Blue Mars(141)

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 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?