Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that and concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The canal water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.
The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize space in the locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the canals and rivers of classical antiquity. The first towns they passed were quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a canal bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the canal was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.
For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and nod.
The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town called Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area for ships and goods.
After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: “How do you like the canal?” they asked.
“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps— such dark skin, such white regular teeth— strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants— human scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. Sexy.
She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more relaxed cocktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at the canal and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did not react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It would be lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she didn’t even really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought gave her ideas. Faces were so powerful.