The Martians(106)

However one experiences these knots in time, afterward one can scarcely remember the details of what has been a day of perpetual activity, on the part of both you and the world. Something impedes the memory; there aren't the words for it, perhaps. One ride merges with the next, and at the end of the day, back on the beach in ordinary reality, if you struggle to remember, only certain peak moments come to mind, moments of vision where an image or a movement branded itself in the brain for good, to come back in unexpected moments and unremembered dreams.

So of any particular ride that day I can say little, although the first of the day (like most firsts) stuck better than most. It was a long and eventful ride, like all the rest that followed. I planed across the shoulder, roller-coastering up and down as the wave bulged beneath me, feeling the way my body was both still and moving rapidly, shifting my angles to stay in the right spot. I saw the fast section coming, and stalled back into a tube that lasted for some time; then I saw the tube was collapsing, and shot out of its last little oval gate, skidding back out high on the shoulder and almost off the back side of the swell, so that I did a 360 spinner to fall back into the wave, and nailed a bottom turn to fly on again. The ride went on like that for the whole length of the beach, lasting almost two minutes.

And all the rides were like that. When they ended we found it easier to roll like grunion   onto the shore, spent, and walk back down the beach and swim out at the point, than it would have been to swim out and back south the length of the beach. So we all three got rides and then walked back together, kicking the shallows into fans of spray ahead of us, exclaiming over the rides, and looking around at the sun-drenched day. Then back out for another strenuous fight to get outside, and another wild ride.

The waves got bigger as morning gave way to afternoon, and a wind finally disturbed the glassy surface of the water. It was an offshore wind, however, the surfer's friend; it held the waves up for us by swooshing down-canyon into the afternoon sun, stalling the breaks and whipping spray off their tops, spray that fell like heavy rain onto the back side of the waves. Looking down the line as we bobbed over the crests, we saw some of those brief rainbows in the blown spray that the Hawaiians call ehukai. And late in the day I took off and saw Irishka dropping in ahead of me on the shoulder of the same wave, and after a timeless time I was streaking along deep in the tube behind her, both of us as still as statues and yet flying through a great rolling tube of water swirling up on our left and out over our heads. And I saw the tube close-out begin ahead of Irishka, and both of us turned up and burst back out into the air at the same time, inside the spray flung back by the wind, and I looked over and saw her suspended in the ehukai with her arms out-stretched, like a mermaid trying to fly up a rainbow.





Selected Abstracts from The Journal of Areological Studies

"A Possible Indigenous Nano-organism Found in the Ceraunius Tholus Region.” Vol. 56, 2 November m61. By Forbes, G. N., and Taneev, V. L. et al., Department of Microbiology, Acheron Institute for Areological Studies.

SNC Crater, at the foot of the north flank of Ceraunius Tholus, is well supported as the source of the SNC meteorites found on Earth (cf. Clayborne and Frazier, m4d). Drillings were made to a depth of 1 km under the north flank of Ceraunius Tholus, in locations where the ground was 10–50 microkelvins warmer than the flank median. Most drill sites were within 4 kms of the prominent lava channel running from the Ceraunius caldera down into SNC Crater. Five drill shafts on the west side of the laval channel (see map 1) encountered the collapsed remains of a thermal spring, which contained ice and pockets of liquid water in the ml. range. The walls of these fractures exhibited ovoid forms, all under 20 nanometers long, resembling the structures found in SNC meteorite ALH 84001. No metabolic activity was detected in the Ceraunius forms, but electron microscopy reveals what appear to be cell walls, and RNA protein fragments within the forms. PCR was preformed on the samples using primers specific for ribosomal RNA, and the products were sequenced, revealing a magnetotactic sequence similar to Terran marine methanogens. Some silicates in the collapsed thermal vent near the recovered material also exhibit stratified spongiform structures highly stromatolitic in appearance, the strata two magnitudes finer than that observed in Terran samples. It is suggested that these are stromatolites, and that the ovoid forms are archaea or nanobacteria, either dormant or slowed metabolically in response to a long-failing environment.

"Terran Origins Possible in the Ceraunius Basement Samples.” Vol. 57, 1 January m62. By Claparede, R., and Borazjani, H. X. et al., Department of Ecology, University of Mars, Burroughs.