Blue Mars(262)
OLYMPUS MONS CALDERA
• • •
“I’m looking for Ann Clayborne,” Sax said to the drivers, who were rapt with the view. “Do you know where I could find her?”
“You don’t know where she is?” one asked.
“I’ve heard she’s climbing in the Olympus caldera.”
“Does she know you’re looking for her?”
“No. She’s not answering her calls.”
“Does she know you?”
“Oh yes. We’re old— friends.”
“And who are you?”
“Sax Russell.”
They stared at him. One said, “Old friends, eh?”
Her companion elbowed her.
They called the spot they were at Three Walls, sensibly enough. Directly under their car, on a little slump terrace, there was an elevator station. Sax peered at it through binoculars: outer-lock doors, reinforced roofing— it could have been a structure from the early years. The elevator was the only way down into this part of the caldera, if you did not care to rappel.
“Ann resupplies at Marion Station,” the elbower finally said, shocking her codriver. “See it, there? That square dot, where the lava channels from the main floor cut down into South Circle.”
This was on the opposite rim of the southernmost circle, which Sax’s map named “6.” Sax had trouble making out any square dot, even with the binocular’s magnification. But then he saw it— a tiny block just a bit too regular to be natural, although it had been painted the rusty gray of the local basalt. “I see it. How do I get there?”
“Take the elevator down, then walk on over.”
• • •
So he showed the elevator attendants the pass the elbower had given him, and took the long elevator ride down the wall of South Circle. The elevator ran on a track affixed to the cliffside, and it had windows; it was like dropping in a helicopter, or coming down the last bit of the space elevator over Sheffield. By the time he got down to the caldera floor it was late afternoon; he checked into the spartan lodge at the bottom and ate a big leisurely dinner, thinking from time to time what he might say to Ann. It came to him, slowly: a coherent and it seemed convincing self-explication, or confession, or cri de coeur, piece by piece. Then to his great chagrin he blanked the whole thing. And there he was on the floor of a volcanic caldera, the blinkered circle of sky dark and starry above. On Olympus. Searching for Ann Clayborne, with nothing to say to her. Very chagrined.
The next morning after breakfast, he pushed his way into a walker. Although the materials were improved, the elastic fabric necessarily clasped the limbs and torso just as tightly as their old suits had. Strange how the kinetics of it evoked trains of thought, flashes of memory: the look of Underhill as they were building the foursquare dome; even a kind of somatic epiphany, which seemed to be a recollection of his very first walk out of the landing craft, with the surprise of the close horizons and the textured pink of the sky. Context and memory, again.
He walked out across the floor of South Circle. This morning the sky was a dark indigo very near black— marine blue, the chart said, an odd choice of name considering how dark it was. Many stars were visible. The horizon was a round cliff, rising on all sides: the southern semicircle three kilometers tall, the northeast quadrant two kilometers, the northwest quadrant one kilometer only, and shattered. Astonishing sight, actually— the roundness of it. Thermodynamics of cooling rock in magma chambers, magma throats. Out in the middle the encircling walls were a dizzying sight. The walls looked much the same height in all directions, a textbook example of foreshortening’s ability to telescope the perception of vertical distances.
He tromped on at a steady pace. The caldera floor was fairly smooth, pocked by occasional lava bombs and late meteor hits, and curving shallow grabens. Some of these had to be circumvented, a beautifully apt word in this case, as they were circumvents, he was circumventing. But for the most part he could tramp directly toward the broken spill of cliff in the northwest quadrant of the caldera.
It took six hours of steady walking to cross the floor of South Circle, which was less than ten percent of the caldera complex’s total area— all the rest of which was invisible to him for the entire hike. No sign of life, nor of any disturbance to the caldera floor or walls; the atmosphere was visibly thin, everything equally sharp to the eye, right around the primal ten millibars, he judged. The untouched nature of things made him feel uncertain about even his bootprints, and he tried to step on hard rock, and avoid dust patches. It was strangely satisfying to see the primal landscape— quite reddish— though the color was mostly an overlay on dark basalt. His color chart was not good at odd mixes.