Green Mars. Kim Stanley Robinson
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the distant wall, blasting Nirgal’s vision for a while. But as the sun rose, the shadows on the huge semi-circular cliff gave way in wedges of light that revealed sharp ragged embayments, scalloping the larger curve of the wall, which was so big that Nirgal simply gasped, his nose pressed right against the windshield—it was almost frightening it was so big! “Coyote, what is it?”
Coyote let out one of his alarming laughs, the animal cackle filling the car. “So you see it isn’t such a small world after all, eh, boy? This is the floor of Promethei Basin. It’s an impact basin, one of the biggest on Mars, almost as big as Argyre, but it hit down here near the South Pole, so about half of its rim has since been buried under the polar cap and the layered terrain. The other half is this curved escarpment here.” He waved a hand expansively. “Kind of like a super-big caldera, but only half there, so you can drive right into it. This little rise is the best place I know for seeing it.” He called up a map of the region, and pointed. “We’re on the apron of this little crater here, Vt, and looking northwest. The cliff is Promethei Rupes, there. It’s about a kilometre high. Of course the Echus cliff is three kilometres high, and the Olympus Mons cliff is six kilometres high, do you hear that Mister Small Planet? But this baby will have to do for this morning.”
The sun rose higher, illuminating the great curve of the cliff from above. It was deeply cut by ravines and smaller craters. “Prometheus Sanctuary is in the side of that big indentation there,” Coyote said, and pointed to the left side of the curve. “Crater Wj.”
As they waited through the long day Nirgal looked at the gigantic cliff almost continuously, and each time it looked different, as the shadows shortened and shifted, revealing new features and obscuring others. It would have taken years of looking to see it all, and he found he could not overcome the feeling that the wall was unnaturally, or even impossibly huge. Coyote was right—the tight horizons had fooled him—he had not imagined the world could be so big.
That night they drove into Crater Wj, one of the biggest embayments in the giant wall. And then they reached the curving cliff of Promethei Rupes. The cliff towered over them like the vertical side of the universe itself: the polar cap was nothing compared to this rock mass. Which meant that the Olympus Mons cliff that Coyote had mentioned would have to be … he didn’t know how to think it.
Down at the foot of the cliff, at a spot where unbroken rock dropped almost vertically into flat sand, there was a recessed lock door. Inside was the sanctuary called Prometheus, a collection of wide chambers stacked like the rooms of a bamboo house, with incurving filtered windows overlooking Crater Wj and the larger basin beyond. The inhabitants of the sanctuary spoke French, and so did Coyote when talking to them. They were not as old as Coyote or the other issei, but they were pretty old, and of Terran height, which meant they mostly looked up to Nirgal, while speaking very hospitably to him, in fluent but accented English. “So you are Nirgal! Enchanté! We have heard of you, we are happy to meet you!”
A group of them showed him around while Coyote did other things. Their sanctuary was very unlike Zygote; it was, to put it plainly, nothing but rooms. There were several large ones stacked by the wall, with smaller ones at the back of these. Three of the window rooms were greenhouses, and all the rooms throughout the refuge were kept very warm, and filled with plants and wall hangings and statuary and fountains; to Nirgal it seemed confining, and much too hot, and utterly fascinating.
But they only stayed a day, and then they drove Coyote’s car into a big elevator, and sat in it for an hour. When Coyote drove out of the opposite door they were on top of the rugged plateau that lay behind Promethei Rupes. And here Nirgal was once again shocked. When they had been down at Ray’s Lookout, the great cliff had formed a limit to what they could see, and he had been able to comprehend it. But on top of the cliff, looking back down, the distance was so great that Nirgal could not grasp it at all. He had trouble focusing—he saw nothing but a blurry vertiginous mass of blobs and patches of colour—white, purple, brown, tan, rust, white—it made him queasy. “Storm coming in,” Coyote said, and Nirgal saw that the colours above them were a fleet of tall solid clouds, sailing through a violet sky with the sun well to the west—the clouds whitish above and infinitely lobed, but dark grey on their bottoms. These cloud bottoms were closer to their heads than the ground of the basin, and they were all on a level, as if rolling over a transparent floor. The world below was nothing so even, mottled tan and chocolate—ah—those were the shadows of the clouds, visibly moving. And that white crescent out in the middle of things was the polar cap! They could see all the way home! Recognising the ice gave him the final bit of perspective needed to make sense of things, and the blobs of colour stabilised into a bumpy uneven ringed landscape, mottled by moving cloud shadows.
This dizzying act of cognition had only taken Nirgal a few seconds, but when he finished he saw that Coyote was watching him with a big grin.
“Just how far can we see, Coyote? How many kilometres?”
Coyote only cackled. “Ask Big Man, boy. Or figure it out for yourself! What, three hundred k? Something like that. A hop and a jump for the big one. A thousand empires for the little ones.”
“I want to run it.”
“I’m sure you do. Oh, look, look! There—from the clouds over the ice cap. Lightning, see it? Those little flickers are lightning.”
And there they were, bright threads of light, appearing and disappearing soundlessly, one or two every few seconds, connecting black clouds with white ground. He was seeing lightning at last, with his own eyes. The white world sparkling into the green, jolting it. “There’s nothing like a big storm,” Coyote was saying. “Nothing like it. Oh to be out in the wind! We made that storm, boy. Although I think I could make an even bigger one.”
But a bigger one was beyond Nirgal’s ability to imagine; what lay below them was cosmically vast—electric, shot with colour, windy with spaciousness. He was actually a bit relieved when Coyote turned their car around and drove off, and the blurry view disappeared, the edge of the cliff becoming a new skysill behind them.
“Just what is lightning again?”
“Well, lightning … shit. I must confess that lightning is one of the phenomena in this world that I cannot hold the explanation for in my head. People have told me, but it always slips away. Electricity, of course, something about electrons or ions, positive and negative, charges building up in thunderheads, discharging to the ground, or both up and down at once, I seem to recall. Who knows. Ka boom! That’s lightning, eh?”
The white world and the green, rubbing together, snapping with the friction. Of course.
There were several sanctuaries on the plateau north of Promethei Rupes, some hidden in escarpment walls and crater rims, like Nadia’s tunnelling project outside Zygote; but others simply sitting in craters under clear tent domes, there for any sky police to see. The first time Coyote drove up to the rim of one of these and they looked down through the clear tent dome onto a village under the stars, Nirgal had been once again amazed, though it was amazement of a lesser order than that engendered by the landscape. Buildings like the school, and the bathhouse and the kitchen, trees, greenhouses—it was all basically familiar—but how could they get away with it, out in the open like this? It was disconcerting.
And so full of people, of strangers. Nirgal had known in theory that there were a lot of people in the southern sanctuaries, five thousand as they said, but it was something else again to meet so many of them so fast, and see that it was really true. And staying in the unhidden settlements made him extremely nervous. “How can they do it?” he asked Coyote. “Why aren’t they arrested and taken away?”
“You got me, boy. It’s possible they could be. But they haven’t been yet, and so they don’t think it’s worth the trouble to hide. You know it takes a tremendous effort to hide—you got to do all that thermal disposal engineering, and electronic hardening, and you got to keep out of sight all the time—it’s a pain in the ass. And some people down here just don’t want to do it. They call themselves the demi-monde. They have plans for if they’re ever investigated or invaded—most of them have escape tunnels like ours, and some even have some weapons stashed away. But they figure