So he went back to Pavonis, leaving the group in Sabishii talking things over.Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.
“Good idea,” Sax said. “Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.”
Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldn’t.
He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis— gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.
After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.
Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraforming . . . there was evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was much like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal— then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning.
He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.
• • •
The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of the Tempe Fossa, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.
Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation— not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air out rather than in. “Hmm,” Sax said, startled at the idea.
Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected— not a plant to be seen— just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking the canyons.
They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall, made of bits of colored stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on— big, dusty— the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.
As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveler might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much anymore, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Gray flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around 150 years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments . . . she would soon die.