Sax hesitated. “I saw her. She— she grabbed my wrist. I have to believe.” Suddenly his face twisted. “Yes, she’s out there! She’s out there! I have no doubt! No doubt! No doubt she’s expecting us to come to her.”
And Nirgal knew he had to look.
He left Candor Mesa without a good-bye to anyone. His acquaintances there would understand; they often flew away themselves for a time. They would all be back someday, to soar over the canyons and then spend their evenings together on Shining Mesa. And so he left. Down into the immensity of Melas Chasma, then downcanyon again, east into Coprates. For many hours he floated in that world, over the 61 glacier, past embayment after embayment, buttress after buttress, until he was through the Dover Gate and out over the broadening divergence of Capri and Eos chasmas. Then above the ice-filled chaoses, the crackled ice smoother by far than the drowned land below it had been. Then across the rough jumble of Margaritifer Terra, and north, following the piste toward Burroughs; then, as the piste approached Libya Station, he banked off to the northeast, toward Elysium.The Elysium massif was now a continent in the northern sea. The narrow strait separating it from the southern mainland was a flat stretch of black water and white tabular bergs, punctuated by the stack islands which had been the Aeolis Mensa. The North Sea hydrologists wanted this strait liquid, so that currents could make their way through it from Isidis Bay to Amazonis Bay. To help achieve this liquidity they had placed a nuclear-reactor complex at the west end of the strait, and pumped most of its energy into the water there, creating an artificial polynya where the surface stayed liquid year-round, and a temperate mesoclimate on the slopes on each side of the strait. The reactors’ steam plumes were visible to Nirgal from far up the Great Escarpment, and as he floated down the slope he crossed over thickening forests of fir and ginkgo. There was a cable across the western entrance to the strait, emplaced to snag icebergs floating in on the current. He flew directly over the bergjam west of the cable, and looked down on chunks of ice like floating driftglass. Then over the black open water of the strait— the biggest stretch of open water he had ever seen on Mars. For twenty kilometers he floated over the open water, exclaiming out loud at the sight. Then ahead an immense airy bridge arced over the strait. The black-violet plate of water below it was dotted with sailboats, ferries, long barges, all trailing the white Vs of their wakes. Nirgal floated over them, circling the bridge twice to marvel at the sight— like nothing he had ever seen on Mars before: water, the sea, a whole future world.
NORTH SEA POLAR PROJECTION
• • •
He continued north, rising over the plains of Cerberus, past the volcano Albor Tholus, a steep ash cone on the side of Elysium Mons. The much bigger Elysium Mons was steep as well, with a Fuji-esque profile that served as the label illustration for many agricultural co-ops in the region. Sprawled over the plain under the volcano were farms, mostly ragged at the edges, often terraced, and usually divided by strips or patches of forest. Young immature orchards dotted the higher parts of the plain, each tree in a pot; closer to the sea were great fields of wheat and corn, cut by windbreaks of olive and eucalyptus. Just ten degrees north of the equator, blessed with rainy mild winters, and then lots of hot sunny days: the people there called it the Mediterranean of Mars.
Farther north Nirgal followed the west coast as it rose up out of a line of foundered icebergs embroidering the edge of the ice sea. As he looked down at the expanse of land below, he had to agree with the general wisdom: Elysium was beautiful. This western coastal strip was the most populated region, he had heard. The coast was fractured by a number of fossae, and square harbors were being built where these canyons plunged into the ice— Tyre, Sidon, Pyriphlegethon, Hertzka, Morris. Often stone breakwaters stopped the ice, and marinas were in place behind the breakwaters, filled with fleets of small boats, all waiting for open passage.
At Hertzka Nirgal turned east and inland, and flew up the gentle slope of the Elysian massif, passing over garden belts banding the land. Here the majority of Elysium’s thousands lived, in intensively cultivated agricultural-residential zones, sloping up into the higher country between Elysium Mons and its northern spur cone, Hecates Tholus. Between the great volcano and its daughter peak, Nirgal flew through the bare rock saddle of the pass, flung like a little cloud by the pass wind.
Elysium’s east slope looked nothing like the west; it was bare rough torn rock, heavily sand-drifted, maintained in nearly its primordial condition by the rain shadow of the massif. Only near the eastern coast did Nirgal see greenery below him again, no doubt nourished by trade winds and winter fogs. The towns on the east side were like oases, strung on the thread of an island-circling piste.