“She didn’t believe in it.”
Maya nodded. No doubt true. Few believed in death anymore, especially the young, who never had, even before the days of the treatment. And now less than ever. But believe in it or not, it was touching down more and more, mostly of course among the superelderly. New diseases, or old diseases returned, or else a rapid holistic collapse with no apparent cause — this last had killed Helmut Bronski and Derek Hastings in recent years, people Maya had met, if not known well. Now an accident had struck someone so much younger than they were that it made no sense, fit no pattern but youthful recklessness. An accident. Random chance.
“Do you still want to get Peter to come?” Michel asked, from out of a whole different realm of thought. What was this, realpolitik from Michel? Ah — he was trying to distract her. She almost laughed again.
“Let’s still get in touch with him,” she said. “See if he might come.” But this was only to reassure Michel; her heart was not in it.
That was the beginning of the string of deaths.
But she didn’t know that then. Then, it was only the end of their canal journey.
The burn of the aerial lens had stopped just short of the eastern edge of the Hellas Basin watershed, between Dao and Harmakhis valleys. The final segment of the canal had been dug by conventional means, and it dropped so precipitously down the steep eastern slope of the basin that frequent locks were necessary, here functioning as dams, so that the canal no longer had the classic look it had had in the highlands, but was rather a series of reservoir lakes connected by short broad reddish rivers, extending out from under each clear dam. So they boated across lake after lake, down and down in a slow parade of barges and sailboats and cabin cruisers and steamers, and as they dropped in the locks they could see through their clear walls down the string of lakes like a giant staircase of blue stepping-stones, down to the distant bronze plate of the Hellas Sea. Somewhere in the badlands to right and left, the Dao and Harmakhis canyons cut deeply into the redrock plateau, following their more natural courses down the great slope; but with their tents removed the two canyons were not visible until you were right on their rims, and nothing could be seen of them from the canal.
On board their ship, life went on. Apparently it was much the same on the Free Mars barge, where Jackie was said to be doing well. Still seeing Athos when the two boats were docked in the same town. Accepting sympathy graciously, and then turning the topic elsewhere, usually to the campaign business at hand. And their campaign continued to go well. Under Maya’s coaching the Green campaign was being run better than before, but anti-immigrant sentiment was strong. Everywhere they went the other Free Mars councillors and candidates spoke at the rallies, and Jackie only made occasional short, dignified appearances. She was a lot more powerful and intelligent a speaker than she used to be. But by watching the others speak Maya got a good sense of who was at the top level of the organization, and several of these people looked very happy to have gained the limelight. One young man, another one of Jackie’s young men, named Nanedi, stood out in particular. And Jackie did not seem very pleased to see it; she became cool to him, she turned more and more to Athos, and Mikka, and even Antar. Some nights she appeared a veritable queen among the consorts. But Maya could see under that, to the truth she had witnessed in Anteus. From a hundred meters away she could see the darkness at the heart of things.
Nevertheless, when Peter returned her call, Maya asked him to meet her for a talk about the current elections; and when Peter arrived, Maya rested, watchfully. Something would happen.
Peter looked relaxed, calm. He lived in the Charitum Montes these days, working on the Argyre wilderness project, and also with a co-op making Mars-to-space planes for people who wanted to bypass the elevator. Relaxed, calm, even a bit withdrawn. Simon-like.
Antar was already angry at Jackie, for embarrassing him more than usual by her lack of discretion with Athos. Mikka was even angrier than Antar. Now, with Peter on hand, Jackie was baffling and then angering Athos as well, as she devoted all her attention to Peter. She was as reliable as a magnet. But she was attracted to Peter, who was as inert to her as always, iron to her magnet. It was depressing how predictable they were. But useful: the Free Mars campaign was subtly losing momentum. Antar was no longer so bold as to suggest to the Qahiran Mahjaris that they forget about Arabia during its time of troubles. Mikka was intensifying the MarsFirst critique of various Free Mars positions unrelated to immigration, and pulling some of the other members of the executive council into his sphere. Yes — Peter was acting as intensifier to Jackie’s impolitic side, making her erratic and ineffective. So it all was working as Maya had planned; one only had to roll men toward Jackie like bowling balls, and over she would go. And yet Maya felt no sense of triumph.
And then they were pushing out of the final lock into Malachite Bay, a funnel-shaped indentation of the Hellas Sea, its shallow water covered by a sun-beaten windchop. Farther out they pitched gently onto the darker sea, where many of the barges and smaller craft turned north and made toward Hell’s Gate, the largest deepwater harbor on the east coast of Hellas. Their barge followed this parade, and soon the great bridge crossing Dao Vallis appeared over the horizon, then the building-covered walls at the entrance to the canyon; then the masts, the long jetty, the harbor slips.
Maya and Michel went ashore, and made their way up the cobbled and staired streets, to the old Praxis dorms under the bridge. There was an autumn harvest festival the next week that Michel wanted to attend, and then they would be off to Minus One Island, and Odessa. After they checked in and dropped their bags, Maya took off for a walk through the streets of Hell’s Gate, happy to be out of the canal boat’s confinement, able to get off by herself. It was near sunset, near the end of a day that had begun in the Grand Canal. That trip was over.
Maya had last visited Hell’s Gate back in 2121, during her first piste tour of the basin, working for Deep Waters, and traveling with — with Diana! that was her name! Esther’s granddaughter, and a niece of Jackie’s. That big cheerful girl had been Maya’s introduction to the young natives, really — not only by way of her contacts in the new settlements around the basin, but in herself, in her attitudes and ideas — the way Earth was just a word to her, the way her own generation absorbed all her interest, all her efforts. That had been the first time Maya had begun to feel herself slipping out of the present, into the history books. Only the most intense effort had allowed her to continue to engage the moment, to have an influence on those times. But she had made that effort, had been an influence. It had been one of the great periods of her life, perhaps the last great period of her life. The years since then had been like a stream in the southern highlands, wandering through cracks and grabens and then sinking into some unexpected pothole.
But once, sixty years before, she had stood right here, under the great bridge that carried the piste from cliff to cliff over the mouth of Dao canyon — the famous Hell’s Gate bridge, with the city falling down the steep sun-washed slopes on both sides of the river, facing the sea. At that time there had been only sand out there, except for a band of ice visible on the horizon. The town had been smaller and ruder, the stone steps of the staircase streets rough and dusty. Now they had been polished on their tops by feet toiling up them. The dust had been washed away by the years; everything was clean and had a dark patina; now it was a beautiful Mediterranean hillside harbor, perched in the shadow of a bridge that rendered the whole town a miniature, like something in a paperweight or a postcard from Portugal. Quite beautiful in an autumn’s early sunset, all shadowed and florid to the west, everything sepia, the moment trapped in amber. But once she had passed through this way with a vibrant young Amazon, when a whole new world was opening up, the native Mars she had helped to bring into being — all of it revealed to her, while she was still a part of it.
The sun set on these memories. Maya returned to the Praxis building, still located up under the bridge, the final staircase to it as
steeply pitched as a ladder. Ascending it with pushes on her thighs to help, Maya suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of deja vu. She had done this before — not only climbed these steps, but climbed them with the sense that she had climbed them before — with precisely the same feeling that in a yet earlier visit, she had been an effective part of the world.
Of course — she had been one of the first explorers of Hellas Basin, in the years right after Underhill. That had slipped her mind. She had helped to found Lowpoint, and then had driven around, exploring the basin before anyone else had, even Ann. So that later, when working for Deep Waters, and seeing the new native settlements, she had felt similarly removed from the contemporary scene. “My God,” she exclaimed, appalled. Layer on layer, life after life — they had lived so long! It was like reincarnation in a way, or eternal recurrence.
There was some little kernel of hope at the middle of that feeling. Back then, in that first feeling of slipping away, she had started a new life. Yes she had — she had moved to Odessa, and made her mark on the revolution, helping it to succeed by hard work, and a lot of thought about why people support change, about how to change without engendering a bitter backlash, which though perhaps decades removed yet always seemed to smash back into any revolutionary success, wrecking what was good in it. And it looked as though they had indeed avoided that bitterness.
At least until now. Perhaps that was the best way of looking at what was happening in this election; an inevitable backlash of some kind. Perhaps she had not succeeded as much as she had thought — perhaps she had only failed less drastically than Arkady, or John, or Frank. Who could be sure; so hard to say anymore what was really going on in history, it was too vast, too inchoate. So much was happening everywhere that anything might be happening anywhere. Co-ops, republics, feudal monarchies … no doubt there were Oriental satrapies out there in the back country, in some caravan gone wrong … so that any characterization one made of history would have some validity somewhere. This thing she was involved in now, the young native settlements demanding water, going off the net and outside UNTA’s control — no — it wasn’t that — something else…
But standing there at the Praxis flat door, she couldn’t remember what it was. She and Diana would take a piste train south the next morning, around the southeast bend of Hellas to see the Zea Dorsa, and the lava-tube tunnel they had converted to use as an aqueduct. No. She was here because…
She couldn’t bring it back. On the tip of the tongue… Deep Waters. Diana — they had just finished driving up and down Dao Vallis, where on the canyon floor natives and immigrants were starting up an agrarian valley life, creating a complex biosphere under their enormous tent. Some of them spoke Russian, it had brought tears to her eyes to hear it! There — her mother’s voice, sharp and sarcastic as she ironed clothes in their little apartment kitchen nook-sharp smell of cabbage —
No. It wasn’t that. Look to the west, to the sea shimmering in the dusk air. Water had flooded the sand dunes of east Hellas. It was a century later at least, it had to be. She was here for some other reason… scores of boats, little dots down in a postage-stamp harbor, behind a breakwater. It wouldn’t come back to her. It wouldn’t come. A horrible sense of tip-of-the-tongueism made her dizzy, then sick, as if she would get it out by vomiting. She sat down on the step. On the tip of the tongue, her whole life! Her whole life! She groaned aloud, and some kids throwing pebbles at gulls stared at her. Diana. She had met Nirgal by accident, they had had a dinner… But Nirgal had gotten sick. Sick on Earth!
And it all came back with a physical snap, like a blow to her solar plexus, a wave rolling over her. The canal voyage, of course, of course, the dive down into drowned Burroughs, Jackie, poor Zo the crazy fool. Of course of course of course. She hadn’t really forgotten, of course. So obvious now that it was back. It hadn’t really been gone; just a momentary lapse in her thinking, while her attention had wandered elsewhere. To another life. A strong memory had its own integrity, its own dangers, just as much as a weak memory did. It was only the result of thinking that the past was more interesting than the present. Which in many ways was true. But still…
Still, she found she preferred to sit a while longer. The little nausea persisted. And there was a bit of residual pressure in her head, as if that tongue’s hard tipping had left things sore; yes, it had been a bad moment. Hard to deny when you could still feel the throbbing from that tongue’s desperate thrusts.
She watched the end of dusk turn the town a deep dark orange, then a glowing color like light shining through a brown bottle. Hell’s Gate indeed. She shivered, got up, stepped unsteadily down the stairs into the harborside district, where the restaurants ringing the quays were bright moth-flittering globes of tavern light. The bridge loomed overhead like a negative Milky Way. Maya walked behind the docks, toward the marina.
There was Jackie, walking toward her. There were some aides following some way back, but in front it was just Jackie, coming toward her unseeing; then seeing. At the sight of Maya a corner of her mouth tightened, no more, but it was enough to allow Maya to see that Jackie was, what, ninety years old? A hundred? She was beautiful, she was powerful; but she was no longer young. Events would soon be washing by her, the way they did everyone else; history was a wave that moved through time slightly faster than an individual life did, so that even when people had lived only to seventy or eighty, they had been behind the wave by the time they died; and how much more so now. No sailboard would keep you up with that wave, not even a birdsuit allowing you to air-surf the wave in pelican style, like Zo. Ah, that was it; it was Zo’s death she saw on Jackie’s face. Jackie had tried her best to ignore it, to let it run off her like water off a duck’s back. But it hadn’t worked, and now she stood in Hell’s Gate over star-smeared water, an old woman.
Maya, shocked by the intensity of this vision, stopped. Jackie stopped. In the distance the clack of dishes, the loud burble of restaurant conversations. The two women looked at each other. This was not something Maya could remember doing with Jackie — this fundamental act of acknowledgment, meeting the other’s eye. Yes, you are real; I am real. Here we are, the both of us. Big sheets of glass, cracking inside. Something freer, Maya turned and walked away.
Michel found them a passenger schooner, going to Odessa byway of Minus One Island. The boat’s crew told them that Nirgal was expected to be on the island for a race, news which made Maya happy. It was always good to see Nirgal, and this time she needed his help as well. And she wanted to see Minus One; the last time she had been there it had not been an island at all, just a weather station and airstrip crn a bump in the basin floor.
Their ship was a long low schooner, with five bird’s-wing mast sails. Once beyond the end of the jetty the mast sails extruded their taut triangular expanses, and then, as the wind was from behind, the crew set a big blue kite spinnaker out front. After that the ship leaped into the clear blue swells, knocking up sheets of spray with every slam into an oncoming wave. After the confinement of the Grand Canal’s black banks it felt wonderful to be out on the sea, with the wind in her face and the waves coursing by — it blew all the confusion of Hell’s Gate out of her head — Jackie forgotten — the previous month now understood to be a kind of malignant carnival that she would never have to revisit — she would never return there — the open sea for her, and a life in the wind! “Oh Michel, this is the life for me.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
And at the end of the voyage they were to settle in Odessa, now a seaside town like Hell’s Gate. Living there they could sail out any day they wanted when the weather was nice, and it would be just like this, windy and sunny. Bright moments in time, the living present which was the only reality they ever had; the future a vision, the past a nightmare — or vice versa — anyway only here in the moment could one feel the wind, and marvel at the waves, so big and sloppy! Maya pointed at one blue hillside rolling by in a long irregular fluctuating line, and Michel laughed out loud;
they watched more closely, laughed harder; not in years had Maya felt so strongly the sense of being on a different world, these waves just didn’t act right, they flew around and fell over and bulged and wriggled all over their surfaces much more than the admittedly stiff breeze could justify, it looked odd; it was alien. Ah Mars, Mars, Mars!
The seas were always high, the crew told them, on the Hellas Sea. The absence of tides made no difference — what mattered most when it came to waves was gravity, and the strength of the wind. Hearing that as she looked out at the heaving blue plain, Maya’s spirits bounced up in the same wild way. Her g was light, and the winds were strong in her. She was a Martian, one of the first Martians, and she had surveyed this basin in the beginning, helped to fill it with water, helped to build the harbors and put free sailors at sea on it; now she sailed over it herself, and if she never did anything again but sail over it, that would be enough.
And so they sailed, and Maya stood in the bow near the bowsprit, hand on the rail to steady her, feeling the wind and the spray. Michel came and stood with her.
“So nice to be off the canal,” she said.
“It’s true.”
They talked about the campaign, and Michel shook his head. “This anti-immigration campaign is so popular.”
“Are the yonsei racist, do you think?”
“That would be hard, given their own racial mix. I think they are just generally xenophobic. Contemptuous of Earth’s problems — afraid of being overrun. So Jackie is articulating a real fear that everyone already has. It doesn’t have to be racist.”
“But you’re a good man.”
Michel blew out air. “Well, most people are.”
“Come on,” Maya said. Sometimes Michel’s optimism was too much. “Whether it’s racist or not, it still stinks.
Earth is down there looking at all our open land, and if we close the door on them now they’re likely to come hammer it open. People think it could never happen, but if the Terrans are desperate enough then they’ll just bring people up and land them, and if we try to stop them they’ll defend themselves here, and presto we’ll have a war. And right here on Mars, not back on Earth or in space, but on Mars. It could happen — you can hear the threat of it in the way people in the UN are trying to warn us. But Jackie isn’t listening. She doesn’t care. She’s fanning xenophobia for her own purposes.”
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