Blue Mars(263)

Sax had never descended into one of the big calderas before. And even many years spent inside impact craters did not prepare one, he found— for the depth of the chambers, the steepness of the walls, the flatness of the floor. The sheer size of things.

Midafternoon he approached the foot of the northwest arc of the wall. The meeting of wall and floor came up over his horizon, and to his slight relief, the block shelter appeared directly before him; his APS setting had been quite accurate. Not a complicated bit of navigation, but in such an exposed place it was pleasant to be precisely on line. Ever since his experience in the storm so long ago, he had been a bit wary about getting lost. Although there would be no storms up here.

As he approached the hut’s lock doors, a group of people appeared from out of the bottom of a stupendously huge steep gully in the vast broken cliff face, debouching onto the crater floor about a kilometer to the west of the refuge. Four figures, carrying big packs on their backs. Sax stopped, the sound of his breath loud in his helmet: he recognized the last figure immediately. Ann was coming in to resupply. Now he was going to have to think of something to say. And then remember it too.

• • •



Inside the hut Sax unclipped his helmet and took it off, feeling a familiar but most unwelcome tension in his stomach as he did. Every meeting with Ann it got worse. He turned around and waited. Finally Ann came in, and took off her helmet, and saw him. She started as if she were seeing a ghost. “Sax?” she cried.

He nodded. He remembered when they had last met; long ago, on Da Vinci Island; it felt like a previous life. He had lost his tongue.

Ann shook her head, smiled to herself. She crossed the room with an expression he couldn’t read, and held his arms in her two hands, and leaned forward and kissed his cheek gently. When she pulled back, one of her hands continued to clutch his left arm, sliding down to the wrist. She was staring right into him, and her grip was like metal. Sax was speechless again, although he very much wanted to speak. But there was nothing to say, or too much, he couldn’t even tell which it was; his tongue was again paralyzed. That hand on his wrist; it was more incapacitating than any glare or cutting remark had ever been.

A wave seemed to pass through her, and she became somewhat more the Ann he knew, looking at him suspiciously, then with alarm. “Everyone’s okay?”

“Yes yes,” Sax said. “I mean— you heard about Michel?”

“Yes.” Her mouth tightened, for a second she became the black Ann of his dreams. Then another wave passed through her, and she was this new stranger, still clutching his wrist as if trying to snip his hand off. “But now you’re just here to see me.”

“Yes. I wanted to”— he searched wildly for a finish to the sentence— “. . . to talk! Yes— to, to, to, to, to ask you some questions. I’m having some trouble with my memory. I wondered if I, if we could travel up here, and talk. Hike”— he gulped—”or climb. You could show me some of the caldera?”

She was smiling. Again it was some other Ann. “You can climb with me if you want.”

“I’m not a climber.”

“We’ll go up an easy route. Up Wang’s Gully, and over the great circle to north circle, I’ve wanted to get up there while it’s still summer anyway.”

“It’s Ls 200, actually. But I mean, it sounds good.” His heart was beating at about 150 beats a minute.

• • •



Ann had all the equipment they needed, it turned out. The next morning, as they were suiting up, she said to him, “Here, take that off.” Pointing at his wristpad.

“Oh dear,” Sax said. “I— isn’t it really part of the suit’s system?”

It was, but she shook her head. “The suit is autonomous.”

“Semiautonomous, I hope.”

She smiled. “Yes. But no wristpad is necessary. Look— that thing connects you to the whole world. It’s your manacle to spacetime. Today let’s just be in Wang’s Gully. It will be enough.”

It was enough. Wang’s Gully was a broad weathered chute, cutting up through steeper cliff ridges like a giant shattered culvert. Most of the day Sax followed Ann up smaller gullies within the body of this larger one, scrambling up waist-high steps, using his hands most of the time, but seldom with the feeling that a fall would kill him, or do much more than sprain an ankle. “This isn’t as dangerous as I thought it would be,” he said. “Is this the kind of climbing you always do?”

“This isn’t climbing at all.”

“Ah.”

So she went up slopes steeper than this. Taking risks that were, strictly speaking, unjustifiable.