The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  “You could climb down the cliff alone,” Eileen adds sarcastically. “First solo descent . . .”

  Marie, apparently feeling the effects of last night's champagne, merely snarls and stalks off to snap herself into one of the cart harnesses. Their new collection of equipment fits into a wheeled cart, which they must pull up the slope. For convenience they are already wearing the space suits that they will depend on higher up; during this ascent they will climb right out of most of Mars's new atmosphere. They look funny in their silvery green suits and clear helmets, Roger thinks; it reminds him of his days as a canyon guide, when such suits were necessary all over Mars. The common band of the helmet radios makes this a more social event than the cliff climb, as does the fact that all seven of them are together, four hauling the cart, three walking freely ahead or behind. From climb to hike: The first day is a bit anticlimactic.

  On the snowy southern flank of the volcano, signs of life appear everywhere. Goraks circle them by day, on the lookout for a bit of refuse; at dusk ball owls dip around the tent like bats. On the ground Roger sees marmots on the boulders and volcanic knobs, and in the system of ravines cut into the plateau they find twisted stands of Hokkaido pine, chir pine, and noctis juniper. Arthur chases a pair of Dall sheep with their curved horns, and they see prints in the snow that look like bear tracks. “Yeti,” Dougal says. One mirror dusk they catch sight of a pack of snow wolves, strung out over the slope to the west. Stephan spends his spare time at the edges of the new ravines, sketching and peering through binoculars. “Come on, Roger,” he says. “Let me show you those otterines I saw yesterday."

  “Bunch of mutants,” Roger grumbles, mostly to give Stephan a hard time. But Eileen is watching him to see his response, and dubiously he nods. What can he say? He goes with Stephan to the ravine to look for wildlife. Eileen laughs at him, eyes only, affectionately.

  Onward, up the great hill. It's a six-percent grade, very regular, and smooth except for the ravines and the occasional small crater or lava knob. Below them, where the plateau breaks to become the cliff, the shield is marked by some sizable mesas—features, Hans says, of the stress that broke off the shield. Above them, the conical shape of the huge volcano is clearly visible; the endless hill they climb slopes away to each side equally, and far away and above they see the broad flat peak. They've got a long way to go. Wending between the ravines is easy, and the esthetic of the climb, its only point of technical interest, becomes how far they can hike every day. It's 250 kilometers from the escarpment up to the crater rim; they try for twenty-five a day, and sometimes make thirty. It feels odd to be so warm; after the intense cold of the cliff climb, the space suits and the mushroom tent create a distinct disconnection from the surroundings.

  Hiking as a group is also odd. The common band is a continuous conversation, that one can switch on or off at will. Even when not in a mood to talk, Roger finds it entertaining to listen. Hans talks about the areology of the volcano, and he and Stephan discuss the genetic engineering that makes the wildlife around them possible. Arthur points out features that the others might take for granted. Marie complains of boredom. Eileen and Roger laugh and add a comment once in a while. Even Dougal clicks into the band around midafternoon, and displays a quick wit, spurring Arthur toward one amazing discovery after another. “Look at that, Arthur, it's a yeti.”

  “What! You're kidding! Where?”

  “Over there, behind that rock.”

  Behind the rock is Stephan, relieving himself. “Don't come over here!”

  “You liar,” Arthur says.

  “It must have slipped off. I think a Weddell fox was chasing it.”

  “You're kidding!”

  “Yes.”

  Eileen: “Let's switch to a private band. I can't hear you over all the rest."

  Roger: “Okay. Band 33.”

  “Why that one?”

  “Ah—” It was a long time ago, but this is the kind of weird fact his memory will pop up with. “It may be our private band from our first hike together.”

  She laughs. They spend the afternoon behind the others, talking.

  One morning Roger wakes early, just after mirror dawn. The dull horizontal rays of the quartet of parhelia light their tent. Roger turns his head, looks past his pillow, through the tent's clear floor. Thin soil over rock, a couple of meters below. He sits up; the floor gives a little, like a gel bed. He walks over the soft plastic slowly so that he will not bounce any of the others, who are sleeping out where the cap of the roof meets the gills of the floor. The tent really does resemble a big clear mushroom; Roger descends clear steps in the side of the stalk to get to the lavatory, located down in what would be the mushroom's volva. Emerging he finds a sleepy Eileen sponging down in the little bath next to the air compressor and regulator. “Good morning,” she says. “Here, will you get my back?"

  She hands him the sponge, turns around. Vigorously he rubs down the hard muscles of her back, feeling a thrill of sensual interest. That slope, where back becomes bottom: beautiful.

  She looks over her shoulder: “I think I'm probably clean now.”

  “Ah.” He grins. “Maybe so.” He gives her the sponge. “I'm going for a walk before breakfast.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Roger dresses, goes through the lock, walks over to the head of the meadow they are camped by: a surarctic meadow, covered with moss and lichen, and dotted with mutated edelweiss and saxifrage. A light frost coats everything in a sparkling blanket of white, and Roger feels his boots crunch as he walks.

  Movement catches his eye and he stops to observe a white-furred mouse hare, dragging a loose root back to its hole. There is a flash and flutter, and a snow finch lands in the hole's entrance. The tiny hare looks up from its work, chatters at the finch, nudges past it with its load. The finch does its bird thing, head shifting instantaneously from one position to the next and then freezing in place. It follows the hare into the hole. Roger has heard of this, but he has never seen it. The hare scampers out, looking for more food. The finch appears, its head snaps from one position to the next. An instant swivel and it is staring at Roger. It flies over to the scampering hare, dive-bombs it, flies off. The hare has disappeared down another hole.

  Roger crosses the ice stream in the meadow, crunches up the bank. There beside a waist-high rock is an odd pure white mass, with a white sphere at the center of it. He leans over to inspect it. Slides a gloved finger over it. Some kind of ice, apparently. Unusual-looking.

  The sun rises and a flood of yellow light washes over the land. The yellowish white half globe of ice at his feet looks slick. It quivers; Roger steps back. The ice is shaking free of the rock wall. The middle of the bulge cracks. A beak stabs out of the globe, breaks it open. Busy little head in there. Blue feathers, long crooked black beak, beady little black eyes. “An egg?” Roger says. But the pieces are definitely ice—he can make them melt between his gloved fingers, and feel their coldness. The bird (though its legs and breast seem to be furred, and its wings stubby, and its beak sort of fanged) staggers out of the white bubble and shakes itself like a dog throwing off water, although it looks dry. Apparently the ice is some sort of insulation—a home for the night, or no—for the winter, no doubt. Yes. Formed of spittle or something, walling off the mouth of a shallow cave. Roger has never heard of such a thing, and he watches openmouthed as the bird-thing takes a few running steps and glides away.

  A new creature steps on the face of green Mars.

  That afternoon they hike out of the realm even of the surarctic meadow. No more ground cover, no more flowers, no more small animals. Nothing now but cracks filled with struggling moss, and great mats of otoo lichen. Sometimes it is as if they walk on a thin carpet of yellow, green, red, black—splotches of color like those seen in the orbicular jasper, spread out as far as they can see in every direction, a carpet crunchy with frost in the mornings, a bit damp in the midday sun, a carpet crazed and parti-colored. “Amazing stuff,” Hans mutters, poking at
it with a finger. “Half our oxygen is being made by this wonderful symbiosis. . ."

  Late that afternoon, after they have stopped and set up the tent and tied it down to several rocks, Hans leaps through the lock waving his atmosphere kit and hopping up and down. “Listen,” he says, “I just radioed the summit station for confirmation of this. There's a high-pressure system over us right now. We're at fourteen thousand meters above the datum, but the barometric pressure is up to three hundred fifty millibars because there's a big cell of air moving over the flank of the volcano this week.” The others stare. Hans says, “Do you see what I mean?”

  “No,” exclaim three voices at once.

  “High-pressure zone,” Roger says unhelpfully.

  “Well,” Hans says, standing at attention, “it's enough to breathe! Just enough, but enough, I say. And of course no one's ever done it before—done it this high before, I mean. Breathed free Martian air.”

  “You're kidding!”

  “So we can establish the height record right here and now! I propose to do it, and I invite whoever wants to to join me.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Eileen says.

  But everyone wants to do it.

  “Wait a minute,” Eileen says. “I don't want everyone taking off their helmets and keeling over dead up here, for God's sake. They'll revoke my license. We have to do this in an orderly fashion. And you—” She points at Stephan. “You can't do this. I forbid it.”

  Stephan protests loudly and for a long time, but Eileen is adamant, and Hans agrees. “The shock could start your edema again, for sure. None of us should do it for long. But for a few minutes, it will go. Just breathe through the mesh face masks, to warm the air.”

  “You can watch and save us if we keel over,” Roger tells Stephan.

  “Shit,” Stephan says. “All right. Do it.”

  They gather just out from under the cap of the tent, where Stephan can, theoretically, drag them back through the lock if he has to. Hans checks his barometer one last time, nods at them. They stand in a rough circle, facing in. Everyone begins to unclip helmet latches.

  Roger gets his unclipped first—the years as canyon guide have left their mark on him, in little ways like this—and he lifts the helmet up. As he places it on the ground the cold strikes his head and makes it throb. He sucks down a breath: dry ice. He refuses the urge to hyperventilate, fearful he will chill his lungs too fast and damage them. Regular breathing, he thinks, in and out. In and out. Though Dougal's mouth is covered by a mesh mask, Roger can tell he is grinning widely. Funny how the upper face reveals that. Roger's eyes sting, his chest is frozen inside, he sucks down the frigid air and every sense quickens, breath by breath. The edges of pebbles a kilometer away are sharp and clear. Thousands of edges. “Like breathing nitrous oxide!” Arthur cries in a lilting high voice. He whoops like a little kid and the sound is odd, distant. Roger walks in a circle, on a quilt of rust lava and gaily colored patches of lichen. Intense awareness of the process of breathing seems to connect his consciousness to everything he can see; he feels like a strangely shaped lichen, struggling for air like all the rest. Jumble of rock, gleaming in the sunlight. “Let's build a cairn,” he says to Dougal, and can hear his voice is wrong somehow. Slowly they step from rock to rock, picking them up and putting them in a pile. The interior of his chest is perfectly defined by each intoxicating breath. Others watch bright-eyed, sniffing, involved in their own perceptions. Roger sees his hands blur through space, sees the flesh of Dougal's face pulsing pinkly, like the flowers of moss campion. Each rock is a piece of Mars, he seems to float as he walks, the size of the volcano gets bigger, bigger, bigger; finally he is seeing it at true size. Stephan strides among them grinning through his helmet, holding up both hands. It's been ten minutes. The cairn is not yet done, but they can finish it tomorrow. “I'll make a messenger canister for it tonight!” Dougal wheezes happily. “We can all sign it.” Stephan begins to round them all up. “Incredibly cold!” Roger says, still looking around as if he has never seen any of it before—any of anything.

  Dougal and he are the last two into the lock; they shake hands. “Invigorating, eh?” Roger nods. “Very fine air.”

  But the air is just part of all the rest of it—part of the world, not of the planet. Right? “That's right,” Roger says, staring through the tent wall down the endless slope of the mountain.

  That night they celebrate with champagne again, and the party gets wild as they become sillier and sillier. Marie tries to climb the inner wall of the tent by grabbing the soft material in her hands, and falls to the floor repeatedly; Dougal juggles boots; Arthur challenges all comers to arm wrestle, and wins so quickly they decide he is using “a trick,” and disallow his victories; Roger tells government jokes ("How many ministers does it take to pour a cup of coffee?"), and institutes a long and lively game of spoons. He and Eileen play next to each other and in the dive for spoons they land on each other. Afterward, sitting around the heater singing songs, she sits at his side and their legs and shoulders press together. Kid stuff, familiar and comfortable, even to those who can't remember their own childhoods.

  So that, that night, after everyone has gone out to the little sleeping nooks at the perimeter of the tent's circular floor, Roger's mind is full of Eileen. He remembers sponging her down that morning. Her playfulness this evening. Climbing in the storm. The long nights together in wall tents. And once again the distant past returns—his stupid, uncontrollable memory provides images from a time so far gone that it shouldn't matter anymore . . . but it does. It was near the end of that trip too. She sneaked into his little cubicle and jumped him! Even though the thin panels they used to create sleeping rooms were actually much less private than what they have here; this tent is big, the air regulator is loud, the seven beds are well spaced and separated from each other by ribbing—clear ribbing, it is true, but now the tent is dark. The cushioned floor under him (so comfortable that Marie calls it uncomfortable) gives as he moves, without even trembling a few feet away, and it never makes a sound. In short, he could crawl silently over to her bed, and join her as she once joined him, and it would be entirely discreet. Turnabout is fair play, isn't it? Even three hundred years later? There isn't much time left on this climb, and as they say, fortune favors the bold. . . .

  He is about to move when suddenly Eileen is at his side, shaking his arm. In his ear she says, “I have an idea.”

  And afterward, teasing: “Maybe I do remember you."

  They trek higher still, into the zone of rock. No animals, plants, insects; no lichen; no snow. They are above it all, so high on the volcano's cone that it is getting difficult to see where their escarpment drops to the forests; two hundred kilometers away and fifteen kilometers below, the scarp's edge can only be distinguished because that's where the broad ring of snow ends. They wake up one morning and find a cloud layer a few k's downslope, obscuring the planet below. They stand on the side of an immense conical island in an even greater sea of cloud: the clouds a white wave-furrowed ocean, the volcano a great rust rock, the sky a low dark violet dome, all on a scale the mind can barely encompass. To the east, poking out of the cloud sea, three broad peaks—an archipelago—the three Tharsis volcanoes in their well-spaced line, princes to the king Olympus. Those volcanoes, fifteen hundred kilometers away, give them a little understanding of the vastness visible. . .

  The rock up here is smoothly marbled, like a plain of petrified muscles. Individual pebbles and boulders take on an eerie presence, as if they are debris scattered by Olympian gods. Hans's progress is greatly slowed by his inspection of these rocks. One day, they find a mound that snakes up the mountain like an esker or a Roman road; Hans explains it was a river of lava harder than the surrounding basalt, which has eroded away to reveal it. They use it as an elevated road and hike on it for all of one long day.

  Roger picks up his pace, leaves the cart and the others behind. In a suit and helmet, on the lifeless face of Mars: Centuries of memory flood him, he
finds his breathing clotted and uneven. This is my country, he thinks. This is the transcendent landscape of my youth. It's still here. It can't be destroyed. It will always be here. He finds that he has almost forgotten, not what it looks like, but what it feels like to be in such wilderness. That thought is the thorn in the exhilaration that mounts with every step. Stephan and Eileen, the other two out of harness this day, are following him up. Roger notices them and frowns. I don't want to talk about it, he thinks. I want to be alone in it.

  But Stephan hikes right by him, looking overwhelmed by the desolate rock expanse, the world of rock and sky. Roger can't help but grin.

  And Eileen is content just to walk with him.

  Next day, however, in the harness of the cart, Stephan plods beside him and says, “Okay, Roger, I can see why you love this. It is sublime, truly. And in just the way we want the sublime—it's a pure landscape, a pure place. But. . .” He plods on several more steps, and Roger and Eileen wait for him to continue, pulling in step together. “But there is life on Mars. And it seems to me that you don't need the whole planet this way. This will always be here. The atmosphere will never rise this high, so you'll always have this. And the world down below, with all that life growing everywhere—it's beautiful.” The beautiful and the sublime, Roger thinks. Another duality. “And maybe we need the beautiful more than the sublime?"

  They haul on. Eileen looks at the mute Roger. He cannot think what to say. She smiles. “If Mars can change, so can you.”

  "The intense concentration of self in the middle of such a heartless immensity, my God! who can tell it?"

  That night Roger seeks out Eileen, and makes love to her with a peculiar urgency; and when they are done he finds himself crying a bit, he doesn't know why; and she holds his head against her breast, until he shifts, and turns, and falls asleep.