“I know that.”
“Arthur and Hans are scheduled to come down soon. Meanwhile, shut up.”
And the next day Arthur and Hans put up three hundred meters of fixed rope and top the tuff band. When Hans announces this on the sunset radio call (Roger can just hear Arthur in the background, saying in falsetto, “So there! So there!"), a little smile twitches Eileen's mouth before she congratulates them and gets on to the orders for the next day. Roger nods thoughtfully.
After they get above Hans and Arthur's band, the slope lies back a bit and progress is more rapid, even in the continuous winds. The cliff is like a wall of immense irregular bricks which have been shoved back, so that each brick is set a bit behind the one below it. This great jumble of blocks and ledges and ramps makes for easy zigzag climbing, and good campsites. One day, Roger stops for a break and looks around. He is portering a load from middle camp to high camp, and has gotten ahead of Eileen. No one in sight. There is a cloud layer far below them, a gray rumpled blanket covering the whole world. Then there is the vertical realm of the cliff face, a crazed jumble of a block wall, which extends up to a very smooth, almost featureless cloud layer above them. Only the finest ripples, like waves, mar this gray ceiling. Floor and ceiling of cloud, wall of rock: It seems for a moment that this climb will go on eternally; it is a whole world, an infinite wall that they will climb forever. When has it been any different? Sandwiched like this, between cloud and cloud, it is easy not to believe in the past; perhaps the planet is a cliff, endlessly varied, endlessly challenging.
Then in the corner of Roger's eye, a flash of color. He looks at the deep crack between the ledge he is standing on and the next vertical block. In the twisted ice nestles a patch of moss campion. Cushion of black-green moss, a circle of perhaps a hundred tiny dark pink flowers on it. After three weeks of almost unrelieved black and white, the color seems to burst out of the flowers and explode in his eyes. Such a dark, intense pink! Roger crouches to inspect them. The moss is very finely textured, and appears to be growing directly out of the rock, although no doubt there is some sand back in the crack. A seed or a scrap of moss must have been blown off the shield plateau and down the cliff, to take root here.
Roger stands, looks around again. Eileen has joined him, and she observes him sharply. He pulls his mask to the side. “Look at that,” he says. “You can't get away from it anywhere.”
She shakes her head. Pulls her mask down. “It's not the new landscape you hate so much,” she says. “I saw the way you were looking at that plant. And it's just a plant after all, doing its best to live. No, I think you've made a displacement. You use topography as a symbol. It's not the landscape, it's the people. It's the history we've made that you dislike. The terraforming is just part of it—the visible sign of a history of exploitation.”
Roger considers it. “We're just another Terran colony, you mean. Colonialism—”
“Yes. That's what you hate, see? Not topography, but history. Because the terraforming, so far, is a waste. It's not being done for any good purpose.”
Uneasily Roger shakes his head. He has not thought of it like that, and isn't sure he agrees: It's the land that has suffered the most, after all. Although—
Eileen continues, “There's some good in that, if you think about it. Because the landscape isn't going to change back, ever. But history—history must change, by definition.”
And she takes the lead, leaving Roger to stare up after her.
The winds die in the middle of the night. The cessation of tent noise wakes Roger up. It is bitterly cold, even in his bag. It takes him a while to figure out what woke him; his oxygen is still hissing softly in his face. When he figures out what did it, he smiles. Checking his watch, he finds it is almost time for the mirror dawn. He sits up and turns on the stove for tea. Eileen stirs in her sleeping bag, opens one eye. Roger likes watching her wake; even behind the mask, the shift from vulnerable girl to expedition leader is easy to see. It's like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny: Coming to consciousness in the morning recapitulates maturation in life. Now all he needs is the Greek terminology, and he will have a scientific truth. Eileen pulls off her oxygen mask and rolls onto one elbow.
“Want some tea?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“It'll be a moment.”
“Hold the stove steady—I've got to pee.” She stands in the tent doorway, sticks a plastic urine scoop into the open fly of her pants, urinates out the door. “Wow! Sure is cold out. And clear! I can see stars.”
“Great. The wind's died too, see?”