“Well, it’s just one of his ideas.”
“I can’t wait to hear what Ann says to that.” She sighed, thought about it. “The thing to do, I suppose, would be to graze an ice asteroid through the atmosphere, as if trying to aerobrake it. That would burn it up without breaking the molecules apart. You’d get water vapor in the atmosphere, which would help, but you wouldn’t be bombing the surface with explosions as big as a hundred hydrogen bombs going off all at once.”
Arkady nodded. “Good idea! You should tell Sax.”
“You tell him.”
East of Cassini the terrain grew rougher than ever. This was some of the oldest surface on the planet, cratered to saturation in the earliest years of torrential bombardment. A hellish age, the Noachian, you could see that in the landscape. No Man’s Land from a Titanic trench war, the sight of it induced a kind of numbness after a while, a cosmological shell shock.
They floated on, east, northeast, southeast, south, northeast, west, east, east. They finally came to the end of Xanthe, and began to descend the long slope of Syrtis Major Planitia. This was a lava plain, much less densely cratered than Xanthe. The land sloped down and down, until finally they drifted over a smooth-floored basin: Isidis Planitia, one of the lowest points on Mars. It was the essence of the northern hemisphere, and after the southern highlands it seemed especially smooth and flat and low. And it too was a very large region. There really was a lot of land on Mars.
Then one morning when they lofted up to cruising altitude, a trio of peaks rose over the eastern horizon. They had come to Elysium, the only other Tharsislike “bulge continent” that the planet had. Elysium was a much smaller bulge than Tharsis, but it was still big, a high continent, one thousand kilometers long and ten kilometers taller than the surrounding terrain. As with Tharsis, it was ringed by patches of fractured land, crack systems caused by the uplift. They flew over the westernmost of these crack systems, Hephaestus Fossae, and found the area an unearthly sight: five long deep parallel canyons, like claw marks in the bedrock. Elysium loomed beyond, a saddleback in shape, Elysium Mons and Hecates Tholus rearing at each end of a long spine range, five thousand meters higher than the bulge they punctuated: an awesome sight. Everything about Elysium was so much bigger than anything Nadia and Arkady had seen so far that as the dirigible floated toward the range, the two were speechless for minutes at a time. They sat in their seats, watching it all float slowly toward them. When they did speak, it was just thinking aloud: “Looks like the Karakoram,” Arkady said. “Desert Himalayas. Except these are so simple. Those volcanoes look like Fuji. Maybe people will hike up them someday in pilgrimages.”
Nadia said, “These are so big, it’s hard to imagine what the Tharsis volcanoes will look like. Aren’t the Tharsis volcanoes twice as big as these?”
“At least. It does look like Fuji, don’t you think?”
“No, it’s a lot less steep. Why, did you ever see Fuji?”
“No.”
After a while: “Well, we’d better try to go around the whole damn thing,” Arkady said. “I’m not sure we have the loft to get over those mountains.”
So they turned the props, and pushed south as hard as they could, and the winds naturally co-operated, as they were curving around the continent too. So the Arrowhead floated southeast into a rough mountainous region called Cerberus; and all of the next day they could mark their progress by the sight of Elysium, passing slowly to their left. Hours passed, the massif shifted in their side windows; the slowness of the shift made it plain just how big this world was. Mars has as much land surface as the Earth – everyone always said that, but it had been just a phrase. Their creep around Elysium was the proof of the senses.
The days passed: up in the frigid morning air, over the jumbled red land, down in the sunset, to bounce at an airy anchorage. One evening when the supply of windmills had dwindled they rearranged those that remained, and moved their beds together under the starboard windows. They did it without discussion, as if it had been the obvious thing to do when they had room; as if they had already agreed to do it long before. And as they moved around the cramped gondola rearranging things, they bumped into each other just as they had all trip long, but now intentionally, and with a sensuous rubbing which accentuated what they had been up to all along, accidents become foreplay; and finally Arkady burst out laughing and caught her up into a wild bear hug, and Nadia shouldered him back onto their new double bed and they kissed like teenagers, and made love through the night. And after that they slept together, and made love frequently in the ruddy glow of dawn and in the starry black nights, with the ship lightly bobbing at its moorings. And they lay together talking, and the sensation of floating as they embraced was palpable, more romantic than any train or ship. “We became friends first,” Arkady said once, “that’s what makes this different, don’t you think?” He prodded her with a finger. “I love you.” It was as if he were testing the words with his tongue. It was clear to Nadia that he hadn’t said them often, it was clear they meant a lot to him, a kind of commitment. Ideas meant so much to him! “And I love you,” she said.
And in the mornings Arkady would pad up and down the narrow gondola naked, his red hair bronzed like everything else by the horizontal morning light, and Nadia would watch from their bed feeling so serene and happy that she had to remind herself that the floating sensation was probably just Martian g. But it felt like joy.
One night as they were falling asleep Nadia said curiously, “Why me?”
“Huhn?” He had been almost asleep.
“I said, why me? I mean, Arkady Nikelyovich, you could have loved any of the women here, and they would have loved you back. You could have had Maya if you wanted.”
He snorted. “I could have had Maya! Oh my! I could have had the joy of Maya Katarina! Just like Frank and John!” He snorted, and they both laughed out loud. “How could I have passed on such joy! Silly me!” He giggled until she punched him.
“All right, all right. One of the others then, the beautiful ones, Janet or Ursula or Samantha.”
“Come on,” he said. He propped himself up on an elbow to look at her. “You really don’t know what beauty is, do you?”
“I certainly do,” Nadia said mulishly.
Arkady ignored her and said, “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”
“Curves I’ve got,” Nadia said, pushing his hand away.
He leaned forward and tried to bite her breast, but she dodged him.
“Beauty is what you are, Nadezhda Francine. By these criteria you are queen of Mars.”
“Princess of Mars,” she corrected absently, thinking it over.
“Yes that’s right. Nadezhda Francine Cherneshevsky, the nine-fingered Princess of Mars.”
“You’re not a conventional man.”
“No!” He hooted. “I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha! – the conventional men get Maya. That is their reward.” And he laughed like a wild man.
One morning they crossed the last broken hills of Cerberus, and floated out over the flat dusty plain of Amazonis Planitia. Arkady brought the dirigible down, to set a windmill in a pass between two final hillocks of old Cerberus. Something went wrong with the clasp on the winch hook, however, and it snapped open when the windmill was only halfway to the ground. The windmill thumped down flat on its base. From the ship it looked okay, but when Nadia suited up and descended in the sling to check it out, she found that the hot plate had cracked away from the base.
And there, behind the plate, was a mass of something. A dull green something with a touch of blue to it, dark inside the box. She reached in