He sat down beside her. The departure lounge was crowded but subdued. People looked grave, wan, upset, thoughtful, radiant. Some were going, some were seeing people off. Through a broad window they looked into the interior of the socket, where elevator cars levitated in silence against the walls, and the foot of the 37,000-kilometer-long cable stood hovering ten meters over the concrete floor.
So you’re going, Nirgal said.
Yes, Jackie said. I want a new start.
Nirgal said nothing.
It will be an adventure, she said.
True. He didn’t know what else to say.
In the carpet she wrote Jackie Boone Went to the Moon.
It’s an awesome idea when you think of it, she said. Humanity, spreading through the galaxy. Star by star, ever outward. It’s our destiny. It’s what we ought to be doing. In fact I’ve heard people say that that’s where Hiroko is— that she and her people joined one of the first starships, the one to Barnard’s star. To start a new world. Spread viriditas.
It’s as likely as any other story, Nirgal said. And it was true; he could imagine Hiroko doing it, taking off again, joining the new diaspora, of humanity across the stars, settling the nearby planets and then on from there. A step out of the cradle. The end of prehistory.
He stared at her profile as she drew patterns on the carpet. This was the last time he would ever see her. For each of them it was as if the other were dying. That was true for a lot of the couples huddled silently together in this room. That people should leave everyone they knew.
And that was the First Hundred. That was why they had all been so strange— they had been willing to leave the people they knew, and go off with ninety-nine strangers. Some of them had been famous scientists, all of them had had parents, presumably. But none of them had had children. And none of them had had spouses, except for the six married couples who had been part of the hundred. Single childless people, middle-aged, ready for a fresh start. That was who they were. And now that was Jackie too: childless, single.
Nirgal looked away, looked back; there she was, flush in the light. Fine-grained gloss of black hair. She glanced up at him, looked back down. Wherever you go, she wrote, there you are.
She looked up at him. What do you think happened to us? she asked.
I don’t know.
They sat looking at the carpet. Through the window, in the cable chamber, an elevator levitated across the floor, hovering upright as it moved over a piste to the cable. It latched on, and a jetway snaked out and enveloped its outer side.
Don’t go, he wanted to say. Don’t go. Don’t leave this world forever. Don’t leave me. Remember the time the Sufis married us? Remember the time we made love by the heat of a volcano? Remember Zygote?
He said nothing. She remembered.
I don’t know.
He reached down and rubbed the nap of the carpet so that he erased the second you. With his forefinger he wrote we.
She smiled wistfully. Against all the years, what was a word?
The loudspeakers announced that the elevator was ready for departure. People stood, saying things in agitated voices. Nirgal found himself standing, facing Jackie. She was looking right at him. He hugged her. That was her body in his arms, as real as rock. Her hair in his nostrils. He breathed in, held his breath. Let her go. She walked off without a word. At the entry to the jetway she looked back once; her face. And then she was gone.
Later he got a print message by radio from deep space. Wherever you go, there we are. It wasn’t true. But it made him feel better. That was what words could do. Okay, he said as he went through his days wandering the planet. Now I am flying to Aldebaran.
The northern polar island had suffered perhaps more deformation than any other landscape on Mars; so Sax had heard, and now walking on a bluff edging the Chasma Borealis River, he could see what they meant. The polar cap had melted by about half, and the massive ice walls of Chasma Borealis were mostly gone. Their departure had been a thaw unlike any seen on Mars since the middle Hesperian, and all that water had rushed every spring and summer down the stratified sand and loess, cutting through them with great force. Declivities in the landscape had turned into deep sand-walled canyons, cutting downstream to the North Sea in very unstable watersheds, channelizing subsequent spring melts and shifting rapidly as slopes collapsed and landslides created short-lived lakes, before the dams were cut through and carried off in their turn, leaving only beach terraces and slide gates.Sax stood looking down on one of these slide gates now, calculating how much water must have accumulated in the lake before the dam had broken. One couldn’t stand too close to the edge of the overlook, the new canyon rims were by no means stable. There were few plants to be seen, only here and there a strip of pale lichen color, providing some relief from the mineral tones. The Borealis River was a wide shallow wash of tumbling glacial milk, some hundred and eighty meters below him. Tributaries cut hanging valleys much less deep, and dumped their loads in opaque waterfalls like spills of thin paint.