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 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!