Blue Mars(210)
Hmm.
Arm in arm they walked back to the crater, following a dim track through dark bracken.
Bless you, Sax. Bless you.
The water of Isidis Bay was the color of a bruise or a clematis petal, sparkling with sunlight that glanced off waves just on the verge of whitecapping. The swell was from the north, and the cabin cruiser pitched and yawed as they motored northwest from DuMartheray Harbor. A bright day in spring, Ls 51, m-year 79, A.D. 2181.Maya sat on the upper deck of the boat, drinking in the sea air and the flood of blue sunlight. It was a joy to be out on the water like this, away from all the haze and junk on shore. Wonderful the way the sea could not be tamed or changed in any way, wonderful how when one got out of the sight of land one rocked on blue wilderness again, always the same no matter what happened back there. She could have sailed on, all day every day, and each slide down the waves a little roller-coaster ride of the soul.
But that wasn’t what they were about. There ahead white-caps broke over a broad patch, and beside her the boat’s pilot brought the wheel over a spoke or two, and knocked the throttle down a few rpm. That white water was the top of Double Decker Butte, now a reef marked by a black buoy, clanging a deep bongBong, bongBong, bongBong.
Mooring buoys were scattered around this big nautical church bell. Their pilot steered to the nearest one. There were no other boats anchored here, or visible anywhere; it was as if they were alone in the world. Michel came up from below and stood by her, hand on her shoulder as the pilot cut the throttle, and a sailor in the bow below them reached out with a boat hook and snagged the buoy, clipped their mooring rope onto it. The pilot killed the engine and they drifted back on the swells till the mooring line tugged them short into one swell, with a loud slap and a fan of white spray. They were at anchor over Burroughs.
THE GRAND CANAL
• • •
Down in the cabin Maya got out of her clothes and pulled on a flexible orange dry suit: suit and hood, booties, tank and helmet, lastly gloves. She had only learned to dive for this descent, and every part of it was still new, except for the sensation of being underwater, which was like the weightlessness of space. So once she got over the side of the boat and into the water, it was a familiar feeling: sinking down, pulled by the weight belt, aware that the water around her was cold, but not feeling it in any real way. Breathing underwater; that was odd, but it worked. Down into the dark. She let go and swam down, away from the little pin of sunlight.
• • •
Down and down. Past the upper edge of Double Decker Butte, past its silvered or coppery windows, standing in rows like mineral extrusions or the one-way mirrors of observers from another dimension. Quickly gone in the murk, however, and she dream-parachuted down again, down and down. Michel and a couple others were following her, but it was so dark that she couldn’t see them. Then a robot trawl shaped like a thick bed frame sank past them all, its powerful headlights shooting forward long cones of crystalline fluidity, cones so long that they became one blurry diffuse cylinder, flowing this way and that as the trawl dipped and bobbed, striking now a distant mesa’s metallic windows, now the black muck down on the rooftops of the old Niederdorf. Somewhere down there, the Niederdorf Canal had run— there, a gleam of white teeth— the Bareiss columns, impervious white under their diamond coating, about half-buried in black sand and muck. She pulled up and kicked her fins back and forth a few times to stop descending, then pushed a button that shot some compressed air into one part of her weight belt, to stabilize herself. She floated then over the canal like a ghost. Yes; it was like Scrooge’s dream, the trawl a kind of robot Christmas Past, illuminating the drowned world of lost time, the city she had loved so much. Sudden darts of pain lanced through her ribs; mostly she was numb to any feeling. It was too strange, too hard to understand or believe that this was Burroughs, her Burroughs, now Atlantis at the bottom of a Martian sea.
Bothered by her lack of feeling, she kicked hard and swam down the canal park, over the salt columns and farther west. There on the left loomed Hunt Mesa, where she and Michel had lived in hiding over a dance studio; then the broad black upslope of Great Escarpment Boulevard. Ahead lay Princess Park, where in the second revolution she had stood on a stage and given a speech to a huge throng; the crowd had stood just below where she was floating now. Over there— that was where she and Nirgal had spoken. Now the black bottom of a bay. All of that, so long ago— her life— They had cut open the tent and walked away from the city, they had flooded it and never looked back. Yes, no doubt Michel was right, this dive was a perfect image of the murky processes of memory; and maybe it would help to see it; and yet . . . Maya felt her numbness, and doubted it. The city was drowned, sure. But it was still here. Anytime they wanted to someone could rebuild the dike and pump out this arm of the bay, and there the city would be again, drenched and steaming in the sunlight, safely enclosed in a polder as if it were some town in the Netherlands; wash down the muddy streets, plant streetgrass and trees, clean out the mesa interiors, and the houses and the shops down in the Niederdorf, and up the broad boulevards— polish the windows— and there you would have it all again— Burroughs, Mars, on the surface and gleaming. It could be done; it even made sense, almost, given how much excavation there had been in the nine mesas, given that Isidis Bay had no other good harbor. Well, no one would ever do it. But it could be done. And so it was not really like the past at all.