The Martians

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  That gives them pause.

  After a silence Stephan says, “What about you, Arthur? What would you do?”

  “What, me? I have no idea. It's not for me to say, anyway. You know me. I don't like telling people what to do.”

  They wait in silence, sipping their hot chocolate.

  “But you know, if you did just direct a couple of little comets right into the ocean...”

  Old friends, laughing at old friends just for being themselves. Eileen leans in against Roger, feeling better.

  Next morning with a whoosh they are off east again, and in a few hours' sailing are out on the ice with no land visible, skating on the gusty wind with runners clattering or schussing or whining or blasting, depending on wind and ice consistencies. The day passes, and it begins to seem like they are on an all-ice world, like Callisto or Europa. As the day ends they slide around into the wind and come to a halt, then get out and drive in some ice screws around the boat and tie it into the center of a web of lines. By sunset they are belayed, and Roger and Eileen go for a walk over the ice.

  “A beautiful day's sail, wasn't it?” Roger asks.

  “Yes, it was,” Eileen says. But she cannot help thinking that they are out walking on the surface of their ocean. “What did you think about what Hans was saying last night, about taking another bash at it?”

  “You hear a lot of people talking that way.”

  “But you?”

  “Well, I don't know. I don't like a lot of the methods they talk about. But—” He shrugs. “What I like or don't like doesn't matter.”

  “Hmm.” Underfoot the ice is white, with tiny broken air bubbles marring the surface, like minuscule crater rings. “And you say the youngsters aren't much interested either. But I can't see why not. You'd think they'd want terraforming to be working more than anyone.”

  “They think they have lots of time.”

  Eileen smiles at this. “They may be right.”

  “That's true, they may. But not us. I sometimes think we're sad not so much because of the crash as the quick decline.” He looks at her, then down at the ice again. “We're two hundred and fifty years old, Eileen.”

  “Two hundred forty.”

  “Yeah yeah. But there's no one alive older than two-sixty.”

  “I know.” Eileen remembers a time when a group of old ones were sitting around a big hotel restaurant table, building card houses, as there was no other card game all of them knew; they collaborated on one card house four storeys high, and the structure was getting shaky indeed when someone said, “It's like my longevity treatments.” And though they had laughed, no one had the steadiness of hand to set the next card.

  “Well. There you have it. If I were twenty I wouldn't worry about the crash either. Whereas for us it's very likely the last Mars we'll know. But, you know. In the end it doesn't matter what kind of Mars you like best. They're all better than nothing.” He smiles crookedly at her, puts an arm around her shoulders, and squeezes.

  The next morning they wake in a fog, but there is a steady breeze as well, so after breakfast they unmoor and slide east with a light slick sliding sound. Ice dust, pulverized snow, frozen mist—all flash east past them.

  Almost immediately after taking off, however, a call comes in on the radiophone. Roger picks up the handset, and Freya's voice comes in. “You left us behind.”

  “What? Shit! What the hell were you doing out of the boat?”

  “We were down on the ice, fooling around.”

  “For Christ's sake, you two.” Roger grins despite himself as he shakes his head. “And what, you're done now?”

  “None of your business,” Jean-Claude calls happily in the background.

  “But you're ready to be picked up,” Roger says.

  “Yes, we are ready.”

  “Okay, well, shit. Just hold put there. It'll take a while to beat back up to you in this wind.”

  “That's all right. We have our warm clothes on, and a ground pad. We will wait for you.”

  “As if you have any choice!” Roger says, and puts the handset down.

  He starts sailing in earnest. First he turns across the wind, then tacks up into it, and the boat suddenly shrieks like a banshee. The sail-mast is cupped tight. Roger shakes his head, impressed. You would have to shout to be heard over the wind now, but no one is saying anything; they're letting Roger concentrate on the sailing. The whiteness they are flying through is lit the same everywhere, they see nothing but the ice right under the cockpit, flying by. It is not the purest whiteout Eileen has ever been in, because of the wind and the ice under the lee rail, but it is pretty close; and after a while even the ends of the iceboat, even the ice under the lee rail, disappear into the cloud. They fly, vibrating with their flight, through a roaring white void; a strange kinetic experience, and Eileen finds herself trying to open her eyes farther, as if there might be another kind of sight inside her, waiting for moments like this to come into play.

  Nothing doing. They are in a moving whiteout, that's all there is to it. Roger doesn't look pleased. He's staring down at their radar, and the rest of the instrumentation. In the old days pressure ridges would have made this kind of blind sailing very dangerous. Now there is nothing out there to run into.

  Suddenly they are shoved forward, the roar gets louder, there is darkness below them. They are skating over a sandy patch. Then out of it and off again, shooting through bright whiteness. “Coming about,” Roger says.

  Eileen braces herself for the impact of their first tack, but then Roger says, “I'm going to wear about, folks.” He brings the tiller in toward his knees and they career off downwind, turn, turn, then catch the wind on their opposite beam, the boat's hull tipping alarmingly to the other side. Booms below as the ballast weight shifts up to the windward rail, and then they are howling as before, but on the opposite tack. The whole operation has been felt and heard rather than seen; Roger even has his eyes closed for a while. Then a moment of relative calm, until the next wearing about. A backward loop at the end of each tack.

  Roger points at the radar screen. “There they are, see?”

  Arthur peers at the screen. “Sitting down I take it.”

  Roger shakes his head. “They're still mostly over the horizon. That's their heads.”

  “You hope.”

  Roger is looking at the APS screen and frowning. He wears away again. “We'll have to come up on them slow. The radar only sees to the horizon, and even standing up it won't catch them farther than six k away, and we're going about a hundred fifty k an hour. So we'll have to do it by our APS positions.”

  Arthur whistles. Satellite navigation, to make a rendezvous in a whiteout. . . . “You could always,” Arthur begins, then claps his hand over his mouth.

  Roger grins at him. “It should be doable.”

  For a nonsailor like Eileen, it is a bit hard to believe. In fact all the blind vibration and rocking side to side have her feeling a bit dizzy, and Hans and Stephan and Frances look positively queasy. All five of them regard Roger, who looks at the APS screen and shifts the tiller minutely, then all of a sudden draws it in to his knees again. On the radar screen Freya and Jean-Claude appear as two glowing green columns. “Hey you guys,” Roger says into the radio handset, “I'm closing on you, I'll come up from downwind, wave your arms and keep an eye out, I'll try to come up on your left side as slow as I can.”

  He pulls the tiller gently back and forth, watching the screens intently. They come so far up into the wind that the sail-mast spreads into a very taut French curve, and they lose way. Roger glances ahead of the boat, but still nothing there, just the pure white void, and he squints unhappily and tugs the tiller another centimeter closer to him. The sail is feathering now and has lost almost all its curve; it feels to Eileen as if they are barely making headway, and will soon stall and be thrown backward; and still no sign of them.

  Then there they are just off the port bow, two angels floating through whiteness toward the still boat—or
so for one illusory moment it appears. They leap over the rail onto the foredeck, and Roger uses the last momentum of the iceboat to wear away again, and in a matter of seconds they are flying east with the wind again, the howl greatly reduced.

  By that sunset they are merely in a light mist. Next morning it is gone entirely, and the world has returned. The iceboat lies moored in the long shadow of Olympus Mons, hulking over the horizon to the east. A continent of a mountain, stretching as far as they can see to north and south; another world, another life.

  They sail in toward the eastern shore of the Amazonian Sea, famous before the crash for its wild coastline. Now it shoots up from the ice white and bare, like a winter fairy tale: Gordii Waterfall, which fell a vertical kilometer off the coastal plateau directly into the sea, is now a great pillared icefall, with a great pile of ice shatter at its foot.

  Past this landmark they skate into Lycus Sulci Bay, south of Acheron, where the land rises less precipitously, gentle hills above low sea bluffs, looking down on the ice bay. In the bay they slowly tack against the morning offshore breeze, until they come to rest against a floating dock, now somewhat askew in the press of ice, just off a beach. Roger ties off on this, and they gear up for a hike on the land. Freya and Jean-Claude carry their backpacks with them.

  Out of the boat and onto the ice. Scritch-scritch over the ice to shore, everything strangely still; then across the frosty beach, and up a trail that leads to the top of the bluff. After that a gentler trail up the vast tilt of the coastal plateau. Here the trailmakers have laid flagstones that run sometimes ten in a row before the next low step up. In steeper sections it becomes more like a staircase, a great endless staircase, each flag fitted perfectly under the next one. Even rime-crusted as it is, Eileen finds the lapidary work extraordinarily beautiful. The quartzite flags are placed as tightly as Orkney drywall, and their surfaces are a mix of pale yellow and red, silver and gold, all in differing proportions for each flag, and alternating by dominant color as they rise. In short, a work of art.

  Eileen follows the trail looking down at these flagstones, up and up, and up, up some more. Above them the rising slope is white to the distant high horizon, beyond which black Olympus bulks like a massive world of its own.

  The sun emerges over the volcano. Light blazes on the snow. As they hike farther up the quartzite trail it enters a forest. Or rather, the skeleton of a forest. Eileen hurries to catch up with Roger, feeling oppressed, even frightened. Freya and Jean-Claude are up ahead, their other companions far behind.

  Roger leads her off the trail, through the trees. They are all dead. It was a forest of foxtail pine and bristlecone pine; but the tree line has fallen to sea level at this latitude, and all the big old gnarled trees have perished. After that a sandstorm, or a series of sandstorms, have sandblasted away all the trees' needles, the small branches, and the bark itself, leaving behind only the bleached tree trunks and the biggest lower branches, twisting up like broken arms from writhing bodies. Wind has polished the spiraling grain of the trunks until it gleams in the morning light. Ice packs the cracks into the heartwood.

  The trees are well spaced, and they stroll between them, regarding some more closely, then moving on. Scattered here and there are little frozen ponds and tarns. It seems to Eileen like a great sculpture garden or workshop, in which some mighty Rodin has left scattered a thousand trials at a single idea, all beautiful, altogether forming a park of surreal majesty. And yet awful too; she feels it as a kind of stabbing pain in the chest; this is a cemetery. Dead trees flayed by the sandy wind; dead Mars, their hopes flensed by the cold. Red Mars, Mars the god of war, taking back its land with a frigid boreal blast. The sun glares off the icy ground, smeary light glazing the world. The bare wood glows orange.

  “Beautiful, isn't it?” Roger says.

  Eileen shakes her head, looking down. She is bitterly cold, and the wind whistles through the broken branches and the grain of the wood. “It's dead, Roger.”

  “What's that?”

  “'The darkness grew apace,'” she mutters, looking away from him. “'A cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts from the east.'”

  “What's that you say?”

  “The Time Machine,” she explains. “The end of the world. 'It would be hard to convey the stillness of it.'”

  “Ah,” Roger says, and puts his arm around her shoulders. “Still the English major.” He smiles. “All these years pass and we're still just what we always were. You're an English major from the University of Mars.”

  “Yes.” A gust seems to blow through her chest, as if the wind had suddenly struck her from an unexpected quarter. “But it's all over now, don't you see? It's all dead"—she gestures—"everything we tried to do!” A desolate plateau over an ice sea, a forest of dead trees; all their efforts gone to waste.

  “Not so,” Roger says, and points up the hill. Freya and Jean-Claude are wandering down through the dead forest, stopping to inspect certain trees, running their hands over the icy spiral grain of the wood, moving on to the next magnificent corpse.

  Roger calls to them, and they approach together. Roger says under his breath to Eileen, “Now listen, Eileen, listen to what they say. Just watch them and listen.”

  The youngsters join them, shaking their heads and babbling at the sight of the broken-limbed forest. “It's so beautiful!” Freya says. “So pure!”

  “Look,” Roger interrupts, “don't you worry everything will all go away, just like this forest here? Mars become unlivable? Don't you believe in the crash?”

  Startled, the two stare at him. Freya shakes her head like a dog shedding water. Jean-Claude points west, to the vast sheet of ice sea spread below them. “It never goes backward,” he says, halting for words. “You see all that water out there, and the sun in the sky. And Mars, the most beautiful planet in the world.”

  “But the crash, Jean-Claude. The crash.”

  “We don't call it that. It is a long winter only. Things are living under the snow, waiting for the next spring.”

  “There hasn't been a spring in thirty years! You've never seen a spring in your life!”

  “Spring is Ls zero, yes? Every year spring comes.”

  “Colder and colder.”

  “We will warm things up again.”

  “But it could take thousands of years!” Roger exclaims, enjoying the act of provocation. He sounds like all the people in Burroughs, Eileen thinks, like Eileen herself when she is feeling the despair of the crash.

  “I don't care,” Freya says.

  “But that means you'll never see any change at all. Even with really long lives you'll never see it.”

  Jean-Claude shrugs. “It's the work that matters, not the end of work. Why be so focused on the end? All it means is you are over. Better to be in the middle of things, or at the beginning, when all the work remains to be done, and it could turn out any way.”

  “It could fail,” Roger insists. “It could get colder, the atmosphere could freeze out, everything in the world could die like these trees here. Nothing left alive at all.”

  Freya turns her head away, put off by this. Jean-Claude sees her and for the first time he seems annoyed. They don't quite understand what Roger has been doing, and now they are tired of it. Jean-Claude gestures at the stark landscape: “Say what you like,” he says. “Say it will all go crash, say everything alive now will die, say the planet will stay frozen for thousands of years—say the stars will fall from the sky! But there will be life on Mars.”

  If Wang Wei Lived on Mars and Other Poems

  If Wang Wei lived on Mars, we'd spend more time outdoors

   1. Visiting

   2. After a Move

   3. Canyon Color

   4. Vastitas Borealis

   5. Night Song

   6. Desolation

   7. Another Night Song

   8. Six Thoughts on the Uses of Art

  1. What's in My Pocket

  2. In the Finale
of Beethoven's Ninth

  3. Reading Emerson's Journal

  4. The Walkman

  5. Dreams Are Real

  6. Seen While Running

   9. Crossing Mather Pass

  10. Night in the Mountains

  1. Camp

  2. The Ground

  3. Writing by Starlight

  11. Invisible Owls

  12. Tenzing

  13. A Report on the First Recorded Case of Areophagy

  14. The Reds' Lament

  15. Two Years

  16. I Say Good-bye to Mars

  VISITING

  No one on Mars has a home

  ceaseless wandering motel to motel

  those friends I had all moved along

  most will never cross paths again

  strange to think each life is only

  a few years long

  settle down in your habits

  same thing every day

  food rooms streets friends

  you can think it will go on

  forever

  AFTER A MOVE

  One night I half awoke from a dream

  And struggled up to go to the bathroom.

  Past bookcases to the foot of the bed, left through

  The doorway, touch the wall—but it wasn't there.

    Emptiness: timeless moment, dark nowhere,

    The space between the stars—

  Ah. A different bedroom

  With no wall there, no bookcases—

  A straight shot to a different bathroom,

  In a different apartment.

  I realized where I was and

  A whole world slipped away.

  CANYON COLOR

  In Lazuli Canyon, boating.

  Sheet ice over shadowed stream

  Crackling under our bow.

  Stream grows wide, curves into sunlight:

  A deep bend in the ancient channel.

  Plumes of frost at every breath.

  Endless rise of the red canyon,

  Canyon in canyons, no end to them.

  Black lines web rust sandstone:

  Wind-carved boulder over us.

  There, on a wet red beach—