Red Mars(233)

He regained his balance, lunged forward and seized her by both shoulders, shook her. She had never noticed how powerful his hands were. “Because,” he shouted, and paused to lick his lips and catch his breath—”Because—” And his eyes bugged out, and his face darkened even further, as if a thousand sentences had all jammed in his throat at once, this her mild Simon!— and then he gave up on saying it, and roared, and shook her in his arms, shouting “Because! Because! Because!”





Snow fell. Though it was early morning, it was dim. Wind whipped across the chaos, swirling the spindrift over the shattered land. Boulders as big as city blocks lay jumbled against each other, and the landscape was broken in a million little cliffs, holes, mesas, ridges, peaks— also many peculiar spikes and towers and balancing rocks, held in place by kami alone. All the steep or vertical stone in this chaotic terrain was still black, white flatter areas were now white with snow, so that the landscape was a densely variegated black and white, all swirling in and out of visibility as billows and veils of snow gusted by.Then the snow stopped. The wind died. The black verticals and white horizontals gave the world a definition it didn’t usually have. In the overcast there were no shadows, and the landscape glowed as if light were pouring up through the snow onto the bottoms of the dusky low clouds. Everything was sharp-edged and distinct, as if captured in glass.

Over the horizon appeared moving figures. One by one they appeared, until there were seven of them, in a ragged line. They moved slowly, their shoulders slumped, their helmets bent forward. They moved as if they had no destination. The two in front looked up from time to time, but they never paused, or pointed the way.

The western clouds gleamed like mother-of-pearl, the only sign on that dull day that the sun was lowering. The figures walked up a long ridge that emerged from the blasted landscape. From the upper slopes of the ridge one could see a long way in every direction.

It took a long time for the figures to climb the ridge. Finally they approached a peak, a bouldery knob where the ridge began to descend again. At the summit of the knob was a curious thing: a big flat-bottomed boulder standing high in the air, balanced on six slender stone pillars.

The seven figures approached this megalith. They stopped and regarded it for a time, under the dark bruised clouds. Then they stepped between the pillars, and under the boulder. It stood well over them, a massive roof. The circular floor beneath it was flat, made of cut polished stone.

One of the figures walked to a far column, and touched it with a finger. The others looked out at the motionless snowy chaos. A trapdoor slid open in the floor. The figures went to it, and one by one stepped down into the ridge.

When they were gone the six slender columns began to sink into the floor, and the great dolmen that they held aloft descended on them, until the columns disappeared and the great rock rested on the ridge, returned to its ancient existence as an impressive peak boulder. Beyond the clouds the sun had set, and the light leaked out of the empty land.





It was Maya who kept them going, Maya who drove them into heading south. The refuge under the dolmen was just that, a sequence of small caves in the ridge, stocked with emergency rations and gas supplies, but otherwise empty. After a few days to rest and catch up on sleep and food, Maya began to complain. It was no way to live, she said, it was no more than a kind of death-in-life; where were all the others? Where was Hiroko? Michel and Kasei explained again that the hidden colony was in the south, that they had moved down there long ago. All right, Maya said, then we will go south too. There were other boulder cars in the refuge’s garage, they could caravan down by night, she said, and out of the canyons they would be safe. The refuge was no longer self-sustaining in any case, its supplies were large but limited, so they would have to go sooner or later. Best to go while the dust storm would still provide some cover for the trip. Best to go.So she drove the tired little group to action. They loaded two cars, and took off again, south across the great rumpled plains of Margaritifer Sinus. Free from the restrictions of Marineris, they made hundreds of kilometers per night, and slept through the days, and in a nearly speechless journey of several days they passed between Argyre and Hellas, through the endless craterland of the southern highlands. It began to seem that they had never done anything but drive onward in their little cars, that the journey would last forever.

But then one night they drove onto the layered terrain of the polar region, and near dawn the horizon ahead gleamed, and then became a dim white bar, which thickened and thickened as they proceeded, until it was a white cliff standing before them. The southern polar cap, evidently. Michel and Kasei took over the two drivers’ seats, and conferred over the intercom in low voices. They drove on until they reached the white cliff, and they continued to drive straight at it, until they were on frozen crusted sand that was under the bulk of the ice. The cliff was an enormous overhang, like a wave stopped in the moment it was about to crash onto a beach. There was a tunnel cut into the ice at the bottom of the cliff, and a figure in a walker appeared and directed the two rovers into it.