Blue Mars(139)
“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.