The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “No.”

  “Over there. The head tuft is black. Pretty well camouflaged.”

  “You're kidding. Why there it is!”

  “They like these rocks. Blood pheasants, redstarts, accentors—more of them than we ever see.”

  Later: “Look there!”

  “Where?”

  Roger finds himself peering in the direction Hans has pointed.

  “On the tall rock, see? The killer rabbit, they call it. A joke.”

  “Oh, a joke,” Arthur says. Roger makes a revision in his estimation of the Terran's subtlety. “A rabbit with fangs?”

  “Not exactly. Actually there's very little hare in it—more lemming and pika, but with some important traits of the lynx added. A very successful creature. Some of Harry Whitebook's work. He's very good.”

  “So some of your biological designers become famous?”

  “Oh yes. Very much so. Whitebook is one of the best of the mammal designers. And we seem to have a special love for mammals, don't we?”

  “I know I do.” Several puffing steps up waist-high blocks. “I just don't understand how they can survive the cold!”

  “Well, it's not that cold down here, of course. This is the top of the alpine zone, in effect. The adaptations for cold are usually taken directly from arctic and antarctic creatures. Many seals can cut the circulation to their extremities when necessary to preserve heat. And they have a sort of antifreeze in their blood—a glycoprotein that binds to the surface of ice crystals and stops their growth—stops the accumulation of salts. Wonderful stuff. Some of these mammals can freeze limbs and thaw them without damage to the flesh.”

  “You're kidding,” Roger whispers as he hikes.

  “You're kidding!”

  “And these adaptations are part of most Martian mammals. Look! There's a little foxbear. That's Whitebook again.”

  Roger stops following them. No more Mars.

  Black night. The six big box tents of Camp One glow like a string of lamps at the foot of the cliff. Roger, out in the rubble relieving himself, looks back at them curiously. It is, he thinks, an odd group. People from all over Mars (and a Terran). Only climbing in common. The lead climbers are funny. Dougal sometimes seems a mute, always watching from a corner, never speaking. A self-enclosed system. Marie speaks for both of them, perhaps. Roger can hear her broad Midlands voice now, hoarse with drink, telling someone how to climb the face. She's happy to be here.

  Inside Eileen's tent he finds a heated discussion in progress. Marie Whillans says, “Look, Dougal and I have already gone nearly a thousand meters up these so-called blank slabs. There are cracks all over the place."

  “As far as you've gone there are,” Eileen says. “But the true slabs are supposed to be above those first cracks. Four hundred meters of smooth rock. We could be stopped outright.”

  “So we could, but there's got to be some cracks. And we can bolt our way up any really blank sections if we have to. That way we'd have a completely new route.”

  Hans Boethe shakes his head. “Putting bolts in some of this basalt won't be any fun.”

  “I hate bolts anyway,” Eileen says. “The point is, if we take the Gully up to the first amphitheater, we know we've got a good route to the top, and all the upper pitches will be new.”

  Stephan nods, Hans nods, Frances nods. Roger sips a cup of tea and watches with interest. Marie says, “The point is, what kind of climb do we want to have?”

  “We want to get to the top,” Eileen says, glancing at Stephan, who nods. Stephan has paid for most of this expedition, and so in a sense it's his choice.

  “Wait a second,” Marie says sharply, eyeing each of them in turn. “That's not what it's about. We're not here just to repeat the Gully route, are we?” Her voice is accusing and no one meets her eye. “That wasn't what I was told, anyway. I was told we were taking a new route, and that's why I'm here.”

  “It will inevitably be a new route,” Eileen says. “You know that, Marie. We trend right at the top of the Gully and we're on new ground. We only avoid the blank slabs that flank the Gully to the right!”

  “I think we should try those slabs,” Marie says, “because Dougal and I have found they'll go.” She argues for this route, and Eileen listens patiently. Stephan looks worried; Marie is persuasive, and it seems possible that her forceful personality will overwhelm Eileen's, leading them onto a route rumored to be impossible.

  But Eileen says, “Climbing any route on this wall with only eleven people will be doing something. Look, we're only talking about the first twelve hundred meters of the climb. Above that we'll trend to the right whenever possible, and be on new ground above those slabs.”

  “I don't believe in the slabs,” Marie says. And after a few more exchanges: “Well, that being the case, I don't see why you sent Dougal and me up the slabs these last few days.”

  “I didn't send you up,” Eileen says, a bit exasperated. “You two choose the leads, you know that. But this is a fundamental choice, and I think the Gully is the opening pitch we came to make. We do want to make the top, you know. Not just of the wall, but the whole mountain.”

  After more discussion Marie shrugs. “Okay. You're the boss. But it makes me wonder. Why are we making this climb?”

  On the way to his tent Roger remembers the question. Breathing the cold air, he looks around. In Camp One the world seems a place creased and folded: horizontal half stretching away into darkness—back down into the dead past; vertical half stretching up to the stars—into the unknown. Only two tents lit from within now, two soft blobs of yellow in the gloom. Roger stops outside his darkened tent to look at them, feeling they say something to him; the eyes of the mountain, looking. Why is he making this climb?

  Up the Great Gully they go. Dougal and Marie lead pitch after pitch up the rough unstable rock, hammering in pitons and leaving fixed ropes behind. The ropes tend to stay in close to the right wall of the Gully, to avoid the falling rock that shoots down it all too frequently. The other climbers follow from pitch to pitch in teams of two and three. As they ascend they can see the four Sherpas, tiny animals winding their way down the talus again.

  Roger has been teamed with Hans for the day. They clip themselves onto the fixed rope with jumars, metal clasps that will slide up the rope but not down. They are carrying heavy packs up to Camp Two, and even though the slope of the Gully is only fifty degrees here, and its dark rock knobby and easy to climb, they both find the work hard. The sun is hot and their faces are quickly bathed with sweat.

  “I'm not in the best of shape for this,” Hans puffs. “It may take me a few days to get my rhythm.”

  “Don't worry about me,” Roger says. “We're going about as fast as I like.”

  “I wonder how far above Camp Two is?”

  “Not too far. Too many carries to make, without the power reels.”

  “I look forward to the vertical pitches. If we're going to climb we might as well climb, eh?”

  “Especially since the power reels will pull our stuff up.”

  “Yes.” Breathless laugh.

  Steep, deep ravine. Medium gray andesite, an igneous volcanic rock, speckled with crystals of dark minerals, knobbed with hard protrusions. Pitons hammered into small vertical cracks.

  Midday they meet with Eileen, Arthur, and Frances, the team above, who are sitting on a narrow ledge in the wall of the Gully, jamming down a quick lunch. The sun is nearly overhead; in an hour they will lose it. Roger and Hans are happy to sit on the ledge. Lunch is lemonade and several handfuls of the trail mix Frances has made. The others discuss the Gully and the day's climb, and Roger eats and listens. He becomes aware of Eileen sitting on the ledge beside him. Her feet kick the wall casually, and the quadriceps on the tops of her thighs, big exaggerated muscles, bunch and relax, bunch and relax, stretching the fabric of her climbing pants. She is following Hans's description of the rock and appears not to notice Roger's discreet observation. Could she really not remember him? Roger breathes
a soundless sigh. It's been a long life. And all his effort—

  “Let's get up to Camp Two,” Eileen says, looking at him curiously.

  Early in the afternoon they find Marie and Dougal on a broad shelf sticking out of the steep slabs to the right of the Great Gully. Here they make Camp Two: four large box tents, made to withstand rockfalls of some severity.

  Now the verticality of the escarpment becomes something immediate and tangible. They can only see the wall for a few hundred meters above them; beyond that it is hidden, except up the steep trough in the wall that is the Great Gully, etching the vertical face just next to their shelf. Looking up this giant couloir, they can see more of the endless cliff above them, dark and foreboding against the pink sky.

  Roger spends an hour of the cold afternoon sitting at the Gully edge of their shelf, looking up. They have a long way to go; his hands in their thick pile mittens are sore, his shoulders and legs tired, his feet cold. He wishes more than anything that he could shake the depression that fills him; but thinking that only makes it worse.

  Eileen Monday sits beside him. “So we were friends once, you say.”

  “Yeah.” Roger looks her in the eye. “You don't remember at all?”

  “It was a long time ago.”

  “Yes. I was twenty-six, you were about twenty-three.”

  “You really remember that long ago?”

  “Some of it, yes.”

  Eileen shakes her head. She has good features, Roger thinks. Fine eyes. “I wish I did. But as I get older my memory gets even worse. Now I think for every year I live I lose at least that much in memories. It's sad. My whole life before I was seventy or eighty—all gone.” She sighs. “I know most people are like that, though. You're an exception.”

  “Some things seem to be stuck in my mind for good,” says Roger. He can't believe it isn't true of everyone! But that's what they all say. It makes him melancholy. Why live at all? “Have you hit your three hundredth yet?”

  “In a few months. But—come on. Tell me about it.”

  “Well . . . you were a student. Or just finishing school, I can't remember.” She smiles. “Anyway, I was guiding groups in hikes through the little canyons north of here, and you were part of a group. We started up a—a little affair, as I recall. And saw each other for a while after we got back. But you were in Burroughs, and I kept guiding tours, and—well, you know. It didn't last.”

  Eileen smiles again. “So I went on to become a mountain guide—which I've been for as long as I can remember—while you moved to the city and got into politics!” She laughs and Roger smiles wryly. “Obviously we must have impressed each other!”

  “Oh yes, yes.” Roger laughs shortly. “Searching for each other.” He grins lopsidedly, feeling bitter. “Actually I only got into government about forty years ago. Too late, as it turned out.”

  Silence for a while. “So that's what's got you down,” Eileen says.

  “What?”

  “The Red Mars party—out of favor.”

  “Out of existence, you mean.”

  She considers it. “I never could understand the Red point of view—”

  “Few could, apparently.”

  “—until I read something in Heidegger, where he makes a distinction between earth and world. Do you know it?”

  “No.”

  “Earth is that blank materiality of nature that exists before us and more or less sets the parameters on what we can do. Sartre called it facticity. World then is the human realm, the social and historical dimension that gives earth its meaning.”

  Roger nods his understanding.

  “So—the Reds, as I understood it, were defending earth. Or planet, in this case. Trying to protect the primacy of planet over world—or at least to hold a balance between them.”

  “Yes,” Roger says. “But the world inundated the planet.”

  “True. But when you look at it that way, you can see what you were trying to do was hopeless. A political party is inevitably part of the world, and everything it does will be worldly. And we only know the materiality of nature through our human senses—so really it is only world that we know directly.”

  “I'm not sure about that,” Roger protests. “I mean, it's logical, and usually I'm sure it's true—but sometimes—” He smacks the rock of their shelf with his mittened hand. “You know?”

  Eileen touches the mitten. “World.”

  Roger lifts his lip, irritated. He pulls the mitten off and hits the cold rock again. “Planet.”

  Eileen frowns thoughtfully. “Maybe.”

  And there was hope, Roger thought fiercely. We could have lived on this planet the way we found it, and confronted the materiality of earth every day of our lives. We could have.

  Eileen is called away to help with the arrangement of the next day's loads. “We'll continue this later,” she says, touching Roger lightly on the shoulder.

  He is left alone over the Gully. Moss discolors the stone under him, and grows in the cracks in the couloir. Swallows shoot down the Gully like falling stones, hunting for cliff mice or warm-blooded lizards. To the east, beyond the great shadow of the volcano, dark forests mark the sunlit Tharsis Bulge like blobs of lichen. Nowhere can one see Mars, just Mars, the primal Mars. They forgot what it was like to walk out onto the empty face of old Mars.

  Once he walked out onto the great northern desert of Vastitas Borealis. All of Mars's geographical features are immense by Terran scales, and just as the southern hemisphere is marked by huge canyons, basins, volcanoes, and craters, the northern hemisphere is strangely, hugely smooth; it had, in its highest latitudes, surrounding what at that time was the polar ice cap (it is now a small sea), a giant planet-ringing band of empty flat layered sand. Endless desert. And one morning before dawn Roger walked out of his campsite and hiked a few kilometers over the broad wavelike humps of the windswept sand, and sat down on the crest of one of the highest waves. There was no sound but his breath, his blood pounding in his ears, and the slight hiss of the oxygen regulator in his helmet. Light leaked over the horizon to the southeast and began to bring out the sand's dull ocher, flecked with dark red. When the sun cracked the horizon the light bounced off the short steep faces of the dunes and filled everything. He breathed the gold air, and something in him bloomed, he became a flower in a garden of rock, the sole consciousness of the desert, its focus, its soul. Nothing he had ever felt before came close to matching this exaltation, the awareness of brilliant light, of illimitable expanse, of the glossy, intense presence of material things. He returned to his camp late in the day, feeling that a moment had passed—or an age. He was nineteen years old, and his life was changed.

  Just being able to remember that incident, after two hundred and eighty-odd years have passed, makes Roger a freak. Less than one percent of the population share this gift (or curse) of powerful, long-term recollection. These days Roger feels the ability like a weight—as if each year were a stone, so that now he carries the crushing burden of three hundred red stones everywhere he goes. He feels angry that others forget. Perhaps it is envious anger.

  Thinking of that walk when he was nineteen reminds Roger of a time years later, when he read Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick. The little black cabin boy Pip (and Roger had always identified himself with Pip in Great Expectations), “the most insignificant of the Pequod's crew,” fell overboard while his whaleboat was being pulled by a harpooned whale. The boat flew onward, leaving Pip alone. “The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?” Abandoned on the ocean alone, Pip grew more and more terrified, until “By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little Negro went about the deck an idiot.... The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul."

  Reading that made Roger feel strange. Someone had lived an hour very like his day on the polar desert, out in the infinite void of nature. And what had seemed to Roger rapture had driven Pip
insane.

  It occurred to him, as he stared at the thick book, that perhaps he had gone mad as well. Terror, rapture—these extremities of emotion circumnavigate the spirit and approach each other again, though departing from the origin of perception in opposite directions. Mad with solitude, ecstatic with Being—the two parts of the recognition of self sit oddly together. But Pip's insanity only shocked Roger into a sharper love for his own experience of the “heartless immensity.” He wanted it; and suddenly all the farthest, most desolate reaches of Mars became his special joy. He woke at night and sat up to watch dawns, a flower in a garden of rock. And wandered days like John in the desert, seeing God in stones and frost and skies that arched like sheets of fire.

  Now he sits on a ledge on a cliff on a planet no longer his, looking down on plains and canyons peppered with life, life created by the human mind. It is as if the mind has extruded itself into the landscape: each flower an idea, each lizard a thought.... There is no heartless immensity left, no mirror of the void for the self to see itself in. Only the self, everywhere, in everything, suffocating the planet, cloying all sensation, imprisoning every being.

  Perhaps this perception itself was a sort of madness.

  The sky itself, after all (he thought) provides a heartless immensity beyond the imagination's ability to comprehend, night after night.

  Perhaps he needed an immensity he could imagine the extent of, to feel the perception of it as ecstasy rather than terror.

  Roger sits remembering his life and thinking over these matters, as he tosses granules of rock—little pips—over the ledge into space.

  To his surprise, Eileen rejoins him. She sits on her heels, recites quietly,

  "I love all waste

  And solitary places, where we taste

  The pleasure of believing what we see

  Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be."

  “Who said that?” Roger asks, startled by the lines.

  “Shelley,” she replies. “In 'Julian and Maddalo.'”

  “I like it.”