Meanwhile, Sax found it hard to concentrate there on East Pavonis. People kept interrupting him to complain about the mirrors, and the volatile political situation lurched along in storms as unpredictable as the weather’s. Already it was clear that removing the mirrors had not placated all the Reds; there were sabotages of terraforming projects almost every day, and sometimes violent fights in defence of these projects. And reports from Earth, which Sax forced himself to watch for an hour a day, made it clear that some forces there were trying to keep things the way they had been before the flood, in sharp conflict with other groups trying to take advantage of the flood in the same way the Martian revolutionaries had, using it as a break point in history and a springboard to some new order, some fresh start. But the metanationals were not going to give up easily, and on Earth they were entrenched, the order of the day; they were in command of vast resources, and no mere seven-metre rise in sea level was going to push them off stage.
Sax switched off his screen after one such depressing hour, and joined Michel for supper out in his rover.
‘There’s no such thing as a fresh start,’ he said as he put water on to boil.
‘The Big Bang?’ Michel suggested.
‘As I understand it, there are theories suggesting that the – the dumpiness of the early universe was caused by the earlier-dumpiness of the previous universe, collapsing down into its Big Crunch.’
‘I would have thought that would crush all irregularities.’
‘Singularities are strange – outside their event horizons, quantum effects allow some particles to appear. Then the cosmic inflation blasting those particles out apparently caused small clumps to start and become big ones.’ Sax frowned; he was sounding like the Da Vinci theory group. ‘But I was referring to the flood on Earth. Which is not as complete an alteration of conditions as a singularity, by any means. In fact there must be people down there who don’t think of it as a break at all.’
‘True.’ For some reason Michel was laughing. ‘We should go down there and see, eh?’
As they finished eating their spaghetti Sax said, ‘I want to get out in the field. I want to see if there are any visible effects of the mirrors going away.’
‘You already saw one. That dimming of the light, when we were out on the rim …’ Michel shuddered.
‘Yes, but that only makes me more curious.’
‘Well – we’ll hold down the fort for you.’
As if one had physically to occupy any given space in order to be there. ‘The cerebellum never gives up,’ Sax said.
Michel grinned. ‘Which is why you want to go out and see it in person.’
Sax frowned.
Before he left, he called Ann.
‘Would you like to, to accompany me, on a trip to South Tharsis, to, to, to examine the upper boundary of the areobio-sphere, together?’
She was startled. Her head was shaking back and forth as she thought it over – the cerebellum’s answer, some six or seven seconds ahead of her conscious verbal response: ‘No.’ And then she cut the connection, looking somewhat frightened.
Sax shrugged. He felt bad. He saw that one of his reasons for going into the field had to do with getting Ann out there, showing her the fellfields himself. Showing her how beautiful they were. Talking to her. Something like that. His mental image of what he would say to her if he actually got her out there was fuzzy at best. Just show her. Make her see it.
Well, one couldn’t make people see things.
He went to say goodbye to Michel. Michel’s entire job was to make people see things. This was no doubt the cause of the frustration in him when he talked about Ann. She had been one of his patients for over a century now and still she hadn’t changed, or even told him very much about herself. It made Sax smile a little to think of it. Though clearly it was vexing for Michel, who obviously loved Ann. As he did all his old friends and patients, including Sax. It was in the nature of a professional responsibility, as Michel saw it – to fall in love with all the objects of his ‘scientific study’. Every astronomer loves the stars. Well, who knew. Sax reached out and clasped Michel’s upper arm, who smiled happily at this unSaxlike behaviour, this ‘change in thinking’. Love, yes; and how much more so when the object of study consisted of women known for years and years, studied with the intensity of pure science – yes, that would be a feeling. A great intimacy, whether they co-operated in the study or not. In fact they might even be more beguiling if they didn’t co-operate, if they refused to answer any questions at all. After all if Michel wanted questions answered, answered at great length even when they weren’t asked, he always had Maya, Maya the all-too-human, who led Michel on a hard steeplechase across the limbic array, including throwing things at him, if Spencer was to be believed. After that kind of symbolism, the silence of Ann might prove to be very endearing. ‘Be careful,’ Michel said: the happy scientist, with one of his areas of study standing before him, loved like a brother.
Sax took a solo rover and drove it down the steep, bare southern slope of Pavonis Mons, then across the saddle between Pavonis and Arsia Mons. He contoured around the great cone of Arsia Mons on its dry eastern side. After that he drove down the southern flank of Arsia, and of the Tharsis bulge itself, until he was on the broken highlands of Daedalia Planitia. This plain was the remnant of a giant ancient impact basin, now almost entirely erased by the uptilt of Tharsis, by lava from Arsia Mons, and by the ceaseless winds, until nothing was left of the impact basin except for a collection of areologists’ observations and deductions, faint radial arrays of ejecta scrapes and the like, visible on maps but not in the landscape.
To the eye as one travelled over it, it looked like much of the rest of the southern highlands: rugged, bumpy, pitted, cracked land. A wild rockscape. The old lava flows were visible as smooth lobate curves of dark rock, like tidal swells fanning out and down. Wind streaks both light and dark marked the land, indicating dust of different weights and consistencies: there were light, long triangles on the southeast sides of craters and boulders, dark chevrons to the northwest of them, and dark splotches inside the many rimless craters. The next big dust storm would redesign all these patterns.
Sax drove over the low stone waves with great pleasure, down down up, down down up, reading the sand paintings of the dust streaks like a wind chart. He was travelling not in a boulder car, with its low, dark room and its cockroach scurry from one hiding place to the next, but rather in a big, boxy areologist’s camper, with windows on all four sides of the third-storey driver’s compartment. It was a very great pleasure indeed to roll along up there in the thin, bright daylight, down and up, down and up, down and up over the sand-streaked plain, the horizons very distant for Mars. There was no one to hide from; no one hunting for him. He was a free man on a free planet, and if he wanted to he could drive this car right around the world. Or anywhere he pleased.
The full impact of this feeling took him about two days’ drive to realize. Even then he was not sure that he comprehended it. It was a sensation of lightness, a strange lightness that caused little smiles to stretch his mouth repeatedly for no obvious reason. He had not been consciously aware, before, of any sense of oppression or fear – but it seemed it had been there – since 2061, perhaps, or the years right before it. Sixty-six years of fear, ignored and forgotten but always there – a kind of tension in the musculature, a small hidden dread at the core of things. ‘Sixty-six bottles of fear on the wall, sixty-six bottles of fear! Take one down, pass it around, sixty-five bottles