Back on Pavonis everything was the same. More and more people, spurred on by Art Randolph, were proposing that they hold a constitutional congress. Write an at least provisional constitution, hold a vote on it, then establish the government described.
‘Good idea,’ Sax said. ‘Perhaps a delegation to Earth as well.’
Casting seeds. It was just like on the moors; some would sprout, others wouldn’t.
He went looking for Ann, but found she had left Pavonis – gone, people said, to a Red outpost in Tempe Terra, north of Tharsis. No one went there but Reds, they said.
After some thought Sax asked for Steve’s help, and looked up the outpost’s location. Then he borrowed a little plane from the Bogdanovists and flew north, past Ascraeus Mons on his left, then down Echus Chasma, and past his old headquarters at Echus Overlook, on top of the huge wall to his right.
Ann too had no doubt flown this route, and thus gone by the first headquarters of the terraforming effort. Terraforming … there was evolution in everything, even in ideas. Had Ann noticed Echus Overlook, had she even remembered that small beginning? No way of telling. That was how humans knew each other. Tiny fractions of their lives intersected or were known in any way to anybody else. It was very like living alone in the universe. Which was strange. A justification for living with friends, for marrying, for sharing rooms and lives as much as possible. Not that this made people truly intimate; but it reduced the sensation of solitude. So that one was still sailing solo through the oceans of the world, as in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, a book that had much impressed Sax as a youth, in which the eponymous hero at the conclusion occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, shared a meal – then voyaged on, alone and solitary. An image of their lives; for every world was as empty as the one Mary Shelley had imagined, as empty as Mars had been in the beginning.
He flew past the blackened curve of Kasei Vallis without noting it at all.
The Reds had long ago hollowed out a rock the size of a city block, in a promontory that served as the last dividing wedge in the intersection of two of the Tempe Fossae, just south of Perepelkin Crater. Windows under overhangs gave them a view over both of the bare straight canyons, and the larger canyon they made after their confluence. Now all these fossae cut down what had become a coastal plateau; Mareotis and Tempe together formed a huge peninsula of ancient highlands, sticking far into the new ice sea.
Sax landed his little plane on the sandy strip on top of the promontory. From here the ice plains were not visible; nor could he spot any vegetation – not a tree, not a flower, not even a patch of lichen. He wondered if they had somehow sterilized the canyons. Just primal rock, with a dusting of frost. And nothing they could do about frost, unless they wanted to tent these canyons, to keep air out rather than in. ‘Hmm,’ Sax said, startled at the idea.
Two Reds let him in the lock door on the top of the promontory, and he descended the stairs with them. The shelter appeared to be nearly empty. Just as well. It was nice only to have to withstand the cold gazes of two young women leading him through the rough-hewn rock galleries of the refuge, rather than a whole gang. Interesting to see Red aesthetics. Very spare, as might be expected – not a plant to be seen – just different textures of rock: rough walls, rougher ceilings, contrasted to a polished basalt floor, and the glistening windows overlooking the canyons.
They came to a cliffside gallery that looked like a natural cave, no straighter than the nearly Euclidean lines of the canyon below. There were mosaics inlaid into the back wall; made of bits of coloured stone, polished and set against each other without gaps, forming abstract patterns that seemed almost to represent something, if only he could focus properly on them. The floor was a stone parquet of onyx and alabaster, serpentine and bloodstone. The gallery went on and on – big, dusty – the whole complex somewhat disused, perhaps. Reds preferred their rovers, and places like this no doubt had been seen as unfortunate necessities. Hidden refuge; with windows shuttered, one could have walked down the canyons right past the place and not known it was there; and Sax felt that this was not just to avoid the notice of the UNTA, but also to be unobtrusive before the land itself, to melt into it.
As Ann seemed to be trying to do, there in a stone window-seat. Sax stopped abruptly; lost in his thoughts, he had almost run into her, just as an ignorant traveller might have run into the shelter. A chunk of rock, sitting there. He looked at her closely. She looked ill. One didn’t see that much any more, and the longer Sax looked at her, the more alarmed he became. She had told him, once, that she was no longer taking the longevity treatment. That had been some years before. And during the revolution she had burned like a flame. Now, with the Red rebellion quelled, she was ash. Grey flesh. It was an awful sight. She was somewhere around one hundred and fifty years old, like all the First Hundred left alive, and without the treatments … she would soon die.
Well. Strictly speaking, she was at the physiological equivalent of being seventy or so, depending on when she had last had the treatments. So not that bad. Perhaps Peter would know. But the longer one went between treatments, he had heard, the more problems cropped up, statistically speaking. It made sense. It was only wise to be prudent.
But he couldn’t say that to her. In fact, it was hard to think what he could say to her.
Eventually her gaze lifted. She recognized him and shuddered, her lip lifting like a trapped animal’s. Then she looked away from him, grim, stone-faced. Beyond anger, beyond hope.
‘I wanted to show you some of the Tyrrhena Massif,’ he said lamely.
She got up like a statue rising, and left the room.
Sax, feeling his joints creak with the pseudo-arthritic pain that so often accompanied his dealings with Ann, followed her.
He was trailed in his turn by the two stern-looking young women. ‘I don’t think she wants to talk to you,’ the taller one informed him.
‘Very astute of you,’ Sax said.
Far down the gallery, Ann was standing before another window: spellbound, or else too exhausted to move. Or part of her did want to talk.
Sax stopped before her.
‘I want to get your impressions of it,’ he said. ‘Your suggestions for what we might do next. And I have some, some, some areological questions. Of course it could be that strictly scientific questions aren’t of interest to you any more—’
She took a step toward him and struck him on the side of the face. He found himself slumped against the gallery wall, sitting on his bottom. Ann was nowhere to be seen. He was being helped to his feet by the two young women, who clearly didn’t know whether to cheer or groan. His whole body hurt, more even than his face, and his eyes were very hot, stinging slightly. It seemed he might cry before these two young idiots, who by trailing him were complicating everything enormously; with them around he could not yell or plead, he could not go on his knees and say Ann, please, forgive me. He couldn’t.
‘Where did she go?’ he managed to say.
‘She really, really doesn’t want to talk to you,’ the tall one declared.
‘Maybe you should wait and try later,’ the other advised.
‘Oh shut up!’ Sax said, suddenly feeling an irritation so vehement that it was like rage. ‘I suppose you would just let her stop taking the treatment and kill herself!’
‘It’s her right,’ the tall one pontificated.
‘Of course it is. I wasn’t speaking of rights. I was speaking of how a friend should behave when someone is suicidal. Not a subject you are likely to know anything about. Now help me find her.’
‘You’re no friend of hers.’
‘I most certainly am.’ He was on his feet. He staggered a little as he tried to walk in the direction he thought she had gone. One of the young women tried to take his elbow. He avoided the help and went on. There Ann was, in the distance, collapsed in a chair, in some kind of dining chamber, it seemed.