The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “Yeah.” Stephan laughs. “Pretty invigorating out there all right.”

  “The Scots,” Arthur says, giggling away. “Martian Scots, no less. I can't believe it.”

  “It's not just the Scots are strange,” Roger points out. “What about you, Arthur? I notice you getting quite a giggle out of all this yourself, eh?”

  “Oh yeah, yeah,” Arthur says. “I'm having a good time. Aren't you? I'll tell you, once we got on the oxygen I started feeling great. Before that it wasn't so easy. The air seemed really thin, I mean really thin. Elevations here don't mean anything to me, I mean you haven't got a proper sea level so what does elevation really mean, right? But your air is like nothing, man. So when we got on the bottle I could really feel the difference. A lifesaver. And then there's the gravity! Now that's wonderful. What is it, two-fifths of a gee? Practically nothing! You might as well be on the moon! As soon as I learned to balance properly, I really started to have a good time. Felt like Superman. On this planet it just isn't that hard to go uphill, that's all.” He laughs, toasts the other two with tea, “On Mars, I'm Superman.”

  High-altitude pulmonary edema works fast, and one either succumbs or recovers very quickly. When Stephan's lungs are completely clear Hans orders him to keep on maximum oxygen intake, and he is given a light load and ordered to take it slow and only move up from one low camp to the next. At this point, Roger thinks, it would be more difficult to get him back down the cliff than keep on going to the top—a common enough climbing situation, but one that no one talks about. Stephan complains about his reduced role, but agrees to go along with it. For his first few days back out Roger teams with him and keeps a sharp eye on him. But Stephan climbs fairly rapidly, and only complains about Roger's solicitousness, and at the cold winds. Roger concludes he is all right.

  Back to portering. Hans and Arthur are out in the lead, having a terrible time with a broad, steep rampart that they are trying to force directly. For a couple of days they are all stalled as the camps are stocked, and the lead party cannot make more than fifty or seventy-five meters a day. One evening on the radio while Hans describes a difficult overhang, Marie gets on the horn and starts in. “Well, I don't know what's going on up there, but with Stephan sucking down the oxygen and you all making centimeters a day we're going to end up stuck on this damn cliff for good! What? I don't give a fuck what your troubles are, mate—if you can't make the lead you should bloody well get down and let somebody on there who can!"

  “This is a big tuff band,” Arthur says defensively. “Once we get above this it's more or less a straight shot to the top—”

  “If you've got any bloody oxygen it is! Look what is this, a co-op? I didn't join a fucking co-op!”

  Roger watches Eileen closely. She is listening carefully to the exchange, her finger on the intercom, a deep furrow between her eyes, as if she is concentrating. He is surprised she has not already intervened. But she lets Marie get off another couple of blasts, and only then does she cut in. “Marie! Marie! Eileen here—”

  “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?”

  Eileen crawls back into her bag. They brew their tea with great seriousness, as if mixing delicate elixirs. Roger watches her drink.

  “Do you really not remember us from before?” he asks.

  “Nooo. . . .” she says slowly. “We were in our twenties, right? No, the first years I really remember are from my fifties, when I was training up in the caldera. Wall climbs, kind of like th
is, actually.” She sips. “But tell me about us.”

  Roger shrugs. “It doesn't matter.”

  “It must be odd. To remember when the rest don't.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I was probably awful at that age.”

  “No no. You were an English major. You were fine.”

  She laughs. “Hard to believe. Unless I've gone down-hill since.”

  “No, not at all. You sure couldn't have done all this back then.”

  “I believe that. Getting half an expedition strung out all over a cliff, people sick—”

  “No no. You're doing fine.”

  She shakes her head. “You can't pretend this climb has gone well. I remember that much.”

  “What hasn't gone well hasn't been your fault, as you must admit. In fact, given what has happened, we're doing very well, I think. And that's mostly your doing. Not easy with Frances and Stephan, and the storm, and Marie.”

  “Marie!”

  They laugh. “And this storm,” Roger says. “That night climb we did, getting Stephan down!” He sips his tea.

  “That was a wild one,” Eileen agrees.

  Roger nods. They have that. He gets up to pee, letting in a blast of intensely cold air. “My God that's cold! What's the temperature?”

  “Sixty below, outside.”

  “Oh. No wonder. I guess that cloud cover was doing us some good.” Outside it is still dark, and the ice-bearded cliff face gleams whitely under the stars.

  “I like the way you lead us,” Roger says. “It's a very light touch, but you still have things under control.” He zips the tent door closed and hustles back into his bag.

  “More tea?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Here—roll back here, you'll warm up faster, and I could use the insulation myself.”

  Roger nods, shivering, and rolls his bag into the back side of hers, so they are both on one elbow, spooned together.

  They sip tea and talk. Roger warms up, stops shivering. Pleasure of empty bladder, of contact with her. They finish the tea and doze for a bit in the warmth. Keeping the oxygen masks off prevents them from falling into a deep sleep. “Mirrors'll be up soon.” “Yeah.” “Here—move over a bit.” Roger remembers when they were lovers, so long ago. Previous lifetime. She was the city dweller then, he the canyon crawler. Now . . . now all the comfort, warmth, and contact have given him an erection. He wonders if she can feel it through the two bags. Probably not. Hmmm. He remembers suddenly—the first time they made love was in a tent. He went to bed, and she came right into his little cubicle of the communal tent and jumped him! Remembering it does nothing to make his erection go away. He wonders if he can get away with a similar sort of act here. They are definitely pressed together hard. All that climbing together: Eileen pairs the climbing teams, so she must have enjoyed it too. And climbing together has that sort of dancelike teamwork—boulder ballet; and the constant kinetic juxtaposition, the felt relationship of the rope, has a certain sensuousness to it. It is a physical partnership, without a doubt. Of course all that can be true and climbing remain a profoundly nonsexual relationship—there are certainly other things to think about. But now . . .

  Now she is dozing again. He thinks about her climbing, her leadership. The things she said to him back down in the first camps, when he was so depressed. A sort of teacher, really.

  Thoughts of that lead him to memories of his past, of the failed work. For the first time in many days his memory presents him with the usual parade of the past, the theater of ghosts. How can he ever assume such a long and fruitless history? Is it even possible?

  Mercifully the tea's warmth, and the mere fact of lying prone, have their way with him, and he dozes off.

  The day dawns. Sky like a sheet of old paper, the sun a big bronze coin below them to the east. The sun! Wonderful to see sunlight, shadows. In the light the cliff face looks sloped back an extra few degrees, and it seems there is an end to it up there. Eileen and Roger are in the middle camp, and after ferrying a load to the high camp they follow the rope's zigzag course up the narrow ledges. The fine, easy face, the sunlight, the dawn's talk, the plains of Tharsis so far below: All conspire to please Roger. He is climbing more strongly than ever, hopping up the ledges, enjoying the variety of forms exhibited by the rock. Such a beauty to rough plated angular broken rock.

  The face continues to lie back, and at the top of one ledge ramp they find themselves at the bottom of a giant amphitheater filled with snow. And the top of this white half bowl is . . . sky. The top of the escarpment, apparently. Certainly nothing but sky above it. Dougal and Marie are about to start up it, and Roger joins them. Eileen stays behind to collect the others.

  The technically difficult sections of the climb are done. The upper edge of the immense cliff has been rounded off by wind erosion, broken into alternating ridges and ravines. There they stand at the bottom of a big bowl broken in half; at bottom the slope is about forty degrees, and it curves up to a final wall that is perhaps sixty degrees. But the bottom of the bowl is filled with deep drifts of light, dry, granular snow, sheeted with a hard layer of windslab. Crossing the stuff is hard work, and they trade the lead often. The leader crashes through the windslab and sinks to his or her knees, or even to the waist, and thereafter has to lift a foot over the windslab above, crash through again, and in that way struggle uphill through the snow. They secure the rope with deadmen—empty oxygen tanks in this case, buried deep in the snow. Roger takes his lead, and quickly begins to sweat under the glare of the sun. Each step is an effort, worse than the step before because of the increasing angle of the slope. After ten minutes he gives the lead back to Marie. Twenty minutes later it is his turn again—the other two can endure it no longer than he can. The steepness of the final wall is actually a relief, as there is less snow.

  They stop to strap crampons on their boots. Starting again, they fall into a slow steady rhythm. Kick, step, kick, step, kick, step. Glare of light breaking on snow. The taste of sweat.

  When Roger's tenth turn in the lead comes, he sees that he is within striking distance of the top of the wall, and he resolves not to give up the lead again. The snow is soft under windslab, and he must lean up, dig away a bit with his ice axe, swim up to the new foothold, dig away some more—on and on, gasping into the oxygen mask, sweating profusely in the suddenly overwarm clothing. But he's getting closer. Dougal is behind him. He finds the pace again and sticks to it. Nothing but the pace. Twenty steps, rest. Again. Again. Again. Sweat trickles down his spine, even his feet might warm up. Sun glaring off the steep snow.

  He stumbles onto flatness. It feels like some terrible error, like he might fall over the other side. But he is on the edge of a giant plateau, which swoops up in a broad conical shape, too big to be believed. He sees a flat boulder almost clear of snow and staggers over to it. Dougal is beside him, pulling his oxygen mask to one side of his face: “Looks like we've topped the wall!” Dougal says, looking surprised. Gasping, Roger laughs.

  As with all cliff climbs, topping out is a strange experience. After a month of vertical reality, the huge flatness seems all wrong—especially this snowy flatness that extends like a broad fan to each side. The snow ends at the broken edge of the cliff behind them, extends high up the gentle slope of the conical immensity before them. It is easy to believe they stand on the flank of the biggest volcano in the solar system.

  “I guess the hard part is over,” Dougal says matter-of-factly.

  “Just when I was getting in shape,” says Roger, and they both laugh.

  A snowy plateau, studded with black rocks, and some big mesas. To the east, empty air: far below, the forests of Tharsis. To the northwest, a hill sloping up forever.

  Marie arrives and dances a little jig on the boulder. Dougal hikes back to the wall and drops into the amphitheater again, to carry up another load. Not much left to bring; they are almost out of food. Eileen arrives, and Roger shakes her hand. She drops her pack and gives him a hug. They
pull some food from the packs and eat a cold lunch while watching Hans, Arthur, and Stephan start up the bottom of the bowl. Dougal is already almost down to them.

  When they all reach the top, in a little string led by Dougal, the celebrating really begins. They drop their packs, they hug, they shout, Arthur whirls in circles to try to see it all at once, until he makes himself dizzy. Roger cannot remember feeling exactly like this before.

  "Our cache is a few kilometers south of here,” Eileen says after consulting her maps. “If we get there tonight we can break out the champagne."

  They hike over the snow in a line, trading the lead to break a path. It is a pleasure to walk over flat ground, and spirits are so light that they make good time. Late in the day—a full day's sunshine, their first since before base camp—they reach their cache, a strange camp full of tarped-down, snowdrifted piles, marked by a lava causeway that ends a kilometer or so above the escarpment.

  Among the new equipment is a big mushroom tent. They inflate it and climb in through the lock and up onto the tent floor for the night's party. Suddenly they are inside a giant transparent mushroom, bouncing over the soft clear raised floor like children on a feather bed; the luxury is excessive, ludicrous, inebriating. Champagne corks pop and fly into the transparent dome of the tent roof, and in the warm air they quickly get drunk, and tell each other how marvelous the climb was, how much they enjoyed it—the discomfort, exhaustion, cold, misery, danger, and fear already dissipating in their minds, already turning into something else.

  The next day Marie is not at all enthusiastic about the remainder of their climb. “It's a walk up a bloody hill! And a long walk at that!"

  “How else are you going to get down?” Eileen asks acerbically. “Jump?”

  It's true; the arrangement they have made forces them to climb the cone of the volcano. There is a railway that descends from the north rim of the caldera to Tharsis and civilization; it uses for a rampway one of the great lava spills that erase the escarpment to the north. But first they have to get to the railway, and climbing the cone is probably the fastest, and certainly the most interesting, way to do that.