The Martians(51)

It was a project.


The question, then, was where to settle, where to make a home? He was a Provençal, therefore he would settle in Provence. But he had moved around so much over the years that no one place represented home above all the others. But now he wanted one. Now when Maya returned (if she did; on the phone it sounded like she had a lot to keep her there in Russia), he wanted to be able to show her a Michel centered in the moment, happy. At home, and by being at home, justifying after the fact his decision to say no to Mars, to opt instead for the Mediterranean, that cradle of civilization still rocking, the coast's sun-washed rocky headlands still glowing in the light. Seduce the Russian beauty with the warmth of Provence.

A sign appeared, in the form of a family event; Michel's great-uncle died, and left to Michel and his nephew Francis a house on the coast, east of Marseilles. Michel thought of Maya's love for the sea and went to see his nephew. Francis was deeply involved in Arlesian affairs, and was agreeable to selling his share of the house to Michel, trusting that he would remain welcome there, which he certainly would be—Michel's late brother's son was among the most cherished people in Michel's life, a rock of good humor and good sense. And now, bless him, perfectly amenable. He seemed to know what Michel intended.

So the place was Michel's. An unadorned old vacation house on the beach, at the back of a little inlet between Pointe du Déffend and Bandol. A very modest place, in keeping with his great-uncle's character, and with Michel's project; it looked very much like a place Maya would like, beautifully located under plane trees, on a low beach no more than three or four meters higher than the sea, behind a little creek-crossed beach wedged between two small rocky headlands. A line of cypress trees ran up the crease in the hills.

One evening after the place was established as his, after a day spent moving things into it, Michel stood on the sand with his feet in the water, looking in the open door of the old place, then out at the wide horizon of the sea. The Martian sense of lightness began to seep back into him. Oh Provence, oh Earth this most beautiful world, each beach a gift of time and space, pendant on the sea and sparkling in the sun. . . . He kicked at the spent wave washing up the strand, and the water jetted out from his foot, glazed bronze by the horizontal sunlight. The sky under the sun was a bright bar of pewter, on a blazing sea. He said to himself, Here is my home, Maya. Come back and live with me.





Green Mars

Olympus Mons is the tallest mountain in the solar system. It is a broad shield volcano, six hundred kilometers in diameter and twenty-seven kilometers high. Its average slope angles only five degrees above the horizontal, but the circumference of the lava shield is a nearly continuous escarpment, a roughly circular cliff that drops six kilometers to the surrounding forests. The tallest and steepest sections of this encircling escarpment stand near South Buttress, a massive prominence which juts out and divides the south and southeast curves of the cliff (on the map, it's at 15 degrees north, 132 degrees longitude). There, under the east flank of South Buttress, one can stand in the rocky upper edge of the Tharsis forest, and look up at a cliff that is twenty-two thousand feet tall.


Seven times taller than El Capitan, three times as tall as Everest's southwest face, twice as tall as Dhaulagiri wall: four miles of cliff, blocking out the western sky. Can you imagine it? (It's hard.)


"I can't get a sense of the scale!” the Terran Arthur Sternbach shouts, hopping up and down.

Dougal Burke, looking up through binoculars, says, “There's quite a bit of foreshortening from here.”

“No no. That's not it.”


The climbing party has arrived in a caravan of seven field cars. Big green bodies, clear bubbles covering the passenger compartments, fat field tires with their exaggerated treads, chewing dust into the wind: The cars' drivers have parked them in a rough circle, and they sit in the middle of a rocky meadow like a big necklace of paste emeralds.


This battered meadow, with its little stands of bristle-cone pine and noctis juniper, is the traditional base camp for South Buttress climbs. Around the cars are treadmarks, wind-walls made of stacked rock, half-filled latrine trenches, cairn-covered trash dumps, and discarded equipment. As the members of the expedition wander around the camp, stretching and talking, they inspect some of these artifacts. Marie Whillans picks up two ultralight oxygen cylinders stamped with letters that identify them as part of an expedition she climbed with more than a century ago. Grinning, she holds them overhead and shakes them at the cliff, beats them together. “Home again!” Ping! Ping! Ping!


One last field car trundles into the meadow, and the expedition members already in the camp gather around it as it rolls to a halt. Two men get out of the car. They are greeted enthusiastically: “Stephan's here! Roger's here!"