little help to his thinking. At the higher elevations they were always going to be in tents, and mesocosm engineering would be needed; but it was becoming more of a science than an art, and with increasing experience solving the problems would be more and more routinized. Besides, did he want to pursue a tented profession, when so much of the lower planet was becoming land they could walk on?
No. He wanted to live in the open air. To learn a patch of land, its soil and plants and animals and weather and skies, and everything else... he wanted that. Part of him. Part of the time.
He began to feel, however, that whatever he chose, Candor Chasma was not the place for the kind of settlement he was thinking of. Its huge vistas made it a hard place to see as home- it was too vast, too inhuman. The canyon floors were designed and designated as wilderness, and every spring the streams surging with snowmelt would jump their banks, tear new channels, be buried under enormous landslides. Fascinating, all of it. But not home. The locals were going to stay up on Shining Mesa, and only visit the canyon floors during the day. The mesa would be their true home. It was a good plan. But the mesa- it was an island in the sky, a great tourist destination, a place for flying vacations, for partying through the nights, for expensive hotels, for the young and the in-love... all that was fine, wonderful. But crowded, perhaps even overrun- or else always battling the influx of visitors, and newly settled residents enchanted by the sublime views, people who would arrive like Nirgal himself, dropping in at some dusk in their life and never going away, while the old residents looked on helplessly and grumbled about the good old days when the world had been new, and unoccupied.
No- that was not the kind of home he had in mind. Although he loved the way dawn flushed the fluted west walls of Candor, flaring all across the Martian spectrum, the sky turning indigo or mauve, or a startling earthly cerulean... a beautiful place, so beautiful that on some days as he flew about he felt it would be worth it to stand on Shining Mesa and hold his ground, to try to preserve it, to swoop down and learn the gnarly wilderness floor, float back up every afternoon to dinner. Would that work, make him feel at home? And if wilderness was what he wanted, weren't there other places less spectacular but more remote, thus more wild?
Back and forth he went, back and forth. One day, flying over the foaming opaque series of waterfalls and rapids in the Candor Gap, he remembered that John Boone had been through this area, in a solo rover just after the Transmarineris Highway had been built. What would that master equivocator have said about this amazing region?
Nirgal called up Boone's AI, Pauline, and asked for Candor, and found a voice diary made during a drive through the canyon in 2046. Nirgal let the tape run as he looked down on the land from above, listening to the hoarse voice with the friendly American accent, a voice unselfconscious about talking to an AI. Listening to the voice made Nirgal wish he could really talk to the man. Some people said Nirgal had filled John Boone's empty shoes, that Nirgal had done the work John would have done had he lived. If that were so, what would John have done afterward? How would he have lived?
"This is the most unbelievable country I've ever seen. Really, it's what you think of when you think of Valles Marineris. Back in Melas the canyon was so wide that out in the middle you couldn't see the walls at all, they were under the horizon! This small-planet curvature is producing effects no one ever imagined. All the old simulations lied so bad, the verticals exaggerated by factors of five or ten, as I recall, which made it look like you were down in a slot. It's not a slot. Wow, there's a rock column just like a woman in a toga, Lot's wife I guess that would be. I wonder if it is salt, it's white, but I guess that doesn't mean much. Have to ask Ann. I wonder what those Swiss road builders made of all this when they built this road, it's not very alpine. Kind of like an anti-Alps, down instead of up, red instead of green, basalt instead of granite. Well, but they seemed to like it anyway. Of course they're anti-Swiss Swiss, so it makes a kind of sense. Whoa, pothole country here, the rover is bouncing around. Might try that bench there, it looks smoother than here. Yep, there we go, just like a road. Oh- it is the road. I guess I got off it a bit, I'm driving manually for the fun of it, but it's hard to keep an eye out for the transponders when there's so much else to look at. The transponders are made more for automatic pilot than the human eye. Hey, there's the break into Ophir Chasma, what a gap! That wall must be, I don't know- twenty thousand feet tall. My Lord. Since the last one was called Candor Gap, this one should be called Ophir Gap, right? Ophir Gate would be nicer. Let's check the map. Hmm, the promontory on the west side of the gap is called Candor Labes, that's lips, isn't it? Candor Throat. Or, hmm. I don't think so. It's one hell of an opening though. Steep cliffs on both sides, and twenty thousand feet tall. That's about six or seven times as tall as the cliffs in Yosemite. Sheeee-it. They don't look that that much taller, to tell the truth. Foreshortening no doubt. They look about twice as tall, or- who knows. I can't remember what Yosemite really looked like, in terms of size anyway. This is the most amazing canyon you could ever even imagine. Ah, there's Candor Mensa, on my left. This is the first time I could see that it isn't part of the Candor Labes wall. I'll bet that mesa top has one hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up there, sure. I wish I could get up there and see it! This would be a fun place to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see dust devils every now and then, vicious little things, real tight and dark. There's a shaft of sunlight there hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar of butter hanging in the air. Ah, God, what a beautiful world!" much taller, to tell the truth. Foreshortening no doubt. They look about twice as tall, or- who knows. I can't remember what Yosemite really looked like, in terms of size anyway. This is the most amazing canyon you could ever even imagine. Ah, there's Candor Mensa, on my left. This is the first time I could see that it isn't part of the Candor Labes wall. I'll bet that mesa top has one hell of a view. Put a fly-in hotel up there, sure. I wish I could get up there and see it! This would be a fun place to fly around in. Dangerous though. I see dust devils every now and then, vicious little things, real tight and dark. There's a shaft of sunlight there hitting the mesa through the dust. Like a bar of butter hanging in the air. Ah, God, what a beautiful world!"
Nirgal could only agree. It made him laugh to hear the man's voice, and surprised him to hear John talk about flying above. It made him understand a little bit the way the issei talked about Boone, the hurt in them that never went away. How much better it would be to have John here than just these recordings in an AI, what a great adventure it would have been to watch John Boone negotiate Mars's wild history! Saving Nirgal the burden of that role, among other things. As it was, however, they only had that friendly happy voice. And that did not solve his problem.
Back up on Candor Mesa, the fliers met at night in a ring of pubs and restaurants placed on the high southern arc of their tent wall, where on terraces just inside the tent they could sit and look out at the long views, over the forested world of their domain. Nirgal sat among these people, eating and drinking, listening, sometimes talking, thinking his own thoughts among them, comfortably; they did not care what had happened to him on Earth, they did not care that he was there among them. This was good, as often he was distracted to the point of being oblivious to his surroundings; he would fall into reveries and come out of them, and realize that once again he had been in the steamy streets of Port of Spain, or in the refugee compound in the torrential monsoon. How often he found himself there again; everything that had happened since was so pale by comparison!
But one night he came to from a reverie, having heard some voice say "Hiroko."
"What's that?" he said.
"Hiroko. We met her flying around Elysium, up on its north slope."
It was a young woman speaking, her face innocent of any knowledge of who he was.
"You saw her yourself?" he said sharply.
"Yes. She's not hiding or anything. She said she liked my flier."
"I don't know," an older man said. A Mars vet, an issei immigrant from the early years, his face battered by wind and cosmic rays until it looked like leather. Voice hoarse: "I heard she was down in the chaos where the first hidden colony used to be, working on the new harbors in the south bay."
Other voices cut in: Hiroko had been seen here, had been seen there, had been confirmed dead, had gone to Earth; Nirgal had seen her there on Earth- "This here's here's Nirgal," one said to the last comment, pointing and grinning. "He should be able to confirm or deny that one!" Nirgal," one said to the last comment, pointing and grinning. "He should be able to confirm or deny that one!"
Nirgal, taken aback, nodded. "I didn't see her on Earth," he said. "There were rumors only."
"Same as here, then."
Nirgal shrugged.
The young woman, flushed now that she knew who Nirgal was, insisted she had met Hiroko herself. Nirgal watched her closely. This was different; no one had ever made such a direct claim to him (except in Switzerland). She looked worried, defensive, but was holding her ground. "I talked with her, I say!"
Why lie about something like that? And how would it be possible for someone to get fooled about it? Impersonators? But why do that?
Despite himself Nirgal's pulse had quickened, and he was warmer. The thing was, it was possible Hiroko would do something like this; hide but not hide; live somewhere without bothering to contact the family left behind. There was no obvious motive for it, it would be weird, inhumane, inhuman; and perfectly within Hiroko's range of possibilities. His mother was a kind of insane person, he had understood that for years- a charismatic who led people effortlessly, but was mad. Capable of almost anything.
If she was alive.
He did not want to hope again. He did not want to go chasing off after the mere mention of her name! But he was watching this girl's face as if he could read the truth from it, as if he could catch the very image of Hiroko still there in her pupils! Others were asking the questions he would have asked, so he could stay silent and listen, he did not have to make her overselfconscious. Slowly she told the whole story; she and some friends had been flying clockwise around Elysium, and when they stopped for the night up on the new peninsula made by the Phlegra Montes, they had walked down to the icy edge of the North Sea where they had spotted a new settlement, and there in the crowd of construction workers was Hiroko; and several of the construction crew were her old associates, Gene, and Rya, and Iwao, and the rest of the First Hundred who had followed Hiroko ever since the days of the lost colony. The flying group had been amazed, but the lost colonists had been faintly perplexed at their amazement. "No one hides anymore," Hiroko had told the young woman, after complimenting her flier. "We spend most of our time near Dorsa Brevia, but we've been up here for months now."
And there it was. The woman seemed perfectly sincere, there was no reason to believe she were lying, or subject to hallucination.
Nirgal didn't want to have to think about this. But he had been considering leaving Shining Mesa anyway, and having a look around at other places. So he could. And- well- he was going to have to at least have a look. Shigata ga nai! Shigata ga nai!
The next day the conversation seemed much less compelling. Nirgal didn't know what to think. He called Sax on the wrist, told him what he had heard. "Is it possible, Sax? Is it possible?"
A strange look passed over Sax's face. "It's possible possible," he said. "Yes, of course. I told you- when you were sick, and unconscious- that she...." He was picking his words, as he so often did, with a squint of concentration. "- that I saw her myself. In that storm I was caught out in. She led me to my car."
Nirgal stared at the little blinking image. "I don't remember that."
"Ah. I'm not surprised."
"So you... you think she escaped from Sabishii."
"Yes."
"But how likely was that?"
"I don't know the- the likelihood likelihood. That would be difficult to judge."