Maya was surprised: “How to stop her?”
“Yes. Or more generally, to ask you to help us. I think it will take unpisting her personally. I thought you might be interested.”
And she turned her head to look at Maya with a knowing smile.
There was something vaguely familiar in the ironic smile lifting that classic little full-lipped mouth, something which though offensive was much preferable to the wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young historians pestering Michel. And as Maya considered it, the invitation began to look better and better; it was contemporary politics, an engagement with the present. The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History. And this issue could prove to be important, as the young woman had said. And it would put her back in the midst of things. And of course (she did not think this consciously) anything that balked Jackie would have its own satisfactions. “Tell me more about it,” Maya said, moving down the balcony out of earshot of the others. And the tall ironic young woman followed her.
Michel had always wantedto take a trip on the Grand Canal, and recently he had talked Maya into trying a move from Sabishii back to Odessa, as a way to combat Maya’s various mental afflictions; they might even take an apartment in the same Praxis complex that they had lived in before the second revolution. That was the only place Maya thought of as home, aside from Underbill, which she refused even to visit. And Michel felt that coming back to some kind of home might help her. So, Odessa. Maya was agreeable; it did not matter to her. And Michel’s desire to travel there by way of the Grand Canal seemed fine as well. Maya had not cared. She wasn’t sure of anything these days, she had few opinions, few preferences; that was the trouble.
Now Vendana was saying that Jackie’s campaign was to proceed along the Grand Canal, north to south, in a big canal cruiser that doubled as campaign headquarters. They were there now, at the canal’s north end, getting ready in the Narrows.
So Maya returned to Michel on the terrace, and when the historians left them she said, “So let’s go to Odessa by the Grand Canal, like you said.”
Michel was delighted. Indeed it seemed to lift from him a certain somberness that had followed the dive into drowned Burroughs; he had been pleased at its effect on Maya, but for himself it had perhaps not been so good. He had been uncharacteristically reticent about his experience, somehow oppressed, as if overwhelmed by all that the great sunken capital represented in his own life. Hard to tell. So that now, to see Maya responding so well to the experience, and also to suddenly be given the prospect of seeing the Grand Canal — a kind of giant joke, in Maya’s opinion — it made him laugh. And that she liked to see. Michel thought that Maya needed a lot of help these days, but she knew full well that it was Michel who was struggling.
So a few days later they walked up a gangway onto the deck of a long narrow sailing ship, whose single mast and sail were one curved unit.of dull white material, shaped like a bird’s wing. This ship was a kind of passenger ferry, sailing eastward around the North Sea in perpetual circumnavigations. When everyone was aboard, they motored out of DuMartheray’s little harbor, and turned east, keeping within sight of land. The ship’s mast sail proved to be flexible and mobile in many different directions; it shifted in its curves like a bird’s wing, every moment different as its AI responded minutely to catch the fitful winds.
On the second afternoon of their voyage into the Narrows, the Elysium massif came over the horizon ahead of them, bulking alpenglow pink against the hyacinth sky. The coast of the mainland rose to the south as well, as if to stretch up and see the great massif across the bay: bluffs alternated with marshes, and then a long tawny reach was succeeded by an ever-higher sea cliff. The horizontal red strata of this cliff were all broken by bands of black and ivory, and the ledges were lined with mats of samphire and grasses, and streaked with white guano. The waves slammed into the sheer rock at the bottom of these cliffs and rebounded, the arcs of the backwash intersecting the oncoming swells in quick points of upshot water. In short, beautiful sailing: long glides down the swells, the wind an offshore powerhouse, especially in the afternoons — the spray, the salt tang in the air — for the North Sea was becoming salty — the wind in her hair, the white V tapestry of the ship’s wake, luminous over the indigo sea: beautiful days. It made Maya want to stay on board, to sail around the world and then around again, to never land and never change… there were people doing that now, she had heard, giant greenhouse ships utterly self-sufficient, sailing the great ocean in their own thalassacracy…
But there ahead of them were the Narrows, narrowing. The trip from DuMartheray was already almost over. Why were the good days always so short? Moment to moment, day by day — each so full, and oh so lovely — and then gone forever, gone before there was a chance to absorb them properly, to really live them. Sailing through life looking back at the wake, high seas, flying wind… Now the sun was low, the light slanting across the sea cliffs, accenting all their wild irregularities, their overhangs, caves, sheer clean faces dropping directly into the sea, red rock into blue wa-.ter, all untouched by human hands (though the sea itself was their work). Sudden shards of splendor, splintering inside her. But the sun was disappearing, and the break in the sea cliffs ahead marked the first big harbor of the Narrows, Rhodos, where they would dock and the evening would come. They would eat in a harbor cafe next to the water in the long twilight, and that day’s glorious sail would never come again. This strange nostalgia, for the moment just gone, for the evening yet to come: “Ah, I’m alive again,” she said to herself, and marveled that it could have happened. Michel and his tricks — one would think that by now she would have become impervious to all that psychiatric-alchemical mumbo jumbo. It was too much for the heart to bear. But — well — better this than the numbness, that was certain. And it had a certain painful splendor, this acute sensation — and she could endure it — she could even enjoy it, somehow, in snatches — a sublime intensity to these late-afternoon colors, everything suffused with them. And under such a flood of nostalgic light, the harbor of Rhodos looked gorgeous — the big lighthouse on the western cape, the pair of clanging buoys red and green, port and starboard. Then in to the calm dark water of an anchorage, and down into rowboats, in the failing light, across black water through a crowd of exotic ships at anchor, no two the same as ship design was going through a period of rapid innovation, new materials making almost anything possible, and all the old designs being reinvented, drastically altered, then returned to again; there a clipper ship, there a schooner, there something that looked to be entirely outrig– ger … finally to bang into a busy wooden dock, in the dusk.
Harbor towns at dusk were all alike. A corniche, a curving narrow park, lines of trees, an arc of ramshackle hotels and restaurants backing the wharves … they checked into one of these hotels, and then strolled the dock, ate under an awning just as Maya had supposed they would. She relaxed in the grounded stability of her chair, watching liquid light oxbow over the viscous black water of the harbor, listening to Michel talk to the people sitting at the next table, tasting the olive oil and bread, the cheeses and ouzo. It was strange how much beauty hurt, sometimes, and even happiness. And yet she wished the lazy postprandial sprawl in their hard chairs could go on forever.
Of course it didn’t. They went up to bed, hand in hand, and she held on to Michel as hard as ever she could. And the next day they hauled their bags across town to the inner harbor, just north of the first canal lock, and up into a big canal boat, long and luxurious, like a barge become cruise ship. They were two of about a hundred passengers coming on board; and among the others was Vendana and some of her friends. And further on, on a private canal boat a few locks ahead, were Jackie and her consort of followers, about to travel south as well. On some nights they would be docked in the same canalside towns. “Interesting,” Maya drawled, and at t
he word Michel looked both pleased and worried.
The Grand Canal’s bed had been cut by an aerial lens, concentrating sunlight beamed down from the soletta. The lens had flown very high in the atmosphere, surfing on the thermal cloud of gases thrown up by the melted and vaporized rock; it had flown in straight lines, and burned its way across the land without the slightest regard for details of topography. Maya vaguely remembered seeing vids of the process at the time, but the photos had necessarily been taken from a distance, and they had not prepared her at all for the sheer size of the canal. Their long low canal boat motored into the first lock; was lifted up a short distance on infilling water; motored out of an opening gate — and there they were, in a wind-rippled lake two kilometers wide, extending in a straight line directly southwest toward the Hellas Sea, two thousand kilometers away. A great number of boats large and small were proceeding in both directions, keeping to the right with the slower ones closer to the banks, in the standard rules of the road. Almost all the craft were motorized, although many also sported lines of masts in schooner rig, and some of the smallest boats had big triangular sails and no engines — “dhows,” Michel said, pointing. An Arab design, apparently.
Somewhere up ahead was Jackie’s campaign ship. Maya ignored that and concentrated on the canal, gazing from bank to bank. The absent rock had not been excavated but vaporized, and looking at the banks one could tell; temperatures under the concentrated light of the aerial lens had reached five thousand K, and the rock had simply dissociated into its constituent atoms and shot into the air. After cooling, some material had fallen back on the banks, and some back into the trench, pooling there as lava; so the canal had been left with a flat floor, and banks some hundred meters high, and each over a kilometer wide: rounded black slag levees, on which very little could grow, so that they were nearly as bare and black now as when they had cooled forty m-years before, with only the occasional sand-filled crack bursting with greenery. The canal water appeared black under the banks, shading to sky color out in the middle of the canal, or rather to a shade just darker than sky color, the effect of the dark bottom no doubt; with streaks of green zigzagging across all.
The obsidian rise of the two banks, the straight gash of dark water between; boats of all sizes, but many of them long and narrow to maximize space in the locks; then every few hours a canalside town, hacked into the bankside and then spreading on top of the levee. Most of the towns had been named after one of the many canals on the classic Lowell and Antoniadi maps, and these names had been taken by the canal-besotted astronomers from the canals and rivers of classical antiquity. The first towns they passed were quite near the equator, and they were bracketed by groves of palm trees, then wooden docks, backed by busy little waterside districts; pleasant terrace neighborhoods above; then the bulk of the towns up on the flats of the levees. Of course the lens, in cutting a straight line, had carved a canal bed that rose directly up the Great Escarpment onto the high plain of Hesperia, a four-kilometer rise in elevation; so every few kilometers the canal was blocked by a lock dam. These, like dams everywhere these days, were transparent walls, and looked as thin as cellophane, yet were still many magnitudes stronger than necessary to hold the water they held, or so people said. Maya found their windowpane clarity offensive, a bit of whimsical hubris that would surely be struck down one day, when one of the thin walls would pop like a balloon and wreak havoc, and people would go back to good old concrete and carbon filament.
For now, however, the approach to a lock involved sailing toward a wall of water like the Red Sea parted for the passage of the Israelites, fish darting hither and thither overhead like primitive birds, a surreal sight, like something out of an Escher print. Then into a lock like a water-walled grave, surrounded by these bird-fish; and then up, and up, and out onto a new level of the great straight-sided river, cutting through the black land. “Bizarre,” Maya said after the first lock, and the second and the third; and Michel could only grin and nod.
The fourth night of the trip they docked at a small canalside town called Naarsares. Across the canal was an even smaller town called Naarmalcha. Mesopotamian names, apparently. A terrace restaurant on top of the levee gave a view far up and down the canal, and behind the canal to the arid highlands flanking it. Ahead they could see where the canal cut through the wall of Gale Crater, floored with water: Gale was now a bulb in the canal, a holding area for ships and goods.
After dinner Maya stood on the terrace looking through the gap into Gale. Out of the inky talc of twilight Vendana and some companions approached her: “How do you like the canal?” they asked.
“Very interesting,” Maya said curtly. She didn’t like being asked questions, or being at the center of a group; it was too much like being an exhibit in a museum. They weren’t going to get anything out of her. She stared at them. One of the young men among them gave up, began to talk to the woman next to him. He had an extraordinarily beautiful face, features neatly chiseled under a shock of black hair; a sweet smile, an unselfconscious laugh; altogether captivating. Young, but not so young as to seem unformed. He looked Indian perhaps — such dark skin, such white regular teeth — strong, lean as a whippet, a good bit taller than Maya, but not one of these new giants — human scale still, unprepossessing but solid, graceful. Sexy.
She moved toward him slowly, as the group shifted into a more relaxed cocktail-party format, people wandering around to talk and look down at the canal and the docks. Finally she got a chance to speak with him, and he did not react as if approached by Helen of Troy or Lucy the habiline fossil. It would be lovely to kiss such a mouth. Out of the question, of course, and she didn’t even really want to. But she liked to think about it; and the thought gave her ideas. Faces were so powerful.
His name was Athos. He was from Licus Vallis, to the west of Rhodes. Sansei, from a seafaring family, grandparents Greek and Indian. He had helped to found this new Green party, convinced that helping Earth through its surge was the only way to stay out of the maelstrom: the controversial tail-wagging-the-dog approach, as he admitted with an easy beautiful smile. Now he was running for representative from the Nepenthes Bay towns, and helping to coordinate the Green campaigns more generally.
“We’ll catch up with the Free Mars campaign in a few days?” Maya asked Vendana later.
“Yes. We plan to debate them at a meeting in Gale.”
Then as they were walking up the gangplank onto their boat, the young ones turned away from her, heading together up to the foredeck to continue partying; Maya was forgotten, she wasn’t part of that. She stared after them, then joined Michel in their little cabin near the stern. Seething. She couldn’t help it, even though she was shocked when it occurred: sometimes she hated the young. “I hate them,” she said to Michel. And simply because they were young. She might disguise it as hatred of their thoughtlessness, stupidity, callowness, utter provincialism; that was all true; but beyond that, she also hated their youth — not just their physical perfection, but simply their age — sheer chronology — the fact that they had it all in front of them. It was all best in anticipation, everything. Sometimes she woke from floating dreams in which she had been looking down on Mars from the Ares, after they had aerobraked, and were stabilizing their orbit in preparation for the descent; and shocked at the abrupt fall back into the present, she realized that for her that had been the best moment of all, that rush of anticipation as it all lay there below them, anything possible. That was youth.
“Think of them as fellow travelers,” Michel advised now, as he had several times before when Maya had confessed to this feeling. “They’re only going to be young for as long as we were — a snap of the fingers, right? And then they’re old, and then gone. We all go through it. Even a century’s difference doesn’t matter a damn. And of all the humans who ever existed and ever will exist, these people are the only ones alive at the same time we are. Just being alive at the same time, that makes us all contemporaries. And your contemporaries are the only on
es who are ever going to really understand you.”
“Yes yes,” Maya said. It was true. “But I still hate them.”
The aerial lens’s burn had been about equally deep everywhere, so when it had blazed across Gale Crater it had cut a wide swath through the rim on the northeast and southwest sides; but these cuts were higher than the canal bed elsewhere, so that narrower cuts had been excavated through them, and locks installed, and the inner crater made into a high lake, a bulb in the canal’s endless thermometer. The Lowellian system of ancient nomenclature was in abeyance here for some reason, and the northeastern locks were bracketed by a little divided town called Birch’s Trenches, while the southwestern locks’ larger town was called Banks. The town Banks covered the meltzone of the burn, and then rose in broad bending terraces onto the un-melted rim of Gale, overlooking the interior lake. It was a wild town, crews and passengers of passing ships pounding down their gangplanks to join a more or less continuous festival. On this night the party was focused on the arrival of the Free Mars campaign. A big grassy plaza, perched on a wide bench over the lake lock, was jammed with people, some attending to the speeches given from a flat rooftop stage overlooking the plaza, others ignoring the commotion and shopping, or promenading, or drinking, or sitting over the lock eating food purchased from small smoky stands, or dancing, or wandering off to explore the upper reaches of the town.
Throughout the campaign speeches Maya stood on a terrace above the stage, which gave her a view of the backstage area, where Jackie and the rest of the Free Mars leadership were milling about, talking or listening as they waited for their turn in the spotlights. Antar was there, Ariadne, some others Maya half-recognized from recent news vids. Observation from a distance could be so revealing; down there she saw all the primate dominance dynamics that Frank used to go on about. Two or three of the men were fixed on Jackie, and, in a different way, a couple of the women. One of the men, named Mikka, was on the global executive council these days, a leader of the MarsFirst party. MarsFirst was one of the oldest political parties on Mars, formed to contest terms of the renewal of the first Mars treaty; Maya had been part of that, she seemed to recall. Now Martian politics had fallen into a pattern somewhat resembling European parliamentary countries, with a broad spectrum of small parties bracketing a few centrist coalitions, in this case Free Mars, the Reds, and the Dorsa Brevian matriarchy, with the others latching on, or filling gaps, or running off to the sides, all of them shifting this way and that in temporary alliances, to advance their little causes. In this array MarsFirst had become something like the political wing of the Red ecoteurs still in the outback, a nasty expedient unscrupulous organization, folded into the Free Mars super-majority for no good ideological reason; there had to be some kind of deal going on. Or something more personal; the way that Mikka followed Jackie, the way he regarded her; a lover, or very recent ex-lover, Maya would have bet on it. Besides which she had heard rumors to that effect.
Blue Mars m-3 Page 59